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The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy promotes resilient family farms, rural communities and ecosystems around the world through research and education, science and technology, and advocacy.

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Food Crisis

June 11, 2008

Now for the Hard Work: Turning the Food Summit into Action

IATP's Carin Smaller just returned from the UN Food and Agriculture High Level Conference on Food Security in Rome last week.

The UN food summit ended with a political declaration, some pledges for increased aid, and a draft set of recommendations by the UN Taskforce on the Food Crisis. So what next? There are a few things to look out for if you are concerned about the food crisis.

The first is getting governments to put their words into action. The political declaration is not free from controversy (Argentina, Cuba and Venezuela objected), nor from contradictions (continuing to push free trade while at the same time pushing for further government intervention and regulation of markets to ensure food security). Despite this, the declaration opens the door for radically different policies for trade and investment in agriculture. Now is the chance for groups who have criticized the free trade approach and who have an alternative vision for food and agriculture, to push their governments to take bold steps to change policy.

Second, the UN Taskforce will continue to meet, finalize their work program and implement their recommendations. For now, only UN agencies and the Bretton Woods Institutions are involved. The Taskforce would benefit from participation by representatives of farmers, farm workers, pastoralists, fishers and urban settlers. The FAO should be given the lead role in shaping policies, IFAD should be the main source for financing, and the IAASTD should continue to provide research on science and technology.

Finally, governments will meet again this year to discuss the food crisis. It is important to keep paying attention. The next opportunity will be at the G8 Meeting in Hokkaido, Japan, July 7-9.

—Carin Smaller

June 10, 2008

Food Crisis - Scarcity or Injustice

The excellent magazine out of the UK, Food Ethics, tackles the global food crisis in its Summer 2008 issue. The central question in the issue's title is an important one: Scarcity or Injustice? As editor Tom MacMillan writes, "While productivity is relevant, food security is more fundamentally about social justice. . . .We need policies that do the things that markets won't do and that tackle the reasons scarcity is a problem."

The issue includes writings from a number of important thinkers on the food crisis, including Bill Vorley of the International Institute for the Environment and Development (IIED) and Daryll Ray of the Agricultural Policy Analysis Center.

IATP's own Sophia Murphy also contributes an article titled, "Will free trade solve the food crisis?" Sophia writes that the further opening up of agricultural markets would likely increase volatility of agricultural prices and strengthen the market position of big agribusiness companies. Sophia writes, "Trade liberalisation and the neglect of domestic agriculture have increased the dependence of net food importing developing countries on food imports. . the global food crisis is a clear example of how the (WTO) rules have failed."

Sophia outlines strategies for governments to address the food crisis by re-shaping trade, increasing productivity, establishing public food stocks, disciplining speculative trading and redesigning bioenergy policies.

The need to increase production in countries struggling with high prices, as well as for establishing food stocks, were both included within the political declaration at the recent UN FAO Summit on Food Security. Unfortunately, the declaration also included a call for the successful conclusion of the Doha Round, which will not help address the food crisis. Two steps forward, one step back.

—Ben Lilliston

June 05, 2008

Update on Civil Society Voices at FAO Summit

For those interested, the statements referenced in Carin's last blog by Henry Saragih of La Via Campesina and Ben Powless of the Indigenous Environmental Network before participants at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization summit can be read here and here.

You can read or listen to all the various statements from this morning in Rome at the FAO's web site.

—Ben Lilliston

Social Movements and Civil Society Condemn UN Food Summit

IATP's Carin Smaller is blogging from Rome this week at the UN Food and Agriculture High Level Conference on Food Security.

Today, some of the affected communities, including smallholder farmers, indigenous peoples and fishers spoke out. The speakers included Benjamin Victor Powless, from the Mohawk Nation, Herman Kumara from the World Forum of Fisher People, and Henry Saragih from the peasant movement La Via Campesina. They had been participating in a parallel event, the Terra Preta Forum, alongside the FAO summit. And they were not impressed with the outcome. They have been largely excluded from the formal conference, their voices not heard by world leaders. And they have not had a role in the newly formed UN Taskforce on the Food Crisis.

They said the conference promoted the interests of agricultural corporations, including seed, fertilizer and chemical companies, as well as plans for a new Green Revolution in Africa, launched by Kofi Annan's AGRA Foundation. They are furious that the World Bank and IMF are even present, given the central role the two institutions played in undermining local and national capacity for food self-sufficiency, and therefore contibuting to the current food crisis.

In a statement to the UN conference, the social movements and civil society organizations accused conference participants of entrenching the control of corporations and elites over agriculture and the ecological commons. They called some of the actions at the conference an assault on small-scale food providers.

They have three principal demands:

1. That governments pursue justice for the victims of the food emergency by bringing to account, through criminal proceedings, corporations and institutions (including governments) whose actions, such as profiteering from agricultural inputs and products, have denied communities their right-to-food.

2. Set up a Commission on Food Sovereignty under the auspices of the UN.

3. Expand our ability to build collective knowledge, analysis and capacity to make change, and organize ourselves to monitor the outcomes of this FAO Summit.

The strong rejection of the FAO Summit by these social movements and civil society organizations should send a warning signal to governments. While there are some interesting recommendations (I would dare say impressive), they will amount to nil unless there is radical change from past practices. The first step is to integrate representatives of farmers and fishers into the UN Taskforce on the Food Crisis, as well as other governmental initiatives dealing with the food crisis. Second, governments must prioritize work with agencies that have the credibility to work with farmers, like the FAO, IFAD and IAASTD, and to weaken the role of the World Bank, WTO and IMF.

—Carin Smaller

An Impressive First Step: Now Time for Action

IATP's Carin Smaller is blogging from Rome this week at the UN Food and Agriculture High Level Conference on Food Security.

A draft declaration by world leaders on how to resolve the food crisis is circulating. The final declaration will be released tomorrow, on June 5, at the close of the UN's High-Level Conference on Food Security. The draft declaration is impressive. It calls for immediate action to assist countries affected by the food crisis, immediate support to small-scale producers, and the development of food stocks and other risk management mechanisms. The declaration also calls for medium- and long-term measures, including for governments to fully embrace a people-centred policy framework for agriculture, to increase the resilience of food systems to meet the challenges of climate change, and to conduct further studies to ensure that production and use of biofuels is sustainable and takes into account the need to achieve global food security. Obviously, this is no small feat.

Unfortunately, the draft declaration still calls for a rapid and successful conclusion of the WTO Doha Round and for the international community to continue its efforts to liberalize international trade. But I won't go into that again.

In parallel, and possibly even more impressive, are the draft recommendations of the newly established UN Taskforce on the Food Crisis. Once again, the emphasis is on boosting smallholder farmers' food production, increasing social safety nets and strengthening risk management.

So it looks like we will be leaving Rome with some fine-sounding proposals. But what next? There is still a danger that very little will change when it comes time to implementing the recommendations. The proposals on the table will require a radical break from the past and a completely different approach to building food and agriculture systems and supporting rural communities and the urban poor. There are institutions with more credibility to take on the challenge, like the FAO, IFAD, and IAASTD. And others, like the World Bank and the IMF, who are partially responsible for the mess we are in today and who should stay out for now. Unfortunately, that is unlikely to happen. Both institutions have carefully positioned themselves to play a key role in resolving the crisis and to being a channel for funds.

The next step for world leaders is to go home and talk to the affected communities: smallholder farmers, farm workers, fishers, and the urban poor. If they can listen to these communities, they might have a chance of turning their promises into meaningful solutions.

—Carin Smaller

June 04, 2008

Lessons from China on the Food Crisis

IATP President Jim Harkness is blogging from China through June 14. Due to internet access problems, Jim sent this blog via e-mail. I am posting it for him - Ben

Yesterday, IATP and the Rural Development Institute (RDI) of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences held a workshop on agriculture and trade. Daryll Ray of the University of Tennessee’s Agricultural Policy Analysis Center and Li Guoqiang of RDI gave excellent presentations, followed by a lengthy and animated discussion that continued through lunch and into the afternoon. Daryll presented a history of U.S. farm policy, and laid out the basic economics of why certain policies succeed and others fail. Central to his argument is the notion that agricultural markets have a strong tendency to fail, and therefore require government action to buffer against volatility and guarantee food security.  He also used USDA data (with a strong disclaimer concerning its accuracy) to show that contrary to conventional wisdom, China’s increased demand for meat has not been a significant driver of the global food price crisis. He makes the same argument in a policy brief that you can find here.

The short version is this: meat consumption his indeed increased a lot in recent years, but instead of importing more grain (or meat) China has been releasing grain from its massive reserves onto national markets. China’s grain market, including its feed market, is therefore effectively insulated from international price fluctuations.

This is, of course, precisely the kind of “market-distorting government intervention” that the World Bank and IMF have argued against for decades. My friend Yoke Ling Chee of the Third World Network said after the workshop that she was sorry it wasn’t a panel at the World Food Crisis Summit in Rome. Instead, the world is being treated to the spectacle of World Bank President Robert Zoellick blaming poor country export bans for skyrocketing prices, bans put into place as a desperate measure in the face of a crisis the Bank helped create.

IATP's Carin Smaller is blogging from the Rome meeting this week on all the happenings at the food crisis summit.

—Ben Lilliston

June 03, 2008

The WTO Cannot Solve the Food Crisis

IATP's Carin Smaller is blogging from Rome this week at the UN Food and Agriculture High Level Conference on Food Security.

The UN’s High-Level Conference on Food Security got off to a bang today. A flood of world leaders, heads of international organizations, civil society organizations and the private sector descended on the FAO’s headquarters in Rome to identify ways to solve the current food crisis. World leaders have made strong statements for and against biofuels, criticized agricultural subsidies in the rich world, and made accusations about who is and is not to blame for worsening the food crisis. The conference has also received its share of controversy with the attendance of Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe, accused of starving his own people, and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who repeated his call for the destruction of Israel just before arriving at the conference.

But I want to talk about another theme that is being spoken about: the WTO's Doha Round. For months, the heads of the WTO, World Bank, IMF and the OECD, have used every public opportunity (and then some) to push for the completion of the WTO’s trade round to solve the current food crisis. I feel like we are being decieved.

The food crisis is the result of a series of circumstances, including dangerously low stocks for staple foods—wheat, rice, and corn; high oil prices; poor climatic conditions in major food producing areas; and natural resource depletion. On top of this, more and more people can now afford dairy products and meat; and, rich countries have started to use food crops for biofuels to supplement oil consumption.

The WTO has nothing to say about most of these issues. The climate and energy crises are both outside the WTO's mandate and will likely remain that way. The WTO has no control over the oil oligarchy, OPEC, nor over biofuels policies in the U.S. and Europe. Nor does the WTO have a say over how the world plans to address the growing environmental crisis, particularly climate change.

Instead, existing WTO agreements and the proposed Doha reforms are likely to intensify the food crisis. Further deregulation and liberalization will make agricultural markets more volatile and will strengthen the position of dominant players, mainly transnational agribusinesses like Cargill, Monsanto and ADM, in food and agricultural markets.

It is time to build a trading system that cooperates with international efforts to secure food for all. Trade agreements must allow governments to reestablish national and regional food stocks. Global commodity markets must be better managed. And it is time to create international competition laws to prevent transnational agribusinesses from abusing their market power. If world leaders started proposing these steps, we might start getting somewhere in resolving the crisis in our food system.

—Carin Smaller

When Will World Leaders Listen to the Voices of the Poor?

IATP's Carin Smaller is blogging from Rome this week at the UN Food and Agriculture High Level Conference on Food Security.

Terra Preta or “black soil” is the name of a fertile soil created by indigenous people in Central Amazonia, which mysteriously continues to regenerate itself. It is the title of the forum for farmers, pastoralists, fishers, environmentalists, human rights activists and NGO’s being held on the sidelines of the UN’s High-Level Conference on Food Security, June 3-5, at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome.

The forum celebrates the vibrancy of local communities, their struggles against injustice, and the prospect of solving the global food, energy and climate crises through local, community-based and sustainable initiatives. But the forum has been tainted with a deep sense of disappointment because many of the leaders here have been excluded from participating in the High-Level Conference; their voices silenced.

At the outset, the FAO had planned a conference on how to ensure world food security, in light of the threat of climate change and biofuels production: then the food crisis exploded. The FAO meeting was transformed into an emergency gathering of world leaders to create a plan to solve the crisis. With Presidents and Prime Ministers from France, Spain, Italy, Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Egypt, there simply was no space left for leaders representing communities affected by the food crisis.

And so the Terra Preta forum continues in parallel, while world leaders meet at the FAO headquarters. Debates are taking place around three topics: (1) the food crisis and models of production; (2) land, water, energy and agrofuels; and (3) climate change. The participants are preparing a declaration to read out at the end High-Level Conference and a plan of action of their own on how to solve the food crisis. As I sit and watch the events unfold, I am forced to wonder when the international community will stop, take a breath, and realize that finding solutions to the world’s problems, starts with the people hit hardest.

—Carin Smaller

June 02, 2008

Food security in Africa: U.S. support falls short, new report

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, released an important report last week scrutinizing U.S. based efforts to relieve hunger in Sub-Saharan Africa (a one page summary is accessible here).

The GAO stressed that efforts to tackle the root causes of food security have been “insufficient.” USAID is criticized for having focused most of its efforts in Africa on inefficient food aid practices, but the agency "has not addressed the underlying factors that contributed to the recurrence and severity of these crises." The report also called for greater integration between U.S. government agencies on agricultural development in Africa.

The report comes as the UN Food and Agriculture Organization high level meeting on the food security in Rome is about to begin. Will the FAO meeting result in a larger and more constructive commitment to address food insecurity from the Bush Administration? Judging from U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Ed Schafer's comments on Thursday, it looks like a major push for greater use of biotech crops in developing countries will be a big part of the U.S. strategy. This emphasis on costly, patented biotech crops runs counter to recommendations in the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development report issued last month, which have already been approved by 57 governments.

IATP's Carin Smaller will report more on the FAO meeting in Rome throughout the week.

—Anne-Laure Constantin

May 30, 2008

The Heart of the Food Crisis - Inequity

It is always a pleasure to read Amartya Sen. He is a Nobel Prize winner (1998), has written extensively on famine, hunger, gender issues, human rights and politics. He is a serious if gentle critic of much of the determinism that accompanies proponents of today's globalization policies (those that insist the world has no choice but to open its markets and privatize economic services). He is a professor at Harvard University.

All too rare among economists, he argues convincingly from philosophical and ethical principle, not from some arbitrary imposition of economic "law" (that increased demand will always raise prices, or that lower tariffs will always reduce prices in local markets). He is an empirical economist, preoccupied with what happens when economics mixes with politics and social norms and culture. Among many ideas, he and Jean Drèze proposed ameliorating the situation of widows in traditional Hindu culture, who often find themselves utterly dependent on relatives and all too often neglected or even abused. Their idea was simple: a directed government pension that would provide the widows with some economic independence and the improved social standing that accompanies an income.

Amartya Sen's op-ed in the New York Times earlier this week returns to the argument he made in the first book of his that I read, Poverty and Famines. Namely, that is not just poverty that makes people vulnerable to hunger, but inequitable income growth. The example he gives in his op-ed is 1943 Bengal, when the boom created by a war economy in the city of Calcutta, combined with government policies that bought up food in rural areas to try to keep food inflation down in the cities, resulted in some 2 to 3 million deaths in those rural areas. The boom raised wages in the city, and therefore purchasing power, but wage increases did not reach rural areas. In effect, the rural poor were priced out of the market by the newly richer urban population.

His point cannot be made often enough: food scarcity has a number of causes, some of them out of our control. But, and this is another central thesis of Dr. Sen's work, where there are accountable systems of government, famines do not occur, because governments intervene to make food available to all, if only to avoid riots. Governments will introduce rations or welfare payments or otherwise ensure at least a minimum amount of food reaches everyone, overriding the market's rather rougher system of justice: to the highest bidder the food.

One factor left out of his op-ed (700 words only takes you so far) is oil. Oil speculation is a significant new supply issue that has a profound effect on agriculture. The widely anticipated continued increase in oil prices will leave food prices permanently higher, and more volatile. Oil is a fundamental ingredient in the global food supply, both as an input and as the principle means of powering distribution, storage and processing. A recent Wall St. Journal article highlights the dramatic increase of fertilizer costs (a 65 percent rise for American farmers in the past year), linked to the rising price of oil, as well as the cartels that are common in the industry (and apparently protected by century-old exemptions to anti-trust laws).

Whether or not current prices are justified, we have known for a long time that oil is in finite supply and that we do not yet have technologies to replicate the energy yields from other sources. All of us face big adjustments in the way we live and work. Agriculture is no exception - the premise of the Green Revolution was based on oil to increase yields. That approach, with all the controversy that surrounded it, has run its course. The world urgently needs the new investments described by the IAASTD. Biofuels to meet a European or U.S. mandate might indeed exacerbate all that plagues global agriculture. But creating local energy sources from biomass in developing countries should be a top priority for building resilience in the face of the food crisis. The World Bank has announced a new $1.2 billion program for food and agriculture in the neediest developing countries. If only we could have more confidence it will be spent where it is needed, making the transition to agriculture that is less dependent on water, fertilizers and oil. As Dr. Sen says, first we need to "understand the nature of the problem." As far as World Bank President Bob Zoellick goes, I have my doubts.

—Sophia Murphy

May 23, 2008

British Prime Minister's Plan on the Food Crisis

This week, the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) held a “Special Meeting on the global food crisis” at the UN headquarters in New York. The meeting's goal was to help move the international community towards action in addressing the causes of the food crisis.

Speakers included Malawi President Bingu wa Mutharika, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, experts Joachim Von Braun and Jeffrey Sachs as well as DuPont Vice President James Borel, among others. UN Member States then had a chance to react, and many did. All the interventions are available on Ecosoc’s dedicated webpage.

Some may, with reason, consider this as only one among too many meetings to discuss the food crisis. International farm leader John Wilkinson recently wrote “it’s time to act instead of talk, it’s time to plant fields instead of having conferences.”

However, the meeting did feature some interesting debates.

Let us focus on Gordon Brown’s intervention. A short one: around four minutes. But an efficient one: in this limited amount of time, he outlined a dozen of measures the world should take to address the food crisis. They included efforts to: encourage sound policies on land tenure and property rights; set up input subsidies; implement price controls on commodity markets; tax regimes for the agriculture sector; build a regulatory environment around agribusiness; invest in research and infrastructure; and stop dumping.

IATP supports many of these same measures as well (we would have added other steps, including the central need to involve farmer organizations). It is encouraging to hear a powerful world leader support efforts to invest in agriculture and address agribusiness' market power, measures that have too often been downplayed over the past decades.

Of course, the details of implementation matter, and there is no guarantee that we would agree with Brown’s plan there. But most puzzling to us, really, is why the conclusion of Gordon Brown’s speech focused on how a rushed Doha Deal will provide a solution to the crisis. In fact, such a rush would make it more difficult to implement the measures he recommends. M. Brown, why don’t you take a look at IATP’s analysis?

—Anne-Laure Constantin

May 21, 2008

The food crisis and corporate profits

How are global agribusiness corporations doing as the world experiences a food crisis? Very well, thank you!

Just take a look at this four minute video, where GRAIN’s Devlin Kuyek exposes the “structural meltdown of the food system” that is at the source of the current food crisis. According to Kuyek, Cargill is at the moment making $471,000 an hour in profit!

His presentation builds on a recent report in which GRAIN highlights the indecency of agribusiness profits in this time of food crisis.

—Anne-Laure Constantin

May 19, 2008

Food, Water and Climate Challenges

Food prices rose 4 percent in the United States last year, the highest rise since 1990. All over the world food prices are on the rise. At the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank finance ministers wanted to focus the world’s attention on food crisis rather than the credit crisis. There are many factors contributing to this current crisis, including the rising price of oil, deregulated agricultural markets, financial speculation and biofuels. Another key factor is climate change, which is affecting
crop yield and food production. It is time for us to get serious about understanding the way climate change affects water resources for food production and conversely the way agricultural water use is leading to climate change.

In January, scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in the U.S. published an article in the journal Science that said what many climate change experts had already been saying for some time: global warming is responsible for the extreme changes that we see in the hydrological cycle in the western U.S. Moreover, the scientists from Scripps found that up to 60 percent of the climate-related trends of river flow, winter air temperature and snow pack between 1950 and 1999 are human-induced.

While the Scripps scientists analyzed data for the western United States, similar changes have been happening around the world in the second half of the twentieth century. The Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007) found that “climate and freshwater systems are interconnected in complex ways and that any change in one of these systems induces a change in the other.” The IPCC further concluded that the changes in precipitation patterns and glacier melts are projected to significantly affect water availability for an entire range of socially valued water uses, including human consumption, agriculture and energy generation.

The most dramatic effect of climate change is likely to be on agricultural production. The impact is already manifesting itself in countries such as Australia. The global price of wheat hit its highest level in decades in December, partly due to Australia's drought. Irrigated agriculture accounts for almost 70 percent of world water withdrawals and close to 90 percent of the total consumptive water use (the portion that is lost to the
immediate environment for use). Existing irrigation and drainage infrastructures have been designed for stable climate conditions. They are very likely inadequate to cope with extreme climatic variations in precipitation and reduced water supply reliability and availability, as well as floods. On the other hand, since irrigation accounts for such a large percentage of total water withdrawals, any reduction in irrigation water use (either through introducing water use efficient technologies or through changing agroecological
practices) will go a long way in coping with climate-related water stress especially, in water-stressed regions.

While irrigated agriculture accounts for 40 percent of global food production, the remaining 60 percent of world’s food crops are produced by those practicing rain-fed agriculture. Such agriculture covers more than 80 percent of global agricultural land. In these regions, particularly those without local water conservation measures, crop productivity depends on sufficient precipitation to meet both evaporative demand and soil moisture needs. Any variation in precipitation patterns and temperature increases can affect crop productivity substantially. The IPCC predicts that in some countries, “yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50 percent by 2020.” This would most certainly affect food security in many communities and nations.

But it is not only that climate change-related water stress will affect agriculture. The converse is also true: current water use patterns and associated practices contribute to climate change. It is noteworthy that the two sectors in the world that use the most water, chemical intensive agriculture and fossil fuel-based energy production, are also the biggest contributors to global warming, which in turn further increases water stress in many regions. For example, agriculture, as it is practiced now, sequesters much less carbon than it used to because of land use changes. A recent report by Greenpeace, “Cool Farming: Climate Impacts of Agriculture and Mitigation Potential,” found that “industrial, chemical-intensive agriculture degrades the soil and destroys the resources that are critical to storing carbon, such as forests and other vegetation.”

There are a number of ways in which national agricultural, trade and energy policies affect both water resources of a nation and climate change at the global level. Let us take a brief look at irrigated agriculture. Irrigation water use increased dramatically in most parts of the world in the second half of 20th century. This was abetted by the building of massive water systems including dams, reservoirs, aqueducts, pipelines and canals that brought water to otherwise water scarce regions. This growth in irrigated agriculture is part of an unprecedented expansion of chemical intensive agriculture that was originally sold as a way to feed the world and also to increase export earnings through commodity-based trade.

The pursuit of export-led growth in agriculture has also been dependent on intensive use of fossil fuel-based chemical inputs, contributing greatly to climate change. In addition, the transport of agricultural commodities around the world and intensive agricultural practices (such as confined animal feedlots and indiscriminate fertilizer-use) also contributes to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. According to the World Bank’s 2008 report on agriculture, intensive agriculture directly contributes about half of the global emissions of two of the most potent non-carbon dioxide GHGs: “Nitrous oxide emissions from soils (from fertilizer application and manures) and methane from enteric fermentation in livestock production.” Each account for about one-third of the farm sector's total non-carbon dioxide emissions and are projected to rise with increased meat consumption becoming a norm in emerging economies.

Agricultural practices geared towards growing export-oriented monoculture crops are chemical intensive and have resulted in high levels of pollution in local water systems. In addition, nitrogen (N) used in fertilizers leaches into water courses increasing the indirect nitrous oxide emissions downstream. This model of production has intensified water use, both in terms of the water going into the growing of the commodities themselves, but also in terms of inter-basin water transfers.

Protecting our waters in local watersheds and wetlands and using them judiciously in support of local agricultural systems and livelihood practices, rather than continuing with the current strategy of promoting export-oriented, monoculture, industrial, water-guzzling agricultural systems, is key to reducing the water sector’s direct contributions to climate change. Moreover local practices that conserve and enhance local water availability to ensure resilience of rain-fed agricultural systems are necessary as an adaptation mechanism, to meet climate challenges and to help meet food security goals, two of the biggest challenges for developing countries today. It is time to reevaluate our agricultural policies that promote water and energy intensive agriculture.

We will have to make some major changes in our agriculture systems to address some of the upcoming climate challenges. Doing so will help us cope with extreme changes in the hydrological cycle and resultant food and water crises many communities and nations are sure to face. Effective and sustainable water management in agriculture in support of healthy food systems needs to be part of the climate solution.

—Shiney Varghese

May 15, 2008

The WTO Will Not Solve the Food Crisis

If I hear Pascal Lamy say one more time that the Doha Round will help solve the current food crisis, I am going to explode! For months, the WTO chief has used every public opportunity (and then some) to push for the completion of the WTO’s trade round to solve the current food crisis. He is wrong.

The food crisis is the result of a series of circumstances, including alarmingly low stocks for staple foods—wheat, rice, and corn; high oil prices; poor climatic conditions in major food producing areas; and natural resources depletion. On top of this, more and more people can now afford dairy products and meat; and, rich countries have started to use food crops for biofuels to supplement oil consumption.

The WTO has nothing to say about most of these issues. The climate and energy crises are both outside the WTO's mandate and will likely remain that way. The WTO has no control over the oil oligarchy, OPEC, nor over biofuels policies in the U.S. and Europe. Nor does the WTO has a say over how the world plans to address the growing environmental crisis.

Instead, existing WTO agreements and the proposed Doha reforms are likely to intensify the food crisis. Further deregulation and liberalization will make agricultural markets more volatile and will strengthen the position of dominant players, mainly transnational agribusinesses like Cargill, Monsanto and ADM, in food and agricultural markets.

It is time to build a trading system that cooperates with international efforts to secure food for all. Trade agreements must allow governments to reestablish national and regional food stocks. Global commodity markets must be better managed. And it is time to create international competition laws to prevent transnational agribusinesses from abusing their market power. If Pascal Lamy could start proposing these steps we might start getting somewhere in resolving the crisis in our food system.

—Carin Smaller

April 28, 2008

Will the International Assessment of Agriculture Bring a New Era?

On April 12, the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) reports on agriculture were approved by 57 governments meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa. The approval capped a six year-long process of negotiating terms of reference for the project, selecting more than 400 authors, and three full rounds of writing, editing and rewriting in response to thousands of comments from around the world. Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States have not signed on to the reports, despite many changes to the “Summary for Decision-Makers” and the “Synthetic Reports” on cross-cutting themes that were made to gain their support.

I went to two of the four author/reviewer meetings, was a Lead Author for the “policy options” chapter of the Global Report and reviewed the chapter on Agricultural Knowledge Science and Technology (AKST) investment. 

Here are some of the key findings:

• The way the world grows its food must radically change to better serve the poor and hungry if the world is going to cope with a growing population and climate change.
• A new system must focus on the needs of small farms in diverse ecosystems.
• The industrial agriculture model focused almost exclusively on production has come at a high environmental cost.
• The patenting of genetically engineered crops has concentrated ownership of resources, driving up costs and undermining local farming practices.
• Women, who make up a large proportion of farmers in developing countries, continue to struggle with low income, limited access to education, credit and land, and deteriorating work conditions.

The paper concluded that a new agriculture system should focus on: fighting poverty and improving rural livelihoods; enhancing food security, using natural resources in a sustainable way, improving human health and greater equity in agriculture.

Much of the criticism about the IAASTD report comes from a few governments and the agricultural biotechnology industry, which had supported the creation of the IAASTD on the understanding that it would promote the industry and trade liberalization as primary vehicles for AKST investment and research. Industry representatives withdrew from the IAASTD when they couldn’t control its content in the writing and comment process to which they had agreed. I suspect that much of the criticism of the report as “anti-science” comes from those who have not read the whole report or from those whose notion of ASKT encompasses a very narrow range of science. For example, in contrast to the conventional call for focusing public investment in yield-increasing technologies, the IAASTD assesses the policy options and investments for post-harvest technologies to ensure that existing production does not spoil. Sometimes “low tech” solutions obviate the need for costly “high tech” science.

Civil Society Organizations issued an April 12th statement in Johannesburg, entitled “A new era of agriculture begins today.” (More comments and articles on the assessment can be found here). Whether or not the optimism of this title is justified will depend on whether and how governments and CSOs interpret and implement the findings of the report. What cannot be denied is that a massive literature review supports the IAASTD conclusion that the 20^th century focus on increasing agricultural production, while “externalizing” the social and environment costs of that production, is unsustainable.

The IAASTD literature review is not just “scientific,” in the natural science and laboratory sense of the term, though it includes literature from agronomy, climate science, ecology, epidemiology, hydrology, molecular biology, plant virology, soil science, veterinary science etc. The review includes the economic, legal, political science, sociological and trade policy literature that helps decision-makers decide which ASKT policies to adopt and which investments to make. To dismiss the IAASTD because it concerns policy options and investments – and is not an AKST risk assessment on narrow questions of safety – is to misunderstand the assessment mandate given to the IAASTD authors: assess which AKST policies and investments can contribute to sustainable development and other IAASTD objectives.

If the misunderstanding is genuine, it can be corrected through the kind of discussion employed in the IAASTD comment process. If the misunderstanding is willful, then the terms of battle are set between a peculiar notion of “science” and the range of AKST policy and investment options in the IAASTD.

—Steve Suppan

April 24, 2008

M. Lamy Out of Step on Food Prices

IATP's Alexandra Spieldoch and Anne Laure Constantin are in Accra, Ghana for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) XII meeting through April 24. They will be blogging periodically on events in Accra.

Skyrocketing food prices feature high on UNCTAD XII’s agenda. WTO Director General Pascal Lamy addressed this topic to civil society representatives here on April 21. His take on the current food crisis and the role of the WTO was a disappointment to many. According to Lamy, the change in eating habits in developing countries is the main, long-standing factor leading to the increase in prices.

The day before, U.N Secretary General Ban Ki Moon had highlighted more comprehensively the mix of factors leading to price increases, including rising oil prices, climate-related production shortfalls, global economic growth, financial speculation, the shift to biofuels production and the depreciation of the U.S. dollar. For more details on some of these factors, see our recent paper on global agriculture prices and development.

M. Lamy’s argument missed the point. Take just one of the factors M. Ban mentioned: speculation. More and more money is going into financial investment in agriculture commodities. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) concluded that this has been made possible by the deregulation of international agriculture markets. As a result, the volatility of commodity prices is growing. Yesterday, in a debate on “the changing face of commodities in the 21st century,” a Tunisian representative estimated that speculation was responsible for a third of the price of food at the moment.

But no question: M. Lamy was not prepared to engage in a serious reconsideration of global trade deregulation. Hence the “disillusion” expressed by an African civil society leader towards the end of the meeting.

—Anne-Laure Constantin

April 18, 2008

High Prices and Rural Development

In this time of high agriculture prices, we know someone is making a lot of money. On the buying side of the farm chain, Cargill reports third quarter net earnings of over $1 billion this week, a 69 percent increase from last year. On the input side, Monsanto announced record earnings earlier this month, also over $1 billion for its second quarter.

In theory, higher global prices should represent an important opportunity for farmers and rural communities in developing countries. But according to a new report released today by IATP's Anne Laure Constantin, many of the benefits of high prices are not finding their way to farmers due to higher production costs and the dismantling of important agriculture policy tools (thanks to World Bank, IMF and WTO policies) designed to help ramp up production and manage supply to address price volatility.

On Sunday, trade ministers from around the world will gather in Accra, Ghana for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). The meeting represents an important opportunity to address the current failings in agriculture markets. You can follow the latest happenings at the UNCTAD XII meeting at IATP's UNCTAD web page.

Here is IATP's press release from today:

Can High Agriculture Prices Spur Development?

UNCTAD Meeting an Opportunity to Address Agriculture Markets, New Report

Minneapolis/Accra – Trade ministers gathering in Accra, Ghana for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) should take steps to support agriculture and manage supplies to address price volatility, according to a new paper by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP).

“A Time of High Prices: An Opportunity for the Rural Poor?” written by IATP’s Trade Information Project Officer Anne Laure Constantin, is being released in Accra today, and is available at www.iatp.org.

The paper finds that governments have been limited in their ability to help farmers take advantage of higher prices – due to free trade economics pushed by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization. Trade liberalization has encouraged the dismantling of agriculture programs in many developing countries, making it difficult to ramp up production and manage supplies to stabilize prices.

“The push to deregulate national and international agriculture markets needs to be reassessed,” said Constantin. “UNCTAD has historically been at the intersection of commodities and development. They could play a constructive role in addressing unfair markets and stabilizing prices.”

The paper found that while agriculture prices are rising almost across the board, farmers in poor countries aren’t benefitting as much as they could. Instead, many of them suffer from the spike in food prices. Skyrocketing energy and input (fertilizer and seed) costs are increasing the cost of production. Gains from export earnings are being swallowed up by the exporting company and profits have not found their way back to farmers.

The paper called for:

·         UNCTAD XII to reassess the need to regulate agriculture markets. High prices can be a tool for development and poverty alleviation, but they will not achieve these aims if left to highly volatile and concentrated global markets;

·         Greater support for the agriculture sector, particularly in developing countries;

·         Coordinated action to manage agriculture supply to address price volatility;

·         Regulation of the food value chain to address the market power of transnational corporations and deliver on a fair distribution of benefits from producers to consumers;

·         Promotion of environmentally sustainable methods of production including assistance adapting agriculture to climate change;

·         Bioenergy policies that don’t threaten food security and adapt to local conditions and needs.

Constantin and IATP’s Director of Trade and Global Governance, Alexandra Spieldoch, are in Accra at a civil society forum from April 17-19, and then monitoring the UNCTAD meeting from April 20-24. You can find updates on all that is happening at the UNCTAD XII Ministerial at: http://www.iatp.org/unctadxii/

—Ben Lilliston