By Miren Gutierrez* and Oriana Boselli
ROME, Oct 4 (IPS) – “From a current 6.5 billion population, a billion don’t get enough to eat right now. Extrapolate that to 2020, and you begin to recognise why this is not just a moral problem, it is a national security problem that has much more to do with civil strife, warfare, terrorism, immigration… This goes far beyond food.”
That is the issue on the plate for the World Summit on Food Security (Nov. 16-18), says Kevin Cleaver, assistant president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).
And the results of the summit cannot be business as usual.
“I am not a NGO type,” he says. “But I agree the current food system is fundamentally not sustainable. A billion people go to bed without enough food. Something has gone terribly wrong. In the developed world, obesity is the problem. Poor people (in rich countries) are malnourished.”
What needs to be done?
For Cleaver, it is a clear, although not an easy choice. “Reallocate public resources to agriculture production in developing countries, where the epicentre of this crisis is. By the countries themselves, by the donor agencies run by the industrial countries, by the multilateral institutions like IFAD, the World Bank…A hard choice: it means shifting resources into agriculture, and taking them out of something else.
“Also, a lot has to be done in the area of policy,” he says.
“We find that when the food crisis occurred in 2008, many developing countries made the wrong choices, tried to impose price controls on farmers. Argentina, for example, squeezed the farmers by taxes. The result is always that the farmers stop producing or start smuggling. A very inefficient, shortsighted response.
“Other countries did stupid things. The Philippines started to buy massive amounts of rice and stuck it in a warehouse. Each time they went to the market, the price went to the ceiling…so poor countries were crushed,” he says.
“In industrial countries we have the most stupid set of subsidies…About 200 billion dollars a year are devoted to subsidies to U.S. and European companies, a bigger amount than all the aid of all institutions put together. We subsidise this tiny little group of corporate farms to the tune of gazillions. And what sort of farming do they practice? The kind the Slow Food movement criticises. Is this what we want to do with the money? No.”
So what will happen during the summit?
“This is an effort by FAO to be relevant. They recognise the crisis, and they want to have a discussion at the global level to solve it,” says Cleaver. “The problem with these big U.N. gatherings, however well intentioned, is that they don’t actually change much. In 1974, there were some institutional changes. I hope this food conference leads to an equivalent kind of response. But my guess is it won’t change much.
“The most we can hope,” he adds, “is that it will raise awareness in the public about the stakes. The press is not reporting the issues, only pieces of it. They haven’t quite caught on to the global dimension of this dilemma. This summit could manage to get the word out beyond a few bureaucrats.”
Do others hope more from the summit?
The third big U.N. agency headquartered in Rome, the World Food Programme (WFP), specialises in delivering food to people who are caught in a humanitarian crisis, such as a drought, flood or war. “Simply put, it keeps people from starving to death,” says the WFP site.
The most urgent problem facing the WFP now is the food emergencies in about 30 countries.
“Food prices on international markets reached a peak in mid-2008 and since then we have witnessed a decline. However, the cost of food in many markets in the developing countries where WFP works has remained stubbornly high,” says Greg Barrow, global media coordinator of the WFP.
