Reflections from the Rome World Food Security Conference

“Nobody understands how in a time of globalisation of trade, the OECD countries …spent $372 billion dollars in 2006 supporting their agriculture….and that in 2006 the world spent $1.2 billion dollars on the arms trade. Against this backdrop, how can we explain to people that it is not possible to find $30 billion a year to enable 862 million hungry people to enjoy the most fundamental of human rights –the right to food.” Jacques Diouf, Director General, FAO

“Sadly, the international community only acts when the media beams the painful spectacle of world suffering into the homes of wealthy nations…. It was only when the destitute and those who are excluded from the banquets of the rich took to the streets to voice their discontent and despair that the first reactions in support of food aid began to emerge.” Jacques Diouf, Director-General, FAO

“What sort of world has it become that we can download images from all around the world onto a machine, yet we cannot download the food/nourishment we need for our bellies from the earth below or from the fish in the sea.” Denzil Douglas, Saint Kitts and Nevis

“In 1972, the Club of Rome released a report titled ‘The Limits to Growth’ which gave a warning on the exhaustion of resources and destruction of the environment. This report caused a sensation when it was released. However, not many of us at the time took this prophecy seriously. As a result, we continued our dependence on fossil fuels without reflecting upon our lifestyle of mass production, mass consumption and mass waste, thereby steadily increasing the emission of greenhouse gases… Thirty years have passed since the Club of Rome issued their report. We are finally hearing the scream of the earth, and we now realise that Cassandra’s prophecy was right. The difference between Troy and us is that, for us, there is still time remaining before we may perish.” Mr Yasuo Fakuda, Prime Minister of Japan.

On the surface, the World Food Security Conference in Rome was yet another talk fest which concluded with yet another worthwhile but bland declaration; set up yet another global body to coordinate the world food emergency, and raised $12 billion in emergency food aid.

Yet despite this, most of the delegates I spoke to --even those from impoverished developing countries who had paid their own way --felt it had been worthwhile because it helped them to understand why the world’s food situation is so fragile; what is really causing the world food crisis; and what they need to do in their countries to ensure their populations have enough to eat.

Certainly, you had to look beyond the official set piece speeches at the plenary sessions, to find answers to these urgent questions. But even in the main conference, one of the themes to emerge was that food security – that food security is now the main goal of most developing nations, not the ‘free trade’ liberalisation agenda that western nations have been pursuing for decades.

Faced with soaring food prices, most developing countries have worked out that shipping food from the North to the South is not the answer, and they are focussed on trying to increase local food supplies, expand local food production and decrease their dependence on food imports. “The food will not come to us unless we grow it and cultivate it ourselves. What we need is help with the infrastructure and resources to help us to feed ourselves” the Prime Minister of Seychelles argued.

Many countries have already set ambitious targets to increase their local production of food. The Philippines, which is rationing rice because it can’t afford the high cost of imports, has aiming to become self sufficient in rice production within five years and many others are following suit. 28 countries have closed or restricted their exports to favour domestic production, and many have introduced subsidies or import restrictions. Free trade liberalisation seems dead in the water as countries scramble to feed their populations in the face of skyrocketing prices for food staples.

There was a consensus at the conference that high prices for staple foods are here to stay, as a result of a convergence of factors, including soaring oil prices, the early impacts of climate change, natural resource depletion, the diversion of grain to meat production and bio fuels, and years of neglect of world agriculture.

The main conference had a spirited but ultimately unresolved debate about bio-fuels, with many countries calling for a halt to the conversion of agricultural land to bio-fuel production. The US, which heavily subsidises farmers to convert to bio fuels, was unrepentant, and made it clear they intended to continue subsidising farmers to the tune of 12 billion a year, to convert to growing corn for ethanol, regardless of any international pressure, or the distorting effect subsidies for bio-fuel conversion was having on world corn prices. The US Secretary of Agriculture claimed that the production of corn for ethanol accounted for only 3% of the increase in corn prices, while the International Monetary Fund estimated it was responsible for 30% of price rises.

The Brazilian President turned up with a planeload of 50 delegates and thousands of public relations brochures, and vigorously defended sugar based bio fuels, which Brazil has been producing for more than thirty years. “Just as there are good fats and bad fats, there are good bio fuels and bad bio fuels,” he railed. “It offends me to see fingers pointed at bio fuels, when the fingers are coated in coal.”

While the main conference was side tracked by the contentious bio fuels debate, the Non Governmental Organisation Forum, held in a parallel to the main conference, singled out globalisation, free trade liberalisation, financial speculation and increasing corporate control of the food chain, as the underlying causes of the world food crisis.

Globalisation and free trade liberalisation policies have steadily eroded the ability of many developing nations to feed their populations, the100 odd NGOs and small farmers organisations attending the forum, pointed out.

While almost all OECD countries continue to subsidise their agriculture to the tune of more than 345 billion a year, they had forced the removal of trade barriers and protections for local agriculture in developing countries as a result of ‘free trade liberalisation’ policies, and conditions imposed through the World Bank, IMF and the WTO. This resulted in the dumping of heavily subsidised western food commodities onto developing countries, which in turn had undermined local food production, as small farmers were unable to compete with heavily subsidised cheap food imports.

As a result, whereas three decades ago most developing countries were self sufficient in food, today two thirds have lost the ability to feed their populations and are net importers of food, and find themselves at the mercy of volatile world prices for basic commodities like wheat and rice.

Now billions of people in developing countries find they can no longer afford to pay the price of the imported food they need to survive, and are on the brink of starvation, and the situation is forcing many nations back into poverty. The representative of Bangladesh pointed out that every time there is a 10% increase in the price of rice, a further two hundred thousand people in his country are thrown into poverty.

Delegates gave numerous examples of the devastating effect the soaring price of imported food is having in small, poor nations. Mauritius, a country that has been recently devastated by floods and drought, is facing food scarcity because it cannot afford to buy imported food. “We have been focussed on producing sugar for export, but we now find we can’t afford staples. Importing food and oil is a huge burden on our balance of payments,’ the Ambassador of Mauritius explained.

In Haiti, an impoverished nation where protestors chanting ‘we’re hungry’ recently toppled the government, most food including staples like rice, is imported. Yet until the nineties Haiti was self sufficient in rice. The government was pressured to open up their agriculture sector to global competition, allow imports and specialise instead in growing mangoes for the American market. Rice farmers couldn’t compete with cheap rice imports and went out of production, and now 80% of rice is imported –at such high prices that most people cannot afford it—hence the food riots.

The Prime Minister of another Caribbean nation, Saint Kitts, explained that his country was in the grip of a severe food crisis, with severe shortages of rice and other staples. “We have become a net importer of food. We are completely dependent on food imports, but we can’t afford to buy it.”

Mexico is yet another example. Two years after Mexico joined NAFTA, a flood of cheap, subsidised corn from America entered Mexico and thousands of small farmers, unable to compete, were forced to sell their land and migrate to the cities (or the USA). Now Mexicans are reliant on imported corn and can’t afford the inflated prices. Mexicans too have taken to the streets in fury.

About 33 countries have been designated by the FAO as ‘food deficit’ nations –meaning they are almost totally reliant on food imports and food aid to feed their population. But many delegates I spoke to from countries not on this short-list say they cannot feed their populations and can’t understand why they are not receiving aid from the World Food Programme.

The delegate from Djibouti, for example, told me that his country is almost totally reliant on food imports, but can no longer afford to import rice. They had been getting supplies of sorghum from Ethiopia, but these were now in jeopardy as a result of the Ethiopian famine. Desertification has left much of their soil infertile, and he didn’t know how they were going to survive. They are desperate, he told me. “We cant understand why we are not considered a food deficit nation.”

Delegates from Sierra Leone couldn’t understand why they weren’t receiving food aid either. Officially the worlds poorest nation, most of their population live in slums and cannot afford more than one meal a day. “We import virtually everything,” they told me, especially rice. Eight years of war has left Sierra Leone with no infrastructure, few roads or even energy.

Another reason agriculture production had fallen by the wayside, according to delegates, was that it had became cheaper and easier to import food than produce it locally, and people had become accustomed to eating imported western food, rather than local food. The delegate from Saint Kitts and Nevis said eating habits in his country and the growing preference for imported western food over local food, had contributed to their import dependence.

The Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Lesotho bemoaned: “It’s virtually impossible to convince our youth that agriculture is a profitable or worthwhile occupation. A revolution of sorts is needed to change this and restore the value and respect for farming.”

The decline in agricultural production in many developing countries has been exacerbated by a steep decline in agricultural investment and aid, and years of neglect of world agriculture, according to the FAO. There has been little investment in agriculture over the past decade, either from aid or from the private sector. Agricultural aid has fallen by 58% since 1994, when it was 8 billion dollars. Today it stands at 3.4 billion. Delegates at the main conference focussed on ways of investing in agriculture, and increasing agricultural productivity.

Genetic Engineering Rears its Ugly Head

Genetic engineering reared its head at the conference, with delegates from the US and other European countries arguing that high yield, drought resistant genetically engineered seeds were the answer to the world food crisis. Bill Gates and the Rockefeller foundation used the conference to launch a new ‘Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa,’ based on supplying fertiliser, machinery, pesticides, seeds and other inputs to small African farmers. Pressed at a media conference, he conceded that they did intend to use genetically engineered seeds for their new ‘green revolution!’

NGO’s, in their declaration, said genetic engineering and industrialised agriculture are completely unsustainable solutions to the food crisis, and are designed primarily to increase corporate control of the food chain. Farmers simply cant afford to buy genetically engineered seed every year, they pointed out, let alone the expensive pesticides, fertilisers and other inputs that are needed to enable these seeds to survive.

NGO’s also expressed alarm that ‘political and economic elites’ were ‘using the food crisis to further entrench corporate control of world agriculture.’ They are offering proposals that will only deepen these crises, they said in their declaration….If we continue down the free trade liberalisation path eventually 1 billion small farmers will be wiped out and food production will fall into the hands of large agricultural enterprises.

NGO’s said the answer to skyrocketing food prices did not lie in further deregulation of food production and trade, either, or the completion of the DOHA round of trade negotiations. These will only intensify the world food crisis by making food prices more volatile, increase developing countries dependence on imports and give further control to multinational corporations in food and agricultural markets.

Instead, food security should be the top priority of every government, not free trade, and governments should not be forced to adopt policies that undermine their ability to produce food locally. The focus should be on increasing local food supplies and reviving traditional, small scale agricultural systems that have been neglected for several decades, not increasing food import and aid.

“Every country should have the right to produce enough food in their population and increase their local self reliance and long term food security. Governments have a duty to ensure sufficient food is produced to sustain people’s lives –it cannot just be left to the market. The right to food and to be free from hunger is a basic human right, and all international rules should recognise this right.”

NGO’s called on government’s to switch from relying on cheap food imports to producing most, if not all, of their own food. Farmers should principally provide food for their local market, and international trade should consist mainly of essential commodities that cannot be locally produced, they argued.

Small scale, traditional farming and ensuring that small producers have better infrastructure and a reliable and steady income, is the key to food security and increasing agricultural production in developing countries.

The worlds trading system needed an overhaul, too, they argued, so that food security was its main goal. New trade rules that favour local production, self reliance and long term food security and enable countries to build their own, resilient food systems, are also needed.

NGOs and small farmer organisations also questioned the hypocrisy of Western nations demanding that developing countries to open up their agricultural markets, while they were heavily protecting their own agricultural sectors.

New Zealand, it turns out, is the only country in the OECD, that does not subsidise agriculture. (Australia subsidises its farmers to a small extend indirectly through state governments). Collectively Western nations spend about $345 billion dollars a year, or a billion dollars a day, subsidising their agriculture, while at the same time demanding that the developing countries remove their subsidies.

Another shock was discovering how many countries are already borrowing to import oil, which is triggering severe balance of payments crises in many countries. Most developing nations I spoke to are dependent on oil for their energy, and are having to borrow to import it. This alone will trigger crises in many, perhaps most, developing countries.

Food Speculation

The role of commodity speculation in driving up food prices was barely mentioned at the main conference, but was another major topic at the NGO forum. Food has become a hot commodity to profit and speculate on, as investors flee Wall Street. Speculative investment in food commodity futures has increased from 25 billion five years ago to 250 billion today. Commodity futures trading reached as high as16 billion a day earlier this year, and has divorced prices from what is being produced on the ground.

“Food is too important to be a commodity to be traded on the marketplace, NGO’s pointed out. “We need measures to stop speculators from profiting from hunger.

Climate Change

Another shock was the devastation climate change is already causing to food production in nations which are ignored by the western media. Country after country spoke of the devastating effects droughts, floods and desertification were having on their food production.

Swaziland is going through a devastating drought that has dried up its water tables and even entire rivers in many parts of the country. The drought has accelerated soil erosion and as a result, alien species had invaded the country and destroyed their grazing land.

Floods and drought have caused dramatic losses of food production in Lesotho. “Ours is a very fragile eco system, and we are very sensitive to climate change. Droughts and severe cold have destroyed our cereal production and agriculture has been steadily declining.”

Vietnam reported its worst drought in 50 years, while Namibia had just experienced the worst floods in its history, which had devastated its normally productive agricultural sector.

World cereal production fell by 3.6% in 2005 and 6.9% in 2006 due to bad weather in major producing countries, including Australia, Europe.

Finally, a word of New Zealand’s international image. Most of us believe we have a benign reputation overseas, thanks to our anti-nuclear stance. This image, I discovered, has been sullied in third world circles, by our stance as the flag wavers of free trade liberalisation. One of Italy’s leading NGOs told me that New Zealand was regarded in some quarters as an enemy of the third world, because of its aggressive free trade liberalisation stance, and a lackey of the USA and Europe and their free trade liberalisation agenda.