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Dear Colleague,
On 28-29 April, there will be a high-level meeting in Switzerland of
United Nations Agencies. The high cost of food, increased hunger and the
recent food riots have put agricultural policies at the center of the World
Agenda. The food riots are desperate cries for help. There is a need for
action by UN Agencies, regional bodies such as the European Union and the
African Union, by national governments and by civil society organizations.
I would be pleased if you can alert your government authorities,
development research institutes, and Non-Governmental Organizations to the
importance of the UN meeting and especially the need for coordinated follow
up action on world hunger.
Sincerely yours, Rene Wadlow, Representative to the United Nations,
Geneva of the Association of World Citizens
Rene Wadlow
Tuesday, 22 April 2008
"Since the hungry billion in the world community believe that we can all eat
if we set our common house in order, they believe also that it is unjust
that some men die because it is too much trouble to arrange for them to
live."
-Stringfellow Barr, Citizens of the World (1952)
Food riots in Haiti brought the issue of hunger to the front gates of
Haiti's presidential palace and death to a United Nations peacekeeper from
Nigeria who was shot by the crowd surging from a slum area of
Port-au-Prince. The Prime Minister, Jacques-Edouard Alexis, was forced to
resign for having failed to act despite sharp increases in the price of food
over the past several months, pushing people who are already poor into
deeper poverty.
The President of Haiti, René Préval, who was trained as an agronomist and
should have recognized the consequences of food shortages earlier,
nevertheless, promised to use foreign funds originally destined for
development projects to lower the price of rice. This short-range policy can
mean the difference between eating and going hungry for many families.
"The Rich Have Already Eaten" was a phrase from Rev. Andres Giron, a
Guatemalan priest, leader of the National Peasant Association for Land, used
as the title of a hard-hitting study of agricultural conditions in Central
America by Solon Barraclough and Michael Scott (1). They analysed the issues
of land tenure, agricultural production, and food security, demonstrating
how the vast majority of the rural population of Central America had been
dominated, exploited and deprived of any voice in government by a small
minority of oligarchs and military officers. Thus hunger is a sign of a
political struggle for social justice and reform and should not be looked at
as only a question of agricultural production and distribution.
The politically-destabilizing aspect of higher food prices and the food
riots has pushed the issue of food costs to the top of the agenda of UN
Agencies. There will be a top-level meeting of the heads of UN Agencies such
as the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the UN World Food
Programme (WFP) with the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in Switzerland
28-29 April. The President of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, and the
Managing Director of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who have already had
to discuss food prices at their annual meeting in Washington, will be there.
Rising food prices are a global concern and have led to riots against high
food prices in a number of countries such as Egypt, Senegal and Cameroon.
Using government funds to lower food prices can only be a short-term policy.
Egypt already spends more on subsidies, including gasoline and bread, than
on education and health combined. The United Nations food specialists
indicate serious food shortages in many countries of Africa. In East and
Southern Africa : Lesotho, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Somalia, Mozambique, and
Eritrea. In West Africa: Mauritania, Senegal, Liberia, Sierre Leone, Ivory
Coast, Burkina Faso, and Cameroon. There are serious food shortages in
war-torn Afghanistan and Iraq and chronic food shortages in North Korea. The
Somalis, who live largely thanks to the UN's World Food Program, are under
serious threat as the high price of rice and other grains cut into the WFP
budget and increased violence makes food delivery difficult. The same is
true of the refugee and internally displaced camps of the Darfur conflict.
Governments and the UN system had grown complacent, believing that food
security mechanisms had been put into place and that the dangers of
large-scale famine had been permanently banished. The food riots of these
days indicate that important weaknesses in food security policies remain.
The world civil society must now become more active in placing food policy
at the center of the world agenda.
The late 1940s, as the world started to recover from the Second World War,
had been a time when hunger was the key symbol of underdevelopment. Lord
John Boyd Orr as the first Director General of the Food and Agriculture
Organization and Josué de Castro, who served as the independent Chairman of
the FAO Council, were both leaders in calling attention to world hunger and
the need for strong governmental action to provide food security. In 1946,
Boyd Orr presented a proposal for a World Food Board which would be endowed
with sufficient authority and funds to stabilize the world market in food.
He pointed out that several countries were already doing this for the
domestic market but that the world market was subject to violent
fluctuations. The plan for a world food board was rejected following the
lead of the US delegate who said "Governments are unlikely to place large
funds needed for financing such a plan in the hands of an international
agency over whose operations and price policy they would have little direct
control." (2). The FAO did encourage governments to develop national food
security policies, but these were often overshadowed by the desire to make
money through international trade of food.
In 1974, the United Nations and the FAO organized in Rome the World Food
Conference whose final appeal stated that greater food production and
improved nutrition was the unremitting, paramount and increasingly urgent
problem of our time.
Despite the fact that millions of peasants, landless laborers and urban
dwellers suffer from hunger and malnutrition, the issue of food production,
distribution and costs had fallen off the world agenda except for
specialists. Occasionally questions of export subsidies of agricultural
products or production quotas would be taken up by the World Trade
Organization or in the all-night negotiations of the Agriculture Ministers
of the European Union, but the complexity of the issues and the political
power of the large farm association in the USA and Western Europe kept
agricultural policies outside active political debate. Now, food riots are
bringing to light the fact that a true world food program requires action at
the world, the regional, the national, and the local level. There are at
least five issues that need to be analyzed at the April 28-29 UN meeting for
the start of a world food policy to be put into place.
1. There is a need to intensify action on climate change. This year, there
has been bad weather in key growing areas; in particular Australia, normally
the world's second-largest wheat exporter, has been suffering from an epic
drought. This may be a result of particular weather conditions this year or
may be a sign of climate change. It is necessary to analyse the impact of
climate change on long-term food production and see alternative strategies.
2. Higher prices for food are a reflection of the higher price of oil and
energy costs. Much modern farming is energy-intensive for producing
fertilizers, running tractors, and transporting farm products to consumers,
often at long distances. Oil prices are influenced by the violence and
social breakdown in Iraq and heavy speculation on the oil markets. There is
a need both for short term measures to bring oil prices down to a reasonable
level based on production costs and transportation as well as longer-range
energy policies to free countries from oil dependence.
3. Higher prices for oil have encouraged a greater use of ethanol and other
biofuels, often without consideration of the impact of the production of
biofuels on land use and food production. While biofuels are likely to be
useful, their use should be limited at present so that the consequences of
their use can be studied.
4. Governmental food and agriculture policies need to be analysed and
reviewed carefully. The agricultural policies of the European Union and the
larger food exporting countries —USA, Canada, Brazil, Australia — need to be
reviewed and the impact of agricultural subsidies and export encouragement
looked at beyond trying to build political support from farmers.
5. There needs to be a detailed analysis of the role of speculation in the
rise of commodity prices. There has been a merger of the former Chicago
Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade to become the CME Group
Market which deals in some 25 agricultural commodities. Banks and hedger
funds, having lost money in the real estate mortgage packages are now
looking for ways to get money back. For the moment, there is little
governmental regulation of this speculation. There needs to be an analysis
of these financial flows and their impact on the price of grains.
The April 28-29 high-level meeting of the UN system is an important
opportunity to set out such an agenda for analysis and action, but it must
be followed up by the UN, national governments and civil society
organizations.
Notes, Further Reading
1. Solon Barraclough and Michael Scott. The Rich Have Already Eaten: Roots
of Catastrophe in Central America (Amsterdam: Transnational Institute, 1987,
109pp.)
2. For an analysis of Boyd Orr's proposal see Ross Tabot The Four World Food
Agencies in Rome (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1990, 188 pp.)
Rene Wadlow is the Representative to the United Nations, Geneva of the
Association of World Citizens and the editor of the journal of world
politics: www.transnational-perspectives.org
--
"The risk it takes to remain tight inside the bud is more painful than the
risk it takes to blossom." Anais Nin
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