Getting out of Food Crisis

GRAIN, May 2008
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This is a pre-release of the editorial on the food crisis of the July 2008 issue of GRAIN’s Seedling magazine. GRAIN decided to distribute this now in support of the mobilisations of social movements around the High-Level FAO Conference on World Food Security, held from 3 - 5 June, 2008 in Rome.
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While there has been widespread reporting of the riots that have broken out around the world as a result of the global food crisis, little attention has been paid to the way forward. The solution is a radical shift in power away from the international financial institutions and global development agencies, so that small-scale farmers, still responsible for most food consumed throughout the world, set agricultural policy. Three interrelated issues need to be tackled: land, markets and farming itself.

In March 2008, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and other international agencies began talking openly about a global food crisis. As with many such crises, they were a little late. Food prices — especially for cereals, but also for dairy and meat — had been rising throughout 2007, markedly out of step with people’s incomes. People had coped by changing their eating habits, which included cutting back on meals, and had taken to the streets to demand government action. By early 2008 grain prices were surging and riots had broken out in nearly 40 countries, instilling fear among the world’s political elites.

A few months have now passed since the global food crisis was put on the world agenda. The causes of the problem have been identified and more or less understood.[1] Yet the food crisis is still unfolding. Prices are continuing to climb, a whole class of “new poor” has emerged, governments are scrambling to find or manage grain supplies, and the eruption of another major setback could provoke a really dramatic world crisis.

Everyone agrees that something needs to be done but there is vast disagreement as to what this implies. The policy priests at the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation and the International Monetary Fund, the corporate boards of directors and, indeed, most governments and their teams of advisers want us to continue on the course of industrialising agriculture and liberalising trade and investment, even though this recipe just promises more of the same in the future. Social movements and others who have been fighting the injustices of today’s capitalist model see things differently. For them, it is now time to break with the past, to mobilise around a new, creative vision that will bring not only short-term remedies, but also the kind of profound change that will actually get us out of this food crisis — and, indeed, the unending series of crises (climate change, environmental destruction, poverty, conflicts over land and water, migration, and so on) that neoliberal globalisation generates.

RADICAL TRANSFORMATION REQUIRED

Many people are becoming aware that no solution is possible unless we open the doors to a real shift in power. The policymakers, scientists and investors who have led us into the current mess cannot be relied upon to get us out of it. They have created a profound double vacuum: a policy void and a market sham. The policy void is palpable. Instead of generating bright ideas to build a more sustainable and equitable food system, those in power seem capable of only knee-jerk responses that amount to more of the same: more trade liberalisation, more fertilisers, more GMOs and more debt to make it all possible. The very notion of, say, rewriting the rules of the finance system or clamping down on speculators are taboo topics. Even the food self-sufficiency policies being adopted in some developing countries, in themselves a very good idea, often repeat failed Green Revolution strategies.

More disturbing, the political and business elites don’t want to face the fact that, whether you are a working-class homeowner in the US or a mother queuing for rice in the Philippines, confidence in the market has been shattered. Farmers in Thailand are stupefied. Last year they were getting Bht10,000 (US$308) per tonne of rice delivered to the mills. Today they’re paid Bht9,600 (US$296), even though the price of rice to the consumers has tripled![2] The US dollar (still a global currency for food trade) has plunged, while the price of oil (on which industrial food production depends) has gone through the roof.. As a consequence, governments have started taking food out of the market, as they simply don’t trust the way food is being valued any more. The government of Malaysia, for instance, has announced that it will bilaterally swap palm oil for rice with any nation willing to make the deal, while several other countries have banned the export of food. [3]

Against this backdrop of bankrupt ideas and systems, there is no other credible way forward than to rebuild from the bottom up. That means turning the whole thing over: small farmers, still responsible for most food produced, should be the ones setting agricultural policy, rather than the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank or governments. Peasant organisations and their allies have clear, viable ideas about how to organise production and services and how to run markets and even regional and international trade. Ditto for labour unions and the urban poor, who have an important role to play in defining food policy. Many groups, such as the National Farmers’ Union in Canada, the Confédération Paysanne in France, ROPPA in West Africa, Monlar in Sri Lanka and the MST in Brazil, have issued strong calls to revamp agricultural policy and markets. International organisations, such as Via Campesina and the International Union of Food Workers, are also ready to play a role.

POINTS FOR URGENT ACTION

Three interrelated issues need to be tackled to get us out of the food crisis: land, markets and farming itself.

Access to land by peasant farmers is clearly central. With the surge in commodity prices and the new market for agrofuels, land speculation and land grabbing are occurring on a horrific scale. In many parts of the world, governments and corporations are installing plantation agriculture, displacing peasants and local food production in the process. Indeed, the model of export-led agriculture and import dependency at the root of today’s crisis is going into overdrive, destroying the very systems of food production that we need to get out of our present dilemma.

The situation is becoming even more critical as land grabbing is going global and becoming official. According to some sources, Japan has acquired 12 million hectares of land in South-east Asia, China and Latin America to produce food for export to Japan, which would mean that Japan’s overseas croplands are now three times the size of its mainland! [4] The Libyan government has leased 200,000 hectares of cropland in Ukraine to meet its own food import needs, and the United Arab Emirates is buying large landholdings in Pakistan with Islamabad’s support.[5] Last year the Philippine government signed a series of deals with Beijing to allow Chinese corporations to lease land for rice and maize production for export to China, triggering a huge national outcry, from Filipino peasant organisations right up to the Catholic Church. Chinese corporations have also been acquiring rights to productive farmland across Africa and in other parts of the world. The Beijing government is about to make the buying of land overseas to produce food for export to China a central and official government policy. [6]

Land has, of course, always been a central demand from social movements, particularly for peasants, fisherfolk, rural workers and indigenous peoples. Agrarian reform tops the list of measures urgently needed to put an end to the growing plague of rural poverty and to empower people to feed themselves and their communities, reversing the explosion of urban slums that is so central to this food crisis. It is high time that the proposals from the peasant organisations are taken seriously and implemented.

Another major issue in dire need of attention is how to deal with the market. For decades, neo-liberal trade liberalisation and structural adjustment policies have been imposed on poor countries by the World Bank and the IMF. These policy prescriptions were reinforced with the establishment of the WTO in the mid-1990s and, more recently, through a barrage of bilateral free trade and investment agreements. Together with a series of other measures, they have led to the ruthless dismantling of tariffs and other tools that developing countries had created to protect local agricultural production. These countries have been forced to open their markets to global agribusiness and subsidised food exported from rich countries. In that process, fertile lands have been diverted away from serving local food markets to producing global commodities or off-season and high-value crops for western supermarkets, turning many poor countries into net importers of food.

One of the more obscene aspects of the food crisis is the spectacular profits that the market has allowed big agribusiness and speculators to make from it. Contrary to the impression conveyed by some media, few farmers are seeing any benefits from the price hikes. We have already quoted the example of Thai farmers now getting less for their rice while consumers pay three times more. Farmers in Honduras, once the bread basket of Central America, can’t afford to buy seed or fertiliser any more, as prices for these inputs have soared. [7] Corporations, on the other hand, are making record profits at every link in the food chain — from fertilisers and seeds to transport and trading. Earlier this year, GRAIN documented the 2007 profit increases of the major food and fertiliser corporations. [8] In the first quarter of 2008, while many hungry people were further cutting back on the amount of food they eat, the major food and fertiliser companies were reporting even more spectacular profit increases. [9]

At the same time, massive speculation is occurring. According to a leading commodities broker, the amount of speculative money in commodities futures has risen from US$5 billion in 2000 to US$175 billion in 2007. [10] Half the wheat now traded on the Chicago commodities exchange is controlled by investment funds.[11] At the Agricultural Futures Exchange of Thailand, speculation on rice has, within one year, tripled the average number of contracts traded daily on the exchange, with hedge funds and other speculators now representing up to half of the daily contracts being traded. [12] All of this speculative activity from pension funds, hedge funds and the like, plus the shifting of commodity trade from formal exchange markets to direct over-the-counter deals, is sending prices soaring. Such a bubble is inherently unstable and bound to burst, with unpredictable results. With few exceptions, governments and international agencies are hardly talking about this part of the food crisis equation, let alone doing anything effective to deal with it.

In contrast, trade unions and farmers’ organisations have been vigorously calling for proper regulation and controls, particularly since producers and consumers are the groups most affected by it all. Calls by social movements for food sovereignty invariably include urgent proposals for priority to be given to local and regional markets and for measures to be taken to reduce the dominance of international markets and the corporations controlling them. Other proposed measures include suspending, if not dismantling, the WTO Agreement on Agriculture, taxing agribusiness corporations to improve the distribution of resources and establishing national strategic reserves. This would allow governments to manage supply more efficiently, to encourage competition, to inhibit the formation of monopolies, to carry out formal investigations into speculation on the commodity markets and then to take measures to control it, and so on. [13] There are many options, if we truly want to change things.

Then there is the issue of farming itself. The food crisis has galvanised the voices of the old Green Revolution into calling for more of the same top-down packages of seeds, fertiliser and agrochemicals. Since the main reason why the food crisis is hurting so many people is their inability to pay today’s high prices, simply boosting production is not necessarily going to resolve anything, especially if this means driving up the costs of production. The high-yielding varieties of staple foods that the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), the FAO and most agricultural ministries are so enthusiastic about require more petroleum-based fertilisers and other chemicals, all of which have undergone huge price increases that effectively put them out of reach of many farmers. In any case, chemical fertilisers are one of the main sources of the greenhouse gases produced by agriculture. Throwing even more of them at already exhausted soils, as many Green Revolutionaries are now advocating, would merely push the world deeper into climate chaos and further destroy the life of the soils.

Here again, there is a vast array of solid proposals and experiences for moving towards farming methods that are productive, non-petroleum based, and under the control of small farmers. Scientific studies have shown that these methods can be more productive than industrial farming, and that they are more sustainable. [14] If they are properly supported, such local farming systems, based on indigenous knowledge, focused on maintaining healthy, fertile soil, and organised around a broad use of locally available biodiversity, show us ways out of the food crisis. To build on these, one has to stop relying on the experts of the World Bank and the CGIAR and start talking instead to local communities. One would need not only to build new strategies and to collaborate with different players, but also to put an end to the criminalisation of diversity so that farmers can freely access, develop and exchange seeds and experiences. It would mean, too, that governments stop promoting agribusiness and export markets, and start protecting and celebrating the skills, knowledge and capacities of their own people.

TIME TO MOBILISE

It is clear that those of us outside governments and the corporate sector need to come together as never before to build new solidarities and fronts of action both to address the immediate problems of the food crisis and to build long-term solutions. If we don’t work together to facilitate a power shift that puts first the needs of the rural and urban poor, we will definitely get more “business as usual”. Reorienting our agricultures and food systems to make them more just, more ecological and truly effective in feeding people is no easy task, but surely we all have a part to play. Rather than wait or look for ready-made solutions, we need to create those better systems now, collectively.

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There is a PDF version of this editorial

[1] See, for example, GRAIN’s contribution, “Making a killing from hunger“, Against the grain, April 2008

[2] “Chiang Rai farmers protest“, The Nation, Bangkok, 15 May 2008

[3] Leo Lewis, “Food crisis forces Malaysia into barter: palm oil for rice“, The Times, London, 14 May 2008. Already, about one-third of the world’s tradable rice has been taken out of the market. See “Nigeria: Food crisis, not just rice“, Vanguard, Lagos, 14 May 2008

[4] ” Food crisis looming over Korea”, Chosun Ilbo, Seoul, 4 March 2008

[5] “Food crisis turns banks into field hunters“, Sabah, Turkey, 15 May 2008. Simeon Kerr and Farhan Bokhari, “UAE investors buy Pakistan farmland“, Financial Times, London, 11 May 2008

[6] Jamil Anderlini, “China eyes overseas land in food push”, Financial Times, 8 May 2008.

[7] Alison Fitzgerald, Jason Gale and Helen Murphy, “World Bank ‘destroyed basic grains’ in Honduras“, Bloomberg, 14 May 2008

[8] GRAIN, “Making a killing from hunger“, Against the grain, April 2008

[9] See, for example, Geoffrey Lean, “Multinationals make billions in profit out of growing global food crisis”, Independent on Sunday, London, 4 May.

[10] Figures compiled by commodities brokerage Gresham Investment Management, as reported in The Globe and Mail, Toronto, 25 April 2008. This is money that big funds spend, not on buying or selling the physical commodity, but on betting on price movements. Even so, they help to determine prices, so they affect the prices paid by those purchasing the physical commodity.

[11] Paul Waldie, “Why grocery bills are set to soar,” The Globe and Mail, 24 April 2008.

[12] “Rice contract volume rises with speculators moving in,” Bangkok Post, 7 May 2008

[13] See, among others, IUF, “Fuelling hunger“, Geneva, 28 April 2008,  or National Family Farm Coalition, “Family farmers respond to the food crisis“, The Nation, New York, 28 April 2008

[14] See for example: http://www.farmingsolutions.org, http://www.grain.org/gd/, andhttp://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/02/070218135635.htm

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GOING FURTHER

– For more information and further reading, GRAIN has compiled a page on the food crisis with relevant links, documents, audio and video

– High-Level FAO Conference on World Food Security

– The Bonnfire of Biodiversity: fuelling the food crisis 

Food Crisis Symptom of Dubious Liberalisation

By Aileen Kwa*, May 29, 2008. IPS

GENEVA, May 12 (IPS) - The high food prices that have sparked riots in many parts of the developing world — from Indonesia, India and Bangladesh to Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire and Haiti — should come as no surprise. These are only the latest in a series of events many developing countries have suffered as a result of opening their borders and neglecting domestic agriculture.

A large number of developing countries have conscientiously implemented World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) conditions and World Trade Organisation (WTO) commitments. They have applied the given structural adjustment policies — and have seen the damaging consequences to their domestic agricultural sector.

The consequence has been the certain erosion of their capacity to produce their own food.

In the era of stronger state control in the 1970s and even the early 1980s, domestic food markets in the developing world were often in the hands of state marketing boards and cooperatives. Marketing boards would guarantee floor prices, and provide fertilisers and seeds. They also controlled import volumes, redistributed food where there were production shortfalls, and purchased commodities from cooperatives.

These marketing boards were not always run in the best possible way; there were many instances of corruption or inefficiency, but they did fulfill certain critical functions. Farmers were provided a market to sell their produce to, which meant they had a livelihood. Prices were stable even though they were often lower than what farmers would have liked.

As a result of these policies, many developing countries were either net food exporters, or at least were nearly food self-sufficient.

All that has changed over the last 20 years. Investment support to farmers was done away with. Small farmers were told to produce for the international market, and their markets were opened to producers from outside. Rather than supporting staple crops, government support went to the export sector. Since all would specialise in the products where they had ‘comparative advantage’, gains were supposed to accrue all round.

But rather than producing winners, millions of the poorest subsistence farmers were knocked out of their own markets. Imports took over what was previously produced by local people. Over the last 20 years, the production capacity in many countries has severely diminished.

The Philippines has been one prime example of such policies. “During the 60s and 70s, we were self-sufficient,” Jowen Berber of Centro Saka, an NGO working on agrarian issues with farmers, told IPS. “That was the time that the government was heavily investing in rice — irrigation, infrastructure, marketing support and production support such as credits and inputs. But when the government stopped those incentives and subsidies, rice production slowly decreased.”

Berber said “the acreage of irrigated land has also been falling because the government has not been maintaining irrigation facilities. We also have a very high level of post- harvest losses in rice — up to 35 percent because our post-harvest facilities are very old.”

Instead of supporting farmers with guaranteed prices as before, Berber said “the government now intervenes to buy less than 1 percent of the domestic rice that is produced. They are buying more imported rice than our own local rice.”

A study on import surges by David Pingpoh and Joean Senahoun, commissioned by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in 2006, noted that the Cameroon government support to the rice sector was removed in 1994 through implementation of IMF and World Bank policies. The fertiliser market was privatised. Rice yields of poor farmers dropped as fertilisers became unaffordable. Tariffs were liberalised, and annual rice imports doubled from 152,000 tonnes to 301,000 tonnes between 1999 and 2004.

This opening rendered the country vulnerable to the policies of other countries. At the time, India was de-stocking its rice surplus, and rice imports from India increased from 7,900 tonnes in 2001 to 60,300 tonnes in 2002. As a result of this import surge, rice farmers were hard hit, and many left the sector. Land for rice cultivation dropped 31.2 percent between 1999 and 2004.

According to the FAO, Cote d’Ivoire also saw imports flooding in when the market was opened up. As a result of implementing commitments at the WTO, Cote d’Ivoire removed import restrictions on key agricultural goods, particularly rice. Duty on all agricultural products was set at a maximum of 15 percent, except for 25 tariff lines.

As a result, rice imports increased at an annual rate of 6 percent from 470,000 tonnes to 715,000 tonnes between 1997 and 2004. Imports were mainly from Thailand, China and India. Domestic production dropped 40 percent over this period.

In Nepal, the civil society organisation ActionAid documents that rice import surges came in 1994, 1996 and 2000, with imports increasing by 175 percent, 55 percent and 800 percent respectively. From 24,500 tonnes imported in 1999, by the year 2000 imports had hit 195,000 tonnes. The porous borders between Nepal and India, and the Nepal-India Trade Treaty were widely seen as the cause of these surges. In certain areas of Nepal, domestic prices fell by nearly 20 percent. The southern belt bordering India saw a multitude of rice plants and rice mills shutting down.

Today, in the latest twist of events, food prices have increased due to global shortfalls. Food production has been redirected towards biofuel production. Drought in Australia has contributed to shortages on the world market. Speculators playing on commodity markets have further increased prices.

Up to 37 countries have been gripped by protests and riots. In Cameroon, seven people were killed in the unrest in February. Food riots also took hold of Abidjan in the Cote d’Ivoire in March this year.

At meetings in Berne in Switzerland to address the global food crisis, UN Secretary- General Ban Ki-Moon, World Bank president Robert Zollick and WTO director-general Pascal Lamy again made a plea for more free trade the panacea. But farmers remain unconvinced that more of the same policies that have contributed to the last two decades of destruction of agriculture can help.

Reacting to the push by the WTO leadership, the World Bank and the UN to stitch up the Doha Round so that further liberalisation can assist in resolving the food crisis, Henri Saragih, international coordinator of the global network of peasant farmers La Via Campesina writes, “Protecting food has become a crime under free trade rules. Protectionism has become a dirty word. Meanwhile, countries have become addicted to cheap food imports, and now that prices are shooting up, hunger is raising its ugly head.”

 * Aileen Kwa is a Geneva-based policy analyst, presently on leave from Focus on the Global South. This article was first published by IPS, 12 May 2008

The Time Has Come for La Via Campesina and Food Sovereignty

By Peter Rosset*, May 29, 2008

Around the world it seems more and more that the time has come for La Via Campesina. The global alliance of peasant and family farm organizations has spent the past decade perfecting an alternative proposal for how to structure a country’s food system, called Food Sovereignty. It was clear at the World Forum on Food Sovereignty held last year in Mali, that this proposal has been gaining ground with other social movements, including those of indigenous peoples, women, consumers, environmentalists, some trade unions, and others. Though when it comes to governments and international agencies, it had until recently been met with mostly deaf ears. But now things have changed. The global crisis of rising food prices, which has already led to food riots in diverse parts of Asia, Africa and the Americas, is making everybody sit up and take note of this issue.

But, what are the causes of the extreme food price hikes? There are both long term and short causes. Among the former, the cumulative effect of three decades of neoliberal budget-cutting, privatization and free trade agreements stands out. In most countries around the world, national food production capacity has been systematically dismantled and replaced by a growing capacity to produce agroexports, stimulated by enormous government subsidies to agribusiness, using taxpayer money.

It is peasants and families farmers who feed the peoples of the world, by and large. Large agribusiness producers in most any country have an export “vocation.” But policy decisiones have stripped the former of minimum price guarantees, parastatal marketing boards, credit, technical assistance, and above all, markets for their produce. Local and national food markets were first inundated with cheap imports, and now, when transnational corporations (TNCs) have captured the bulk of the market share, the prices of the food imports on which countries now depend have been drastically jacked up.

Meanwhile the World Bank and the IMF have forced governments to sell off their public sector grain reserves. The result is that we now face one of the tightest margins in recent history between food reserves and demand, which generates both rising prices and greater market volatility. In other words, many countries no longer have either sufficient food reserves or sufficient productive capacity. They now depend on imports, whose prices are skyrocketing. Another long term cause of the crisis, though of lesser importance, has been changing patterns of food consumption in some parts of the world, like increased preference for meat and poultry products.

Among the short term causes of the crisis, by far the most important has been the relatively sudden entry of speculative financial capital into food markets. Hedge, index and risk funds have invested heavily in the futures markets for commodities like grains and other food products. With the collapse of the home mortgage market in the USA, their already desperate search for new avenues of investment led them to discover these markets for futures contracts. Attracted by high price volatility in any market, since they take their profits on both price rises and price drops, they bet like gamblers in a casino. Gambling, in this case, with the food of ordinary people. These funds have already injected an additional 70 billion dollars of extra investment into commodities, inflating a price bubble that has pushed the cost of basic foodstuffs beyond the reach of of the poor in country after country. And when the bubble inevitably bursts, it will wipe out millions of food producers throughout the world.

Another important short term factor is the agrofuel boom. Agrofuel crops compete for planting area with food crops and cattle pasture. In the Philippines, for example, the government has signed agreements that commit an area to be planted to agrofuels that is equivalent to fully half of the area planted to rice, the mainstay of the country’s diet. We really ought to label feeding automobiles instead of people as a crime against humanity.

The major global price increases in the costs of chemical inputs for conventional farming, as a direct result of the high price of petroleum, is also a major short term causal factor. Other factors of recent impact include droughts and other climate events in a number of regions, and a conspiracy involving the CIA to destabilize certain governments not well-liked by Washington. In Venezuela, Bolivia and Argentina, the private sector and the TNCs are working hard to export food items sorely needed by the local population, or otherwise prevent them from reaching market, as a way to delegitimize the leaders of those countries.

Faced with this global panorama, and all of its implications, there is really just one alternative proposal that is up to the challenge. Under the Food Sovereignty paradigm, social movements and a growing number of progressive and semi-progressive governments propose that we re-regulate the food commodity markets that were de-regulated under neoliberalism. And regulate them better than before they were deregulated, with genuine supply management, making it possible to set prices that are fair to both farmers and consumers alike.

That necessarily means a return to protection of the national food production of nations, both against the dumping of artificially cheap food that undercuts local farmers, and against the artificially expensive food imports that we face today. It means rebuilding the national grain reserves and parastatal marketing boards, in new and improved versions that actively include farmer organizations as owners and administrators of public reserves. That is a key step toward taking our food system back from the TNCs that hoard food stocks to drive prices up.

Countries urgently need to stimulate the recovery of their national food producing capacity, specifically that capacity located in the peasant and family farm sectors. That means public sector budgets, floor prices, credit and other forms of support, and genuine agrarian reform. Land reform is urgently needed in many countries to rebuild the peasant and family farm sectors, whose vocation is growing food for people, since the largest farms and agribusinesses seem to only produce for cars and for export. And many countries need to implement export controls, as a number of governments have done in recent days, to stop the forced exportation of food desperately needed by their own populations.

Finally, we must change dominant technological practices in farming, toward an agriculture based on agroecological principles, that is sustainable, and that is based on respect for and is in equilibrium with nature, local cultures, and traditional farming knowledge. It has been scientifically demonstrated that ecological farming systems can be more productive, can better resist drought and other manifestations of climate change, and are more economically sustainable because they use less fossil fuel. We can no longer afford the luxury of food whose price is linked to the price of petroleum, much less whose industrial monoculture production model — with pesticides and GMOs — damages the future productive capacity of our soils.

The time has truly arrived for La Via Campesina and for Food Sovereignty. There is no other real solution to feeding the world, and it is up to each and every one of us to join mobilizations to force the changes in national and international public policy that are so urgently needed.

* Peter Rosset is based in Oaxaca, Mexico, where he is a researcher at the Centro de Estudios para el Cambio en el Campo Mexicano. He is on the Board of Focus on the Global South. This is his own translation of the original, at http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2008/05/09/index.php?section=opinion&article=025a1pol

HUNGER AND FOOD CRISES: A VIEW FROM THE GROUND

By * Shalmali Guttal, Focus on the Global South, May 2008

In a press conference in Timor Leste’s capital city Dili on May 14, top UN officials declared that the country is not at a risk of starvation from the global food crisis. According to the World Food Programme (WFP) Country Director Joan Fleuren in Timor Leste, “The Government is working hard to increase its imports” and sell it at subsidised prices in an effort to manage the situation and ensure that there is no food crisis. (1) The Ministry of Agriculture estimates that annual rice consumption in Timor Leste averages about 83,000 metric tones (mt) of which, 40,000 mt are produced domestically. The shortfall is made up through imports which are already at 50-60,000 tones and rising. Acting Special Representative of the Secretary-General to Timor Leste, Reske-Nielsen, suggests that rice imports provide the Timorese Government with time to come up with medium and long term solutions. (2)

This view, however, differs significantly from that of many Timorese analysts, who fear that the country is locked into a dangerous dependency on imports to meet its food needs and already displays the early symptoms of a chronic food crisis. About four months ago, before the onset of the food crisis, the price of rice was 14$ - 16$ for a sack (about 35 kg). Now it averages about $25 a sack in Dili and is significantly higher in rural areas — if it reaches there at all. And despite the Timorese Government’s recent move to subsidise rice prices, there simply isn’t enough subsidised rice to go around. Most of it is swallowed up in Dili and according to Dili locals, a significant portion is sold at much higher prices by rice traders, especially in rural areas. Like most net food importing countries, Timor Leste does not have control over the import prices of rice and other staples. Equally serious, it does not have an effective public distribution system to ensure that food imports reach its rural population. Relying on private companies to handle distribution, the Government cannot even ensure that those who need subsidies most are actually able to avail of them. According to Elda Guterres da’Silva from KBH, a Timorese organisation dedicated to vocational education, (3) “The new government is out of touch with problems in the rural areas; it seems intent to put in a market system and this will increase the number of poor people. Only those with money can buy rice.”

Hunger is not new to Timor Leste. In 2004, reports of severe hunger and starvation were reported among tens of thousands of households in at least five districts and people in eleven out of thirteen districts survived largely on food aid. (4) Majority of Timor Leste’s population of one million (approximately 80 percent) resides in rural areas and is engaged in subsistence agriculture. Local production is not sufficient to meet the population’s food needs throughout the year and in 2001, about 80 percent of villages were estimated to face food shortages at some time during the year. (5) While food shortages during the lean period of an agricultural cycle are common in subsistence economies, a combination of historical factors and recent government policies are entrenching what many Timorese fear will be a long term, chronic, food crisis. Although reliable updated consumption statistics are difficult to come by, reports from some rural areas indicate that there is already not enough food and people can only eat once a day.

The problem is not only imports, but also rice itself. According to Arsenio Pereira of HASATIL (6), a Timorese organisation committed to sustainable agriculture, “There is too much dependency on rice. Indonesians promoted this dependency. Before Indonesian occupation, there were a variety of staples that Timorese people ate, especially in dry and mountainous areas, but the Indonesians insisted that everyone grow and eat rice; current government food policy is also focussed on rice.” This view was echoed by other people I talked with in Dili last week, who pointed out that even today in rural areas, there are many other staples that are consumed — what they call traditional foods. Pereira explained, “Rice is important, but not the only food. We have more than 10 varieties of beans, 20 varieties of maize, and varieties of yams, cassavas, bananas and sweet potato. But if these traditional foods are not given importance, they will be lost and we will be entirely dependent on rice.”

Although Timor Leste’s rural areas are generally cut off from even the minimal level of services available in Dili, hunger is as high in Dili as in many rural areas. Dili residents are almost entirely dependent on rice as their staple food, unlike rural communities for whom traditional foods still form an important part of their daily diets.

INDEPENDENECE BRINGS DEPENDENCE

But Timor Leste’s food shortages have as much, if not more, to do with the country’s policy regime as with low production. Upon the insistence of international donors, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the country’s post-war reconstruction has been modeled on free market economics with severe restrictions on direct governmental involvement in providing public services, price supports and building up a strong domestic economy through investment in public infrastructure in crucial areas such as agriculture, food security, education and local cottage industry. The economy has been radically liberalized and the government is seeking to make the country a haven for private investors through tax holidays, land concessions and other privileges. Job creation, which could have received a boost through public investment, has been left to the dynamics of free market competition.

At least a quarter of the country’s arable land is being handed over to private companies (mostly foreign with some local collaboration) for growing agro-fuels, particularly sugarcane and jatropha. Agricultural land is also dogged by intensifying conflicts among competing claimants, and among farmers and private concessionaires. Timorese locals report that import contracts for rice and other goods and economic concessions are routinely handed over to foreign companies without a public tender process and “single sources” that are personal contacts of the country’s senior leadership. Rural communities do not usually even know that their lands — which are their only assets — are now the “property” of a private company and that they are soon to become contract labour on the lands that they have tended for generations. In the upland district of Ermera, conflicts remain unresolved between local coffee producers and Timor Global, a private company that secured a 25 year concession on all coffee growing lands in the district. According to Antero da’Silva, a professor at the National University, “The government’s plans are oriented towards making farmers more dependent on markets, imports and free trade, and not on independence.”

In the agriculture sector, the World Bank and bilateral donors (particularly Australia and the US) have focussed almost entirely on rice and a handful of cash crops such as vanilla and coffee and at the cost of other staples that constitute the country’s traditional foods. However, decades of intensive and chemically driven rice production during Indonesian occupation have resulted in serious soil degradation in several rice growing areas, bringing down yields and rendering the land unsuitable for producing other crops. “Land used for rice production during Indonesian times cannot be used now, it was destroyed because of too many chemicals to intensify rice production. The soil needs to be regenerated,” says da’Silva.

Such ecological considerations are not a priority under the post-independence donor regime in which official agriculture policy has continued to promote intensive, chemical inputs driven agriculture, but under free market conditions. Over the past six odd years, production inputs and rural transportation have become so costly that that locally produced rice cannot compete with imported rice in price and quality. Genetically modified seed trials are now reportedly being conducted in Betano and Maliana districts by “experts” from an Australian company through a project called Seed of Life. “The donors and WB trying to increase production using hybrid seeds, chemical fertilisers, etc. Their emphasis is not on increasing food security through internal capacity and resources, or by promoting local foods, but by importing rice and food from outside, including food aid from WFP and FAO,” adds Pereira.

The combination of land conflicts, rising and unaffordable agricultural production costs, and hunger has prompted many rural people to move to Dili and large towns looking for jobs. But life in the city is as much, if not more of a struggle as back home in the village. The adoption of the US dollar as the national currency has inflated the prices of even the most basic food necessities. And then there is the international aid industry that set up shop in Dili immediately after the 1999 referendum. Timor Leste recieved over US$ 3 billion in “reconstruction assistance,” much of which went to pay for bloated salaries and facilities for international “experts.” Faithfully following market signals, the food and service industries adapted themselves to servicing the needs of an international community flush with reconstruction cash. A domestic, business elite emerged from among those who had land and houses to rent to expatriates and assets to invest in restaurants, hotels, supermarkets private security, etc. The upshot of all this was the cost of living in Dili rocketed way above the average salary of ordinary Timorese — US$ 30-60 per month. Even the earlier “pre-crisis” cost of rice (which is now remembered fondly by the Timorese) of US$ 14-16 per sack was a big burden on an a family with children and elderly to feed.

The promised foreign investment that was supposed to create jobs did not arrive. Start-up and operating costs are high in Timor Leste, as water, electricity, telecommunications and equipment are all extremely expensive. Restaurant owners and expatriates prefer to shop at supermarkets that sell imported products rather than local produce and meat markets, citing concerns of hygiene and quality. The lack of public investment in education and vocational training has resulted in an extremely small number of young people who are considered employable by the aid industry and its private sector appendages. According to Rigoberto Monteiro, General Secretary of the Timor Leste Trade Union Confederation and member of the National Labour Board, only 500 jobs are available every year in the public and private sectors. Majority of those looking for work in the city end up in a weak and unpredictable informal sector, without secure and sufficient income.

Little wonder then that hunger and malnutrition are as high in Dili, alongside markets filled with food, as they are in the country’s villages.

In 2005, Ben Moxham, a researcher with Focus on the Global South based in Timor Leste poignantly observed, “While Timor’s harsh climate is partly responsible, the question that screams to be asked is why a nation of just under a million people, which in the last five years is supposed to have received more donor funds per capita than anywhere else in the world, is going hungry.” (7)

COWBOY CAPITALISM RIDES THE RANGE

Further to the west, in a country that underwent a similar process of post-conflict reconstruction 17 years earlier than Timor Leste, severe hunger and malnutrition are become increasingly visible alongside an explosion of affluence and a concentration of wealth. As a ward of the international reconstruction and development industry since 1991, Cambodia too adopted the free market model demanded by international donors, the World Bank and the IMF. What has resulted is a cowboy capitalist economy where practically everything is for sale to the highest bidder. Small pockets of plentiful consumption are surrounded by large areas of scarcity and deprivation.

Economic growth has averaged at 11 percent over the past three years, spurred by booms in the tourism, garment manufacturing and real estate sectors. But not everyone has benefitted from these booms. Agriculture and fisheries, the mainstays of the majority of Cambodia’s population, have been systematically assaulted by free market policies, privatisation and liberalisation. The private sector has been aggressively promoted in every possible sphere — the economy, environment, agriculture, education, health, water supply, etc. Cambodia’s multilateral creditors, the World Bank, IMF and the Asian Development Bank (ADB), have demanded and achieved complete government “disinvestment” in essential public infrastructure, supports and services, and exhorted the country’s peasant farmers and artisanal fishers to compete in a free market that they are completely ill equipped for. As a result, farming and fishing has become increasingly precarious occupations for rural families, driving them into debt traps and eventually forcing them to abandon agriculture altogether.

Ruling elites in the Cambodian Government have facilitated a frenzy of land-grabbing in both rural and urban areas creating landlessness, homelessness and destitution at a scale never envisaged by ordinary Cambodians who really believed that they were in for better times. Vast tracts of fertile agricultural lands and rich forests (ranging from 10,000 to 300,000 hectares) have been given away as economic land concessions to foreign companies under 99-year leases for industrial tree plantations, agribusiness activities, tourist resorts, golf courses and other recreational facilities. Economic concessions extend to fishing areas, wetlands and even the country’s coast and islands. A growing, wealthy, domestic middle class has also joined the band-wagon, buying up land from small farmers and fishers unable to meet the rising costs of agricultural production, health care and food. Many of the country’s powerful bilateral allies (for example, China, Vietnam, Thailand and Singapore) have also claimed their piece of the prosperity pie through exclusive, no-bid contracts for infrastructure, energy, mining and oil and gas projects.

The prosperity of the domestic (largely urban) elites and foreign land owning companies classes has resulted in severely negative impacts among the rural and urban poor and even the middle classes, creating new vulnerabilities and poverty. Inflation is high (almost 11 percent at official count, though locals say that it is actually higher) and the cost of food and staple goods have increased sharply, creating twin crises of hunger and malnutrition. According to Boua Chanthou, the Director of PADEK, a Cambodian NGO working on integrated community development in more than 500 poor villages in Cambodia, “A crucial factor related to food is land; Cambodian farmers do not own enough land. A recent study shows that 60 p[ercent of Cambodian farmers are either landless or own less than half a hectare. How can they produce enough food for even their own consumption? A family of five people needs at least two hectares of land to be able to produce enough food. The Government needs to act quickly to implement social land concessions and redistribute land to the farmers.”

The problem is not lack of food per se, but lack of access to food and the means to produce food among rapidly increasingly numbers of people who are being systematically stripped of their abilities to feed themselves. While it is true that much of Cambodia’s agriculture (including fisheries) is small-hold and susceptible to weather and climate conditions, Cambodia is a rice and food exporter and till recently, it was the sixth largest rice exporter in Asia. Large agribusiness companies such as Thailand’s Charoen Pokphand (CP) have established operations in Cambodia for producing animal feed as well as pig and chicken farming. High grade Cambodian rice is grown under contract for Thai businesses in the western part of the country while Vietnam buys lower grade rice grown in the eastern part of the country. Fish from Cambodia’s Great Lake, the Tonle Sap, is exported to neighboring countries and to the numerous restaurants and resorts that cater to the tourist industry.

And yet, the people who produce this food are poor, hungry and malnourished. Since agricultural production does not provide sufficient food for the entire year, nor does it bring them enough income, they don’t have the cash to buy rice and food from markets that are over-flowing with food. Other important sources of food for rural families are the natural commons such as forests, wetlands, rivers and lakes from which they harvest food and medicinal plants. But the enclosure of these resources by private interests, as well as their degradation resulting from over-use has cut off rural communities from their last, fall back source of food and nourishment.

A Food Security Atlas launched in February 2008 by the WFP shows high levels of hunger and malnutrition in the country, especially in areas plagued by land-grabbing, economic land concessions and extractive industry. Included in the 10 “hot-spot” provinces that are considered the most food insecure and vulnerable is Siem Riep, home of the famous Angkor era temples and the tourist mecca of the Mekong region. Province residents say that the boom in the tourist industry has served as a massive suction pump, sucking away resources from local communities and leaving them poor, hungry and vulnerable.

Says Chanthou, “The open market system to export rice is not working in favour of the poor, who do not have enough money to buy food when prices go up. Therefore, the Government needs to intervene. The Government has taken some positive action recently, but should have done more.”

CHRONICLES OF CRISES FORETOLD

In both Timor Leste and Cambodia, the roots of severe hunger, malnutrition and starvation were planted a long time ago. In the case of Timor Leste, they can be traced back to Portuguese colonialism and the imposition of plantation agriculture on a traditional, multi-crop agricultural system. But what we see today in both countries are not simply ghosts from distant colonial pasts. There have been significant (and nightmarish) events over the past few decades that have entrenched food deprivation among innocent civilians.

The report of the Committee for Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR) Chega! documents how famine was induced in Timor Leste in 1977-78 by Indonesian military occupation and the war against Timorese independence forces. (8) At least 80,000 people died of hunger and related diseases during this time as military objectives were more important to the Indonesian military than the lives of occupied peoples. During the same period in Cambodia, millions of Cambodians were brutalised and starved by the Khmer Rouge in labour camps that were set up — ironically — to grow rice for the Khmer Rouge and its most important ally, China. In both countries, food and agricultural systems were militarised and fractured, and food itself became a weapon by which power was wielded.

The transitions of both Cambodia and Timor Leste to independent, “post-conflict” nation states did not result in freedom from hunger for the majority of their populations. Certainly, gains were made on many fronts — social, economic and political — but these gains were not equitably shared by all , nor did they include rebuilding the potential of families and communities to feed themselves. On the contrary, the economic blueprints devised by donors and creditors emphasised cash crops over food crops, and placed domestic producers and workers at the mercy of markets in which they had no leverage or space to maneuver. The World Bank, IMF and ADB were more interested in whether commodity markets functioned efficiently and whether suitably “enabling environments” for the private sector had been created, than whether local people had enough to eat.

Today, all the global trends related to rising food prices are reproduced at local levels in Timor Leste and Cambodia: rising costs of fuel and essential goods, doubling of the price of staples, diversion of grain to bio-fuels and animal feed, the conversion of agricultural lands to industrial, housing and tourism estates, the hoarding and manipulation of food supply by traders, profiteering by speculators through futures trade, etc. And as in every developing country, rising prices of rice, wheat, soy, corn and other staples have not translated into higher prices for small-scale producers or into increased food security for them. On the contrary, middlemen, traders, speculators and agribusiness companies are making a killing — literally.

But even when world food prices come down, unless economic and agricultural policies are drastically amended in both countries, food shortages, hunger and malnutrition are not likely to abate. “Now we can see the negative impacts of the free market” said Mateus Tilman from Kdadalak Sulimutuk Institute (KSI), an organisation working on land reform in Timor Leste. According to Tilman and HASATIL’s Pereira, resolving land conflicts and governmental investment in rural infrastructure are crucial steps to tackle food shortages and hunger. “Our dream is to have comprehensive agrarian reform and empower our farmers. Land must remain in the hands of the farmers” Tilman adds. KSI works closely with HASATIL, whose members are promoting food sovereignty as a long term solution to the country’s food crisis. “We need to plant more local food crops, build independence in food and reduce dependence on imported seeds and fertilisers. We also need to promote local knowledge among farmers — use and nurture their local knowledge and build more; and we need to provide information to farmers about climate change, trade and other related issues.”

Unfortunately, there are few such visionaries in Cambodia. Most development NGOs are reluctant to take on the country’s elite power structures and confront national economic policies that are accelerating land and resource crises and reproducing the food crisis. However, local farming, fishing and indigenous communities are organising and federating in an attempt to build a strong and collective national voice.

Mirroring trends elsewhere, the tragedy in both countries is not that there is not enough food, but that the food does not reach everyone who needs it. Even in instances of actual food shortages, food is available in neighboring areas and countries, and with timely governmental intervention, serious food crises can be averted. But as has become evident over the past year, the world can have record grain production as in 2007 (2.3 billion tons) and still people can be impoverished by rising food prices. (9) The high profits recorded by agribusiness companies and futures traders in 2007 show that food has become a commodity for speculation and profit making. While governments in developing countries, especially net food importing countries, are finally taking some actions to protect their economies and food stocks, it is uncertain whether they will have the courage to move away from the economic orthodoxy of free market theory preached by the World Bank and the IMF, and commit to the drastic transformations of national economic, agricultural and food policies needed to build genuine, long term food security.

It is extremely important that we start to rebuild the capacities of our communities and societies to feed ourselves. La Via Campesina’s proposed paradigm of peoples’ food sovereignty offers the most appropriate and adaptable selection of strategies to do this. For Timor Leste and Cambodia, peoples’ food sovereignty can ensure that independence, national reconstruction and peace building find longer-term, sustainable and home-grown expressions.

* Shalmali Guttal is a senior associate with Focus on the Global South. She can be contacted at s.guttal@focusweb.org

NOTES

1. See UNMIT Weekly number 42:

2. ibid

3. KBH is the acronym for Knua Bua Hatene, a Timorese non-governmental organisation that provides vocational education to youth and vulnerable groups to facilitate employment and food security.

4. East Timor: a Tiny Half Island of “Surplus Humanity. Ben Moxham, February 18, 2005. 

5. ibid

6. HASATIL is the acronym for Hametin Agricultura Sustentavel Timor Lorosai which means ‘Strengthening Sustainable Agriculture in Timor Leste in Tetum, one of Timor Leste’s national languages.’

7. ‘East Timor: a Tiny Half Island of “Surplus Humanity”‘. Ben Moxham, February 18, 2005. 

8. http://www.cavr-timorleste.org

9. Making a Killing from Hunger. Against the grain, April 2008, GRAIN. 

Food Security Requires New Approach to Water

By Thalif Deen, May 24, 2008 by Inter Press Service

UNITED NATIONS, May 23 (IPS) - The ongoing food crisis, characterized by growing shortages and rising prices of staple commodities, has far reaching implications for the world’s scarce water resources, says a new study released here.

“More food is likely to come at a cost of more water use in agriculture,” according to the report titled “Saving Water: From Field to Fork“.

The emerging challenges facing the food sector include growing water scarcity; unacceptably high levels of under-nourishment; the proliferation of people who are overweight or obese; and of food that is lost or wasted in society.

“All these challenges mean that a narrow perspective on food security in terms of production and supply is no longer sufficient,” the study notes.

It’s time to take a broader perspective incorporating the steps from growing crops in the field to consuming a meal at home: “A field to fork perspective.”

Jointly authored by the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI), in collaboration with the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) and the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), the 26-page study points out that water will be a key constraint to food production — “unless we change the way we think and act about water resources.”

Anders Berntell of SIWI points out that food production and agriculture were the biggest global users of water. On average, about 70 percent of all water extracted was going into agriculture.

“As people’s incomes rise in developing nations, they are changing to more meat-intensive diets,” Berntell told IPS.

In many cases, he argued, this is good, up to a certain level, because they need proteins in their diet. But beyond that, it creates a problem.

According to Berntell, every calorie of food you take in translates into one litre of water. He pointed out that red meat from cattle is more water-intensive because it takes up to 15 cubic metres of water to produce one kilogramme of beef — if the cattle are grain-fed.

“This is a huge difference from a vegetarian diet where as low as 2.0 cubic metres of water per kilogramme are needed to produce certain vegetables,” Berntell noted.

David Molden of IWMI, and one of the co-authors of the study, said if there was no change in current practices in food production and consumption, it is likely that twice as much water as that used today would be required by 2015 to produce the world’s required food.

“Thus, the challenge was to reduce the amount of water use,” he told reporters last week.

The study says the sheer magnitude of losses, wastage and over-consumption means that the international community has the ability and option to reduce gross food demand and agricultural water supply without affecting food security.

Most losses occur after food is produced in the field. Globally, the amount of water withdrawn to produce lost and wasted food could fill a lake of 1,300 kilometres, about half the size of Lake Victoria.

In the United States, people throw away an estimated 30 percent of all food, corresponding to 40,000 billion liters of irrigation water: enough water to meet the household needs of 500 million people, according to the study.

“The amount of water that can be saved by reducing food waste is much larger than that saved by low-flush toilets and water-saving washing machines,” the report said. “It’s time for us to move beyond thinking about how we meet quantities, and to start looking at the type of foods we produce and how we benefit from them.”

Berntell told IPS that the wastage of food in most rich countries could be in the order of about 50 percent. In developing countries, however, waste is due mostly to problems of storage, transportation, rat infestation, and lack of refrigeration.

Reducing food loss and wastage lessens water needs in agriculture, the report says.

Early this year, there were reports of a U.S. meat packing company voluntarily recalling some 143.3 million pounds (about 65 million kgs) of raw and frozen beef products because plant employees had mistreated cattle on the way to the slaughter house.

But the unreported side of the story, says the report, is about the water wastage in the production of that beef.

Berntell said the world is also facing the paradox of more people suffering both from obesity and from hunger.

“There is enough food for everyone in this world. The problem is a matter of distribution and management,” he declared.

Asked if there was waste in the seemingly more prudent Scandinavian countries, he said: “In Sweden, where I come from, food wastage is as high as about 25 percent.”

Obesity is not a significant problem in Scandinavian countries yet, he added, “But we see it coming all over the world.”

It has been a big issue in the United States. “But we can also see it in other parts of the world, including Europe, and in a number of developing countries, especially in big cities with fast food chains,” Berntell said.

He said it was wrong for people with rising incomes in developing nations to virtually say: “I have raised myself from the level of poverty, and now I can afford to buy the kind of food the Western world consumes.”

 

 

Civil Society statement on the World Food Emergency: No More “Failures-as-Usual”!

Historic, systemic failures of governments and international institutions are responsible.  National governments that will meet at the FAO Food Crisis Summit in Rome must begin by accepting their responsibility for today’s food emergency.  

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At the World Food Summit in 1996, when there were an estimated 830 million hungry people, governments pledged to halve the number by 2015. Many now predict that the number will instead increase by 50% to 1.2 billion, further threatened by unpredictable climate chaos and the additional pressures of agrofuel production.  

In the midst of collapsing farm and fish stocks, skyrocketing food and fuel prices, new policies, practices and structures are required to resolve the current food emergency and to prevent future - and greater - tragedies. Governments, including those in the global South, and intergovernmental organisations must now recognize their part in implementing policies that have undermined agricultural productivity and destroyed national food security. For these reasons, they have lost legitimacy and confidence of the world’s peoples that they can make the real, substantial changes necessary to end the present food crisis; to safeguard peoples’ food availability and livelihoods; and to address the challenges of climate change. 

The emergency today has its roots in the food crisis of the 1970s when some opportunistic OECD governments, pursuing neoliberal policies, dismantled the international institutional architecture for food and agriculture. This food crisis is the result of the long standing refusal of governments and intergovernmental organisations to respect, protect and fulfil the right to food, and of the total impunity for the systematic violations of this right among others. They adopted short-term political strategies that engineered the neglect of food and agriculture and set the stage for the current food emergency.  

As a consequence, the UN agencies and programmes and other international institutions, dominated by a small group of donor countries, are badly governed, grossly inefficient, competitive rather than cooperative and incapable of fulfilling their (conflicting) mandates. The structural adjustment policies imposed by the World Bank and the IMF, the WTO Agreement on Agriculture and the free trade paradigm have undermined local and national economies, eroded the environment and damaged local food systems leading to today’s food crisis. It has facilitated the development of corporate oligopolies and break-neck corporate concentration along the entire food chain; allowed predatory commodity speculation and financial market adventurism; and enabled international finance institutions and bilateral aid programmes to devastate sustainable food production and livelihood systems.  

Social movements and other civil society organisations have joined together to determine a new approach to the dysfunctional global food system. We are developing the following global plan of action for food and agriculture and would be willing to discuss this plan with governments and intergovernmental organisations that will be attending the Rome Food Summit - the “High-Level Conference on World Food Security: the Challenges of Climate Change and Bioenergy”.  

We are prepared to work with committed governments and United Nations organisations that share our concerns and are dedicated to end the food emergency and develop food sovereignty.  

We declare a People’s State of Emergency for the ongoing food crisis. In a State of Emergency, people and governments can suspend any legislative or regulatory measures that could imperil the Right to Food and can also abolish any private arrangements considered damaging to Food Sovereignty. Any public or private measures that might restrict the ability of peasant and small-producers to get domestic food to market can be cancelled. Debt cancellation is urgently needed if the global South is to address the immediate and ongoing food emergency. We believe the current food emergency and the ongoing threat of climate change are sufficient grounds for declaring a State of Emergency. 

• We call on the Human Rights Council and the International Court of Justice to investigate the contribution of agribusiness, including grain traders and commodity speculators, to violations of the right to food and to the food emergency. High production input costs and food prices during the current food emergency are in some measure due to historic agribusiness profits and the actions of commodity market speculators. The oligopolies and speculators, who operate throughout the food chain, must be investigated and suspected criminal behaviour must be brought to justice. The UN Human Rights Council should undertake the necessary investigations. National governments should not hesitate, wherever other governments have failed in their international obligations, to challenge abuses through the International Court of Justice. At the national level, anti cartel and monopoly laws should be strengthened. The Human Rights Council should support governments to guarantee that their public policies respect, protect and promote the right to adequate food, in the context of the indivisibility of rights. 

• We demand an immediate halt to the development of land for producing industrial agrofuels for cars, planes and energy production in power stations, including the use of so-called biomass “waste”. The sudden sharp increase in large scale industrial agrofuel production threatens local and global food security, destroys livelihoods, damages the environment and is a significant factor in the steep rise in food prices. This new enclosure movement - converting arable, pastoral, and forest lands to fuel production - must be rejected. The Rome Food Summit should endorse the proposal of the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food for a five year moratorium on the expansion of large scale industrial production of agrofuel in order to resolve conflicts with food production, develop rules for agrofuel production and to evaluate proposed agrofuel technologies. 

• We call for a new and truly cooperative global initiative in which we are full participants in the process of policy change and institutional correction. We will not stand aside to watch the rich and the incompetent destroy our lives and our earth. We will fight for food sovereignty including the right to food, for sustainable food production and for a healthy biologically-diverse environment. To achieve this: 

1. We call for the establishment of a UN Commission on Food Production, Consumption and Trade. This Commission must have a significant and substantive representation of small-scale food producers and marginalized consumers. The Secretary-General’s recently convened Task Force offers a clear and welcome political signal that the food emergency transcends individual institutions and demands urgent global action. However, the Task Force is dominated by the failed institutions whose negligence and neoliberal policies created the crisis. Those whom the governmental and intergovernmental systems have damaged – those we must feed and those who must feed us — are once again, excluded. The Task Force should end its work at the conclusion of the Rome Food Summit and the new, inclusive, Commission must begin its work immediately thereafter. 

Membership: The Commission should expand upon the format established by the Brundtland Commission 20 years ago which opened the way for the environmental summits that followed. In forming the Commission, the Secretary-General should be mindful of the findings of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) whose recently completed report was approved by nearly 60 governments, as well as the outcomes of FAO agrarian reform (ICARRD) conference and process.  

Mandate: The mandate of the new Commission must include all forms of – and constraints to – food production; all aspects of – and barriers to – safe, adequate, affordable and culturally appropriate food; and a full analysis of the entire food chain in consideration of changing climatic conditions. The Commission should provide an interim report to the UN General Assembly and the governing bodies of FAO, IFAD and WFP by the end of 2008 and provide a final report, with recommendations, to these organisations in the final quarter of 2009. 

2. We must fundamentally restructure the multilateral organisations involved in food and agriculture. Several food-related multilateral institutions have been criticised for their governance and programme failures. Notably, Independent External Evaluations (IEE) of FAO and IFAD have exposed serious systemic shortcomings. In particular, the IEE of FAO shows that the senior management of FAO — while recognizing the urgent need for change — does not believe that the governments or the institution is capable of substantive changes.  The evaluation of CGIAR is ongoing and is exposing major governance failures that cannot be resolved within the CGIAR framework. Last year, the World Bank undertook an internal evaluation of its agricultural work in Africa and was deeply and appropriately self-critical. It is because of this that civil society is convinced that the Secretary-General’s Task Force must evolve into the wider Commission outlined above. In order to facilitate the Commission’s work, civil society recommends three immediate decisions: 

• The Rome Food Summit should agree to undertake a meta-evaluation of the major food and agricultural institutions (FAO, IFAD, WFP and CGIAR) by the end of 2008. 

• Based on this meta-evaluation, FAO’s biennial budget for regional conferences should be adjusted to allow the convening of regional food and agricultural conferences, equally involving all the major multilateral institutions, in the first half of 2009. These meetings must ensure the full and active participation of representatives of peasant and small-scale farmers, pastoralists and fisherfolk. 

• Building from the meta-evaluation and regional conferences, the Commission – by the end of 2009 – must submit its report including a new architecture for the UN’s food and agricultural work. Without prescribing the integrity of the process described above, we are convinced that responsibility for international policies and practices related to food and agriculture must reside with a single agency within the community of agencies of the United Nations where the principle of “one nation – one vote” must prevail.  

3. We call for a local and global paradigm-shift towards Food Sovereignty. Food production and consumption are fundamentally based upon local considerations. The answer to current and future food crises is only possible with a paradigm-shift toward comprehensive food sovereignty. Small-scale farmers, pastoralists, fisherfolk, indigenous peoples and others have defined a food system based on the human Right to adequate Food and food production policies that increase democracy in localised food systems and ensure maximisation of sustainable natural resource use. Food Sovereignty addresses all of the continuing issues identified by the 1974 World Food Conference. It focuses on food for people; values food providers; localises food systems; assures community and collective control over land, water and genetic diversity; honours and builds local knowledge and skills; and works with nature. Food sovereignty is substantially different from existing neoliberal trade and aid policies purporting to address world ‘food security’. These policies are exclusionary; insensitive to those who produce food; silent on where and how it is grown or consumed; and have - since the 1970s - been proven failures.  Governments and international institutions must respect and adopt food sovereignty. 

4. We believe that the Right to Food prevails over trade agreements and other international policies. In the current food emergency, trade negotiations related to food and agriculture must halt and work should begin on a new trade dialogue under UN auspices. The structural adjustment policies imposed by the World Bank and the IMF, the WTO Agreement on Agriculture and the free trade paradigm have undermined local and national economies, eroded the environment and damaged local food systems leading to today’s food crisis. Neoliberal trade policies have also strengthened multinational agribusinesses and encouraged windfall profiteering. Food dumping and artificially low-priced food exports have also destroyed local systems and must end. The international finance institutions and the WTO have forced the global South to close marketing boards and shutdown mechanisms for market stabilisation and price guaranties for food producers. Governments have been forced to abolish food reserves and eliminate import controls. Yet, state intervention in the market is necessary to fulfil the right to food, secure food production and the economy of small scale food producers. Therefore, FTA, EPA and WTO negotiations on the Agreement on Agriculture must be ended. These negotiations are hurting the vast majority of food producers. A new approach to international food and agricultural trade is urgently needed. This approach must be based on the right of countries to decide their level of self sufficiency and support for sustainable food production for domestic consumption. Discussions leading to a new trade regime based on the diverse needs of people and societies and the preservation of the environment should take place within the UN system. 

5. We insist that the right of governments to intervene and regulate in order to achieve food sovereignty, be reinstated. National governments have to take up their responsibility, control and push back elites and make food production for domestic consumption their priority. Countries have to raise their level of self sufficiency in food as far as possible and to achieve this the following measures must be taken: 

• respect, protect and fulfil the right to adequate food, among other rights. 

• Increase the budget support of peasant based food production; 

• Implement genuine agrarian reform to give landless and other vulnerable groups access to land and other productive resources; 

• Guarantee credit access to peasants and other small-scale food producers; 

• Abolish all barriers preventing peasants and small-scale farmers from saving and 

exchanging seeds between communities, countries and continents; 

• Strengthen peasant led research and support autonomous capacity building; 

• Improve infrastructure so that peasants and small-scale producers can reach local markets; 

• Develop strategies with peasant and other appropriate organisations to manage specific hazards and emergencies. 

• Guarantee marginalised consumers access to domestic food and - if not available - to food brought in from adjacent surplus regions.  

6. We reject the Green Revolution models. Technocratic techno-fixes are no answer to sustainable food production and rural development. Industrialised agriculture and fisheries are not sustainable. The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) clearly shows the need for a major change in the current research and development model. This report shows that governments (South and North) have wilfully and tragically neglected agriculture and rural development, especially small scale farming and artisanal fisheries since the last global food crisis. This attitude appears to be changing as the current emergency unfolds. However, the new interest in agriculture remains fundamentally flawed as private US foundations partner with global agribusiness to press national governments and international research systems to pursue a so-called “green revolution” in Africa and elsewhere based upon technological quick-fixes and failed market policies rather than social policy decisions. Governments, research institutions and other donors must learn from this study; change direction; and support small scale sustainable crop and livestock production and fisheries based on the expressed needs of local communities. The farmer/fisher-led programmes will lead to local and national self-reliance.  Specifically, governments attending the Third High-Level Forum on Aid-Effectiveness in Ghana in September should reject the philanthro-capitalist directed models for a new green revolution and should reaffirm the central role of people and governments in setting the policy and practical framework for development. 

7. We support an inclusive strategy for the conservation and sustainable use of agricultural biodiversity that prioritises the participation of small-scale farmers, pastoralists and fisherfolk. Biological diversity in agriculture is a prerequisite for securing food supplies. The huge loss in diversity, the use of GMOs and the patenting of seeds and genes make food production vulnerable. To support small-scale farmers that develop resilient, biodiverse production systems, we must work together to safeguard agroecosystems, species and genetic diversity that can adapt on-farm to new threats such as climate change.  The Rome Food Summit should challenge governments, FAO, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity and the Global Crop Diversity Trust to provide massive and immediate financial support for in situ and on-farm conservation through farmer-led crop and livestock conservation and improvement. 

8. We will participate in the development of a comprehensive local/global strategy to respond to climate change. Climate change is already causing major losses in food production and is devastating the lives of millions of people including those of migrants. The future is uncertain but most studies assume that climate change will be more damaging to people and food systems in tropical and subtropical countries than those in temperate zones. There is an urgent need to cut greenhouse gas emission by at least 80 per cent by 2030. This is primarily the responsibility of the industrialised countries. The global South must also adopt different policies and practices for energy production. In agriculture, the high input fossil fuel- driven industrial model for production and transport is a major cause of CO2 emissions. The development of peasant led sustainable food production, based on the sustainable use of local resources is a key solution to reduce these emissions. In addition, however, the polluting industrial countries must accept responsibility for the destruction of our environment and food systems and must pay reparations at levels, not less than 1 per cent of their annual GDP, that will help to alleviate damage and further development of sustainable and adaptable food and energy systems. 

Social movements and other civil society organisations who are prepared actively to pursue the agenda we have described, at local, national and global levels, are invited to sign up to this statement. 

For more information and to sign up, see www.nyeleni.eu/foodemergency

This statement was prepared by members of the IPC, the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty. The IPC is a facilitating network in which key international social movements and organisations collaborate around the issue of food sovereignty: these include ROPPA, WFFP, WFF, La Via Campesina, and many movements and NGOs in all regions (see: www.foodsovereignty.org/new/focalpoints.php). The IPC is coordinating a Parallel Forum to the FAO Food Summit in Rome.  

Further Details:

In Bonn: 

Miriam Boyer +49 178 249 5042 (français, español) 

Susanne Gura +49 176 850 34205 (Deutsch) 

Patrick Mulvany +49 176 850 37047 (English)  

International Press Contacts: 

International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (IPC) - Beatrice Gasco,  

phone +39 349 846 6103, e-mail: lo@foodsovereingty.org, www.foodsovereignty.org/new/  (English, Français, Español, Italiano) The International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (IPC) includes organisations that represent small farmers, fisherfolk, Indigenous Peoples, pastoralists, women, youth, agricultural workers’ trade unions and NGOs. 

La Via Campesina, Isabelle Delforge, phone: +32 498 522 163, e-mail: idelforge@viacampesina.org, www.viacampesina.org (English, Français, Español) La Via Campesina is the international movement of peasants, small and medium sized producers, landless, rural women, indigenous people, rural youth and agricultural workers active in more than 56 countries in Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas. 

ROPPA, Ousseini Ouédrago, phone: +226 7661 4226, e-mail ouedraogo@roppa-ao.org, www.roppa.info  (Français) Le Réseau des organisations paysannes et de producteurs de l’Afrique de l’Ouest (ROPPA) 

IMF “Cure” for Food Crisis Also a Cause

By Emad Mekay, May 21, 2008 Inter Press Service

WASHINGTON - The International Monetary Fund (IMF) says it is responding to the global food crisis by doling out new emergency loans to 15 of the world’s poorest nations, mostly in Africa.

But the new loans carry the same controversial conditions, such as tariff and subsidies cuts, that many analysts now agree are partly to blame for the soaring inflation and inability of developing country governments to cope.

Mark Plant, deputy director of the IMF’s Policy Development and Review Department, told an IMF publication last week that the so-called Exogenous Shocks Facility (ESF), which the fund uses to disburse fast loans in emergency situations, would be open for business to the world’s poorest nations by June.

Already 15 countries are talking to the Washington-based IMF about tapping loans from the programme, which is designed to offset expenses and budget imbalances incurred from shuffling expenditures to ease food prices in poor nations.

“The IMF is preparing a review of the Exogenous Shocks Facility for Board consideration in June,” Plant told the IMF Survey.

“But I would underscore that the ESF is available now, if any country needs immediate help,” he added.

The IMF official said that in addition to the emergency programme, developing countries suffering high food prices could also receive advance loans from the more traditional Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF), the loan framework under which poor countries typically have to agree to revamp their economies in return for IMF cash.

Countries resorting to the Fund’s emergency loans for the first time will have to accede to the terms of the controversial PRGF, if they do not have one in place already.

But analysts say that both loan programmes could in fact make a bad situation worse. The conditions that these two programmes share include trade liberalisation, cutting social spending, trimming subsidies to local producers and limiting bailouts to troubled national sectors.

Under those conditions, international financial institutions such as the IMF and its sister institution the World Bank helped force developing countries to dismantle much of their agricultural tariff systems, allowing in huge quantities of cheaper farm goods from Europe and the United States.

Critics say this effectively sabotaged national food security systems and has left poor countries ever more reliant on food imports and defenseless in the face of the latest price increases. Today, according to figures from the Global Policy Forum, nearly three in four developing countries are net importers of food.

“The IMF adjustment programmes forced poor countries to abandon policies that protected their farmers and their agricultural production and markets,” said Henk Hobbelink of the international non-governmental organisation GRAIN, which promotes sustainable agriculture and biodiversity.

“As a result, many countries became dependent on food imports, as local farmers could not compete with the subsidised products from the North. This is one of the main factors in the current food crisis, for which the IMF is directly to blame,” he added.

According to data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation, these food import surges have had an especially harsh impact on rural poor and local economies in Africa.

For example, in Cameroon, lowering tariff protection to 25 percent saw poultry imports increase by about six-fold. In Senegal, 70 percent of the poultry industry has been wiped out in recent years because of an influx of European poultry.

And when Ghana cut its rice tariffs from 100 to 20 percent under structural adjustment policies ordered by the World Bank, rice imports to the country increased from 250,000 tonnes in 1998 to 415,150 tonnes in 2003. Domestic rice, which had accounted for 43 percent of the domestic market in 2000, captured only 29 percent of the domestic market three years later.

Rising food prices are having their biggest impact on poor people in low-income developing countries. Rice prices have reached record levels, while wheat prices have nearly tripled and corn doubled since 2000.

Some 33 countries, most in Sub-Saharan Africa, which already carries the world’s heaviest debt burden, have been particularly affected. New loans from the ESF could further plunge these nations into the red.

GRAIN also notes that IMF policy advice to eliminate tariffs on some food items, as Plant has advocated, would simply continue to discourage local production and put poor countries even more at the mercy of international commodity markets over which they have no control.

It is unclear whether pushing more funds in the form of new loans in the market will ease prices, although such a move would likely fatten profits for international food companies, traders and speculators.

GRAIN says that Cargill, the world’s biggest grain trader, achieved an 86-percent increase in profits from commodity trading in the first quarter of 2008. Another company, Bunge, had a 77-percent increase in profits during the last quarter of 2007, while ADM, the second largest grain trader in the world, had a 67-percent increase in profits in 2007.

As part of its package to deal with the crisis, the IMF is also arguing that poor nations redirect new subsidies only to the poor while removing subsidies to petroleum products, an argument that overlooks the major impact of fuel on food prices.

The IMF insists that it is offering varied advice to suit different countries and avoid destabilising their economies.

“Individual country circumstances will require different approaches calibrated against the nature of each country’s shock,” said Bill Murray of the IMF’s media office in an email message.

But food security activists say that poor nations should reject the advice they are getting from institutions such as the IMF and World Bank and work instead towards “food sovereignty”.

The answer to the current crisis, argues Anuradha Mittal of the U.S.-based Oakland Institute, is for developing countries to “break with decades of ill-advised policies that have failed to benefit their people”.

 

The World Food Crisis – A Human Rights Disaster

FIAN International press release

Geneva/Heidelberg, 22.05.08: Today, the UN Human Rights Council stresses the key role of the Human Right to Food to address the immediate and root causes of the current world food crisis. FIAN, the International Human Rights Organisation for the Right to Food, welcomes this clear message to the international community. “The World Food Crisis is a Human Rights Disaster”, stated FIAN International General Secretary Flavio Valente today in Geneva.

The Human Rights Council has adopted the urgent call of the new U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food to hold today in Geneva a Special Session on the negative impact of the world food crisis on the realization of the Right to Food. The Right to Food perspective is crucial to revise thoroughly all international and national policies which have, in fact, generated hunger.

In a Joint Written Statement to the Human Rights Council, FIAN, CETIM, Action Aid, Habitat International Coalition, the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues (FIDH) and Vía Campesina point out: “Differently from the diagnosis that the UN presented at the creation of its Task Force on the Global Food Crisis, we recognize the present crisis as deeply rooted in decades of misguided international policies - decided and implemented under the auspices of the Bretton Woods Institutions and, more recently, the WTO - that have failed to create and maintain an enabling environment for states to respect, protect and fulfil the human right to adequate food.”

“The world does not need more of the same medicine”, the FIAN General Secretary said. “It is remarkable that the the UN Task Force Response to the World Food Crisis under the clear influence of the Bretton Woods Institutions and the WTO does not mention with a single word the Human Right to Food, but it calls for a green revolution in Africa and accelerated trade deregulation processes .”

FIAN welcomes the statement delivered by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights to the Council. The Committee “urges State parties to address the structural causes at the national and international levels, including by: revising the global trade regime under the WTO to ensure that global agricultural trade rules promote, rather than undermine the right to adequate food and freedom from hunger, especially in developing and net food-importing countries”.

Further Information

Flavio Valente +49- 172-1394447

Sandra Ratjen +49- 174- 1925 771

Links to sources:

Joint Written NGO Statement to the Human Rights Council

Statement of the UN Special Rapporteur to the Human Rights Council

Statement of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights to the Human Rights Council

FIAN is an international human rights organization that since more than 20 years advocates for the realization of the right to food. FIAN consists of national sections and individual members in over 50 countries around the world.

Vandana Shiva: Why We Face Both Food and Water Crises

By Maria Armoudian and Ankine Aghassian, AlterNet, May 15, 2008

Policy-makers are finally grappling with the growing global food and water crises that are upon us. While they grope for answers, Vandana Shiva reminds them that it was their wild economic schemes that created these crises in the first place.

The globalized economic structure is simply incompatible with the basic physics of the planet and the principles of democratic governance, she says. And until we align the economic system with those of the ecological system, the problems will only get worse. While many of Shiva’s books address some aspect of this fundamental problem, one title captures it most succinctly, Earth Democracy, Justice, Sustainability and Peace.

Shiva is a physicist, author, director of the Research Foundation on Science, Technology and Ecology and the founder of Navdanya.

AlterNet: Much of your writing and speaking has focused on our economic structure’s incompatibility with the ecological functioning of the earth. Talk about that incompatibility.

Vandana Shiva: One aspect of the inconsistency is between the principles of Gaia, the principles of soil, the ecology, renewability, how the atmosphere cleans itself and the laws of the global marketplace. The global marketplace is driven by the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the illogic of so-called “free trade,” which is totally not free. [The result of this incompatibility] is the current food crisis: The more agriculture is “liberalized,” the greater the food scarcity, the higher the food prices and the more people will go hungry.

Never has there been this rate of escalation in food prices worldwide as we witness now with the global integration of the food economies under the coercive and bullying force of the WTO.

AlterNet: You have said, in the past, that these activities are done in the name of improving human welfare. But instead, poverty and dispossession have increased. Where do we see this the most?

VS: We see the worst dispossession in the countries of the South — tragically — those countries that could feed themselves. India, for example, was food self-sufficient. We were able to feed our people with a universal distribution system, affordable food for all, and agriculture policies that put food first. Small farmers could make a living.

But a decade and a half of globalization’s perverse rules have led to 200,000 farmers committing suicide because they can’t make a living anymore — all their money goes to make profit for Monsanto or Cargill. Meanwhile, with the economy’s so-called growth, people are starving. Per capita entitlement to food has dropped in a decade and half from 177 kg to 152 kg per year.

This contradicts the false propaganda being spread about the reason prices are rising. They say it is because Indians are getting richer and Indians are eating more. Well, some Indians are getting richer, but they’re not eating more. There’s a limit to how much you can eat. And the handful of billionaires buys a few more private jet planes and builds a few more private mansions. [But in reality], the average Indian is eating less. The average child has a bigger chance today of dying of hunger. The Cargill’s of the world have a stranglehold of the world’s economy; they’re harvesting super-profits while people die of hunger.

AlterNet: You talk about India being worse off, but many economists — including those on the political left — say that places like China and India are, overall, actually improving. But you say that is not true.

VS: It’s not true. India, under the perverse growth of globalization, has beaten out Africa in the number of hungry people. While we have 9.2 percent growth measured by GNP and GDP, 50 percent of our children have very severe malnutrition. Fifty percent of deaths for children under five are due to lack of food. That’s about a million kids per year.

AlterNet: That is a considerable change that I don’t think the world is seeing.

VS: That’s because the media orchestrates every analysis and interpretation. They would like this crisis to look like a success of globalization, and they would like to offer more globalization as a solution. In fact, the World Bank has said there should be more liberalized trade. Before the WTO was formed, we had protests with 500,000 farmers on the streets of Bangalore in 1993 to say that this is a recipe for starvation, for destroying agriculture, self-reliance and food security. And the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs — before the WTO was born — had a press conference to say that globalization will make food affordable for all.

They forget that food ultimately is not produced in the speculation and commodity exchanges controlled by Cargill in Chicago. It is produced by hard working women and men working with the soil and sun. And