Dear Friends,
I have been hesitating to comment on this theme. It interests me very much but I also know just how little I understand about international trade in agricultural products. I will, however, make a few short observations based more on intuition than on any in-depth knowledge of the subject.
1. The rules that have painfully emerged from long-drawn out GATT and then WTO negotiations are generally benign (especially from the perspective of improving efficiency), but the manoeuvring in which nations and regional groups quickly engage following agreements prevents the achievement of their intended purposes. Thus, for example, the farm subsidy bill of the OECD countries has continued to rise (to US$415 billion in 2012): adjustments have been introduced in the purposes for which payments are made so as to conform with WTO requirements, but with the same ultimate effect of lowering food prices for consumers and producers within the rich countries – and with knock on effects on international markets. Witness also the abusive use of non-tariff barriers for protection of national agricultural products and the selective application of food import/export sanctions in the context of international political disputes (e.g. EU-Russia).
2. Most governments implicitly favour policies that keep food prices low for consumers, claiming that this enables the poor and hungry to have easier access to food. A blind eye tends to be turned to the conditions of work endured by people working in the food chain and to the low incentives such policies offer for new investment in farming. The result of these policies may be to increase rural deprivation and hunger. Interestingly, when prices rose in 2007-08 and 2011, the medium-long term effect was to reduce poverty (both rural and urban) in developing countries (see Headey, D., Food Prices and Poverty in the Long Run, IFPRI, 2014).
3. “Conventional” food policies tend to reinforce the asymmetries which already exist in commercial food marketing systems (both national and international). They effectively subsidise all consumers (encouraging over-consumption and waste), rather than benefit poor families who need better access to food – an issue best addressed through social security programmes, freeing up subsidy funds to provide farmers with incentives to adopt sustainable production systems..
4. It is most unlikely that the handful of international corporations that dominates the international trade of each of the major food commodities is in any way committed to improving human nutrition or food security. The fact that several of these same corporations also dominate the international trade in farm inputs implies that their interests are in extending input-intensive agriculture at a time when the shift to genuinely sustainable production systems based on harnessing agro-ecology-driven processes is urgently needed on environmental and climate change grounds.
5. While it would be wrong to blame the current trading rules and systems for the fact that more than half the world’s population are malnourished (800 million chronically hungry; 1.5 billion overweight or obese and rising fast; probably 2 billion with micronutrient deficiency), they certainly don’t help matters. From a global perspective, it would seem to be extraordinarily rash to perpetuate a system in which the food and farm input trade which plays such a fundamental role in the health and survival of the world’s population as well as the health of natural resources is in the hands of what amounts to a privately run cartel, whose members are largely above the law and not accountable to any national or international authorities.
6. The lack of apparent concern about an issue of such massive significance for the human race is perplexing. To the extent that there is concern, it is exemplified by the fair trade movement and some certification schemes through which consumers who are conscious of the inequities and environmental risks inherent in the current system seek to bypass it, but these still account for only a small proportion of traded food products.
7. We have been fortunate, since the end of World War 2 to have been able to meet the food needs of a rapidly growing population, thanks, in part, to the globalisation of the food market and the uptake of input-intensive farming. But the need now is to translate ample food availability into healthy eating by all people and to shift food production and consumption onto a truly sustainable basis. This can only be achieved by the emergence of strong institutions that are able to exert themselves in the global public interest.
8. Worryingly, there is little appetite for moves in this direction. We easily forget that, partly because of the absence of such a capacity, 258,000 fellow humans died in Somalia just 4 years ago for lack of food, in a world with more than enough food for all to eat well – and waste much of what has been produced. We must not wait for a truly catastrophic global food shortage to force us to face up to the need for global institutions empowered to shape the ways in which our food systems are managed in the global rather than private interest.
Best wishes,
Andrew
Andrew MacMillan