Bigwigs miss the big picture
Making it worthwhile for farmers didn’t seem to enter the picture much — beyond talk of supporting farmers in underdeveloped, hungry countries.
Making it pay for farmers is the number one requirement — if UN secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon’s target to lift food production 50% by 2030 is to be met.
All the talk on trade barriers was of getting rid of them, even though most of the world’s farmers depend on trade barriers to keep them in business. Many promises were made to help small farmers in poor countries, but they would not have much hope of surviving free trade — small farmers like those in Africa, where farming productivity is particularly low, but which will be the location for ‘a green revolution’, the Food Crisis Summit participants proudly announced. What changes these geniuses will bring to a continent hit by centuries of famine wasn’t specified. They were too busy looking forward to a world trade deal that most farmers — other than multinational farming corporations — dread.
Europe’s Commissioner Marian Fischer-Boel said a trade deal “would allow export revenues to be increased, stimulate agricultural production and allow access to foodstuffs.”
She said the European Union would work towards an early conclusion of the deal, for significant new market opportunities for developing countries to generate export income and stimulate their agricultural production.
But most of these countries cannot feed themselves, and at a summit to end hunger, it is hard to understand world leaders’ obsession with a trade deal that involves only 10% of global agricultural produce.
Thankfully, many at the summit expressed their belief that more open trade can harm food production. According to a global international network of 237 non-government and farmer organisations, trade unions and social movements from more than 50 countries, “The answer does not lie in deeper deregulation of food production and trade.”
These groups think the Doha Round will only “intensify the crisis by making food prices more volatile, increasing developing countries’ dependence on imports, and strengthening the power of multinational agribusiness in food and agricultural markets”.
Thankfully, also, last week’s lukewarm messages, from the OECD meeting of another bunch of presidents in Rome, held out little hope of a world trade deal. And Hillary Clinton’s decision to withdraw from the US presidential race also left a lot of the scripts delivered in Rome beyond their sell-by date, because world trade talks are unlikely to get a look in now that the campaign for the White House has settled down to a two-horse race.
The food summit participants included Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe, who single handedly wrecked that country’s once prosperous agriculture, and Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who blamed the “devilish motivations” of western countries for the food crisis. More reliable delegates stressed the need to strengthen agricultural research and knowledge, develop new crop varieties, improve cropping systems, and use water more efficiently.
Whereas Marian Fischer-Boel pointed out that high commodity prices encourage countries, especially in Africa, to produce more of their own food, one of the final summit declarations was to seek to “moderate unusual fluctuations” in food grain prices. This means that, along with speculators who many blame for much of the doubling of food commodity prices in a couple of years, world leaders may also start to interfere. How they expect farmers to stay in business, if prices go down, even while input costs remain at their highest ever, was not explained.
