Book Review

In Part 3 of Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security: The Impact of Globalization we are told that: “When asked to support the global goal of food security, we can bask in the false belief that all humanity shares similar values and goals. We can pretend that the drift of the world’s food economy is fundamentally good, when in reality it may be for some people but not for others. The goal of food security is in danger of being rendered meaningless by the economic forces of globalisation and by the belief that all human needs are best met by market mechanisms.” “The UN’s latest Food Development Report has produced evidence that the world’s richest 358 billionaires have a wealth equivalent to the combined income of 45% of humanity or 2.3 billion people. In 1960, the richest one-fifth had 70% of global wealth. By 1990, their share had grown to 80%. The poorest one-fifth saw their wealth drop from 2.5% to 1.4% over the same period. This is the driving force for world hunger – the systematic maintenance of poverty, accentuated by the continued displacement of people from land.” “The world needs a shift away from cheap, export-led food policies to more local production for local use everywhere. This requires more people on the land, not throwing people off to make the economic audit of farming look more efficient.” “The goal should be to build a better quality of life in the country to reduce inequalities, and to make public and environmental health part of economics, not a bolt-on extra.” “The FAO, in its documents for the World Food Summit is clear. Self-reliance, in the sense of growing one’s own food, is out. Trade is in. ‘Self-reliance’ means not growing food, but buying it.” “This is the challenge. There has to be a shift in bargaining power between small and large farmers. We have to have a debate about food security which is based on an understanding of the drivers of the modern food economy, not some fantasy wishlist.”

SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE AND FOOD SECURITY:

THE IMPACT OF GLOBALISATION

EDITED BY VANDANA SHIVA & GITANJALI BEDI 

SAGE PUBLICATIONS                 2002

PART III

PART IV: GLOBALISATION OF FOOD INSECURITY

Chapter 11: Food Security: Does it Conflict With Globalisation by Tim Land

Overview

Food security means different things to different people. The food economy, however, is currently in an era of trade liberalization and pursuit of global markets. It is assumed that free trade will increase food security, but this assumption should be questioned. The opportunity is once again ripe for a worldwide debate on the shape of future food policy. However, this is unlikely if the near consensus on the benefits of free trade in food goes unchallenged.

Introduction

No goal is more often repeated in food policy circles, and more guaranteed to bring out a long list of hopes, than the goal of food security. Food security is like a Rorschach Test, the psychologist’s technique where patients are asked to say what they see in an ink blot pattern. Everyone ‘sees’ different shapes and meanings in the same pattern.

Yes, hard questions need to be asked. It may be true that food security means different things to different people. But even though it has this capacity to highlight differences in perspective, food security also has the capacity to bring out a warm glow of unity. Who could be against everyone having the right to food? And whose hearts are not saddened by the enormity of unfulfilled need?

When asked to support the global goal of food security, we can bask in the false belief that all humanity shares similar values and goals. We can pretend that the drift of the world’s food economy is fundamentally good, when in reality it may be for some people but not for others. The goal of food security is in danger of being rendered meaningless by the economic forces of globalisation and by the belief that all human needs are best met by market mechanisms.

 

Official definitions of food security

The extent of unmet need

As is well known, the extent of unmet need in the world is considerable. Food production has kept up with population growth, but has not been equitably distributed within households, within countries or between countries. Even within rich economies such as the US or the United Kingdom, the extent of food poverty is now well documented. All the classical criteria of food security – access, affordability, availability, and so on – are routinely failed by the poor of the richest nations which human history has ever witnessed.

The United Nation’s Children’s Education Fund estimates that one in five persons in the developing world suffers from chronic hunger – that makes 800 million in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

• In spite of huge advances in food production as well as improvement in knowledge about storage and distribution systems, supply is apparently not getting through to where it is needed.
• There is enough food to feed the world at present. The 5.8 billion in the world had, on an average, 15% more food per person than the 4 billion in the world had two decades ago.
• Does the goal of food security have any meaning as long as the world’s food economy is apparently being driven in a different direction? What is the point of having the goal of food security if it lacks targets? If measurable targets were set, politicians from both North and South could be held to account.
• Popular movements and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) concerned about food are gearing up for action. They are determined to argue their case, prepared to cite experience gleaned from decades of working with small farmers and peasants, and running campaigns trying to shame the world about continued food poverty.
• Anger about global trade undermining local production is rising. In Kenya, grain imports, subsidized by the European Union have risen, undermining local production and creating poverty by oversupply.
• In 1992, EU wheat was sold in Kenya at rates 39% cheaper than the rate it was purchased by the EU from European farmers. In 1993, it was 50% cheaper. In 1995, Kenyan wheat prices collapsed through oversupply. All this in a country that was self-sufficient in the 1980s.
• Oxfam, in documenting such cases in the Philippines and Mexico, has produced a devastating indictment of reliance on external trade. It may work for the affluent and the traders, but not for the marginal, the poor and the peasants.
• No wonder anger is beginning to bubble up at the world’s peripheries. Via Campesina, a world coalition of peasant organizations put its case starkly:

 

The prevailing neo-liberal economic system has been the main cause for the increasing impoverishment of farmers and rural peoples in general. It is responsible for the increasing degradation of nature, land, water, plants, animals and natural resources, having put all these vital resources under centralized systems of production, procurement and distribution of agricultural products within the frame of a global market-oriented system.

Time for radical thoughts at Rome

• There was a gap of 22 years between World Food Summit 1996 and the previous world food gathering although there was a UN-sponsored International Conference on Nutrition in 1993 which focused on food and health issues.
• The 1974 meeting had two factors crucial to making any summit a success: passion and imagination.
• Food security is such an awesome challenge for the 21^st century that humanity simply has to consider radical solutions like a reduction of meat use or a dramatic transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor.
• There is little point in us anguishing today about the adequacy of supply unless we give attention equally to distribution – of wealth, of access, of land, of seeds, and ultimately, of control.
• In 1996, too few politicians were interested in world food, and too many NGOs were trying to be too reasonable, as though food poverty was a matter of reason alone.
• What is missing is some anger, some calling of the world’s leaders to account.
• The popular credo goes as follows. Post-war Keynesian economics has run its course. Communism has collapsed. Let the market decide.

• The UN’s latest Food Development Report has produced evidence that the world’s richest 358 billionaires have a wealth equivalent to the combined income of 45% of humanity or 2.3 billion people.
• In 1960, the richest one-fifth had 70% of global wealth. By 1990, their share had grown to 80%. The poorest one-fifth saw their wealth drop from 2.5% to 1.4% over the same period.
• This is the driving force for world hunger – the systematic maintenance of poverty, accentuated by the continued displacement of people from land.
• In 1990, approximately 3 billion of the world’s 5.5 billion people lived in rural areas. On current trends, new urban dwellers will be cheap urban labour, if they are lucky.
• Agricultural policy experts are rehearsing the argument that restraints on the US and EU over-production should be reversed; the North should feed the South, benefiting the North’s intensive farmers.

 

A new agenda for food policy

• The world needs a shift away from cheap, export-led food policies to more local production for local use everywhere. This requires more people on the land, not throwing people off to make the economic audit of farming look more efficient.
• The goal should be to build a better quality of life in the country to reduce inequalities, and to make public and environmental health part of economics, not a bolt-on extra.
• ‘Food miles’ is a useful indicator of energy use. The more local food is, the more farmers have to plant and grow a variety of crops.
• Writers like Susan George produced brilliant analyses of the power of agribusiness and international finance, to explain why some people lived well while others suffered hunger.
• Today, in the heartlands of policy making, there is a near consensus that the market offers a panacea for all ills. Almost everyone bows before the great god of free trade, arguing that increased trade is the way forward for humanity.
• There are signs that a debate is brewing. Voices are being heard which question the trade liberalization orthodoxy. All over the world, pockets of criticism are being expressed against the globalisation process.
• The battle of positions ever food security is a microcosm of the struggle to set food policy on a direction for the 21^st century. For the last 20 years, the world’s economies have been dominated by a political economic belief that trade is the key to generating wealth and that wealth is the key to human happiness. Viewed from the bank manager’s chair, the figures on world trade are rosy.
• The FAO, in its documents for the World Food Summit is clear. Self-reliance, in the sense of growing one’s own food, is out. Trade is in. ‘Self-reliance’ means not growing food, but buying it.

 

Back to basics: What is the real food security problem?

• There will be no breakthrough in meeting any definition of food security as long as the conflict between production and consumption and between different models of agriculture is fudged.
• Since 1974, far from there being any redistribution of land and wealth, there has been no fundamental shift in bargaining power towards those whose food needs are most pressing.

This is the challenge. There has to be a shift in bargaining power between small and large farmers. We have to have a debate about food security which is based on an understanding of the drivers of the modern food economy, not some fantasy wishlist. In most countries, and most markedly in the developed ones, neither farmers nor consumers, but retailers and traders are sovereign. Emerging monopolies and oligopolies over food supply need to be tackled. There should be few high expectations from the new biotechnology revolution. The conclusion one has to draw from any review of food security is that the key issue is politics and vision. Above all, debate and some passion are sorely needed. Food is too important to be left to the market forces.