Economic analysis – “A Hunger Summit” to Secure Food

The “Hunger Summit” will be held in Rome today to address the issue of how to secure food for the entire population. In fact, the draft plan prepared by FAO urges the world to invest 44 billion dollars annually in agriculture, which would secure the world’s food needs until up to the mid-first century of the third millennium.

Food experts are thus examining ways to secure food, while reducing the number of the poor and the hungry. In fact, the rising prices of food products between 2007 and 2008 did not help in improving agricultural production, nor did they boost investments in the food industry. On the contrary, those afflicted by chronic hunger have increased by about 115 million and have now exceeded one billion. Given that agricultural growth in a quarter of a century between 1980 and 2004 was higher than the growth rate of the earth’s population (2 percent compared to 1.6 percent annual average), the food situation did not improve much. This is because of the existing imbalance between the needs and the available resources; for instance, the proportion of hungry individuals rose from 36 to 56 percent of the population of Central Africa between 1990 and 2000.

For this reason, the world is currently facing two dilemmas, namely that of the need to develop production, in addition to that of verifying that this will produce enough food to cover the world’s requirements.

Meanwhile, FAO has noted down the success of many agricultural projects in poor countries, and which succeeded in the multiple cropping of the land in lieu of one crop, doubling the resources for the farmers. Nonetheless, this intensive farming did not compensate for the losses of arable lands in the world, which amount to 10 million hectares every year as a result of urbanization and urban sprawl at the expense of farmland and forests. This is not to mention the shortage of water resources, and the transformation of arable lands into wastelands because of climate change and desertification, which can only be offset by investing in the neglected arable lands that cover large areas throughout Africa, Asia, South America, Russia and the surrounding countries.

In contrast to agricultural growth in general, grain crops remain the basic food for the poor; nonetheless, the growth of its farming has only grown by 6.3 percent between 1997 and 2005, compared with 10.5 percent population growth. This is while noting that the level of grain production has reached a peak in developed nations, while slowly rising in developed nations.

However, the problem lies not in the need to increase grain cultivation or other basic food crops, but in how to deliver them to the poor and the chronically hungry, especially following the rise in food prices, and thus the spending on food by families which has increased in low-income countries from 45 to 80 percent of its already low income, compared to only 12 percent in rich countries. This caused two thirds of the 2.5 billion chronically hungry people to be comprised of farmer families in developed countries, in addition to the majority of poor individuals who live on less than a dollar a day.

Meanwhile, malnutrition is further exacerbated when the poor are not able to afford higher quality foodstuffs, and thus consume less quality foods in fewer quantities. Furthermore, the low-income countries that import foodstuff are subject to the lack of food security because of the high incidence of chronic hunger and poverty within their territories. The bill for their food imports has in fact been estimated to be around 170 billion dollars in 2008, up 40 percent in one year. The greatest impact of this rise was seen in Africa, where many countries rely heavily on imported grain.

The “Hunger Summit” also faces structural dilemmas of how to organize agricultural investments. This is translated in the developing countries – following the developed nations – into a bid to expand the cultivation of crops which are designed for exports, and in cultivating oilseeds for the production of biofuels for cars. This is in addition to the agricultural projects that occupy large stretches of land and which are bought, or leased, by multinational companies in developed nations. Such projects require heavy investment and genetically altered seeds, and would thus compete with the small local farmers and eliminate the agricultural output of poor people, which in turn leads to massive unemployment and the demolition of their feeble environment as a result of climate change.

Meanwhile, and at a time when everyone is in agreement over the need to fight commercial protectionism, the United States and Europe are seeking to subsidize certain goods whose majority is agricultural in nature or is made up of foodstuffs; this effectively transforms their exports to developing or low-income countries into dumped goods, which compete with these countries’ crops in their own domestic markets, pushing the local farmers to leave farming. This practically pushes these countries into becoming nutritionally and economically dependent on the countries of the North.

As such, experts believe that the talk about free trade in the North and the international institutions is for external purposes only, and should thus be countered by trade regimes which would secure the needs of food sovereignty in developing countries, and which would translate into the protection of the domestic market in order to secure a sustainable agricultural, economic, social and environmental development.

Thus, the reconsideration of agricultural policies and the creation of multilateral trade relations based on achieving sovereignty will allow 9.3 billion people to be fed by 2050, despite the warming climate.

Otherwise, the world will not be able to supply its own needs of food.