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Global Food Crisis: When Did It All Begin?

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 increase by 50 percent to 1.2 billion, further threatened by unpredictable climate chaos and the additional pressures of agro-fuel production. In the midst of collapsing farm and fish stocks, skyrocketing food and fuel prices, new policies, practices and structures are required to solve the current food emergency and to prevent future – and greater – tragedies. Governments, including those in the global south, and intergovernmental organisations must now recognise 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 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) governments, pursing neoliberal policies, dismantled the institutional architecture for food and agriculture. The food crisis is as a result of the long standing refusal of governments and intergovernmental organisations to respect protect and fulfil the right to food, and to the total impunity for the systematic violations of the right among others. They adopted short-term political strategies that engineered the neglect of food and agriculture and set 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 (SAPs) imposed by the World Bank and 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.

What are the implications of the Current food crisis?

• During a crisis, people and governments can suspend any legislative or regulatory measures that imperil the right to food and can also abolish any private engagements 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 the market can be cancelled. Debt cancellation is urgently needed if the global south is to address the immediate and ongoing food emergency.
• High production inputs 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. 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
• The sudden sharp increase in large scale industrial agro-fuel 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 need for a new and truly cooperative initiative in which we are all full participants in the process of policy change and institutional correction. We should all strive towards food sovereignty including the right to afford, for sustainable food production and for a health biologically diverse environment.
• The need for a local and global paradigm shift towards Food Sovereignty.  Food production and consumption are fundamentally based upon local considerations. The answer to the current and future food crises is only possible with a paradigm shift toward comprehensive food sovereignty. Small scale farmers, pastoralists, fisher folk, indigenous people and other 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 security addresses all 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 skill; 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 consumed; and have – since the 1970s – been proven failures. Governments and international institutions must respect and adopt food sovereignty.
• 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 the UN auspices. The SAPs 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.
• An inclusive strategy for the conservation and sustainable use of agricultural biodiversity that prioritises the participation of small-scale farmers, pastoralists and fisher folk. Biodiversity 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 makes food production vulnerable. To support  small scale farmers that develop resilient biodiversity production systems, we must work together to safeguard agro-ecosystems, species and genetic diversity that can adopt on farm to new threats such as climate change
• The right of governments to intervene and regulate in order to achieve food sovereignty. 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.

Recommendations

• 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 reforms;
• Guarantee credit access to peasants and other small scale food producers;
• Abolish all barriers preventing peasant 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 peasant farmers and other appropriate organisations to mange specific hazards and emergencies;
• Guarantee marginalised consumers access to domestic food and – if not available- to food brought in from adjacent surplus regions.

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Phares Mugo Kirii
The Writer works for Jesuit Hakimani Centre as the Programme officer for Economic Justice and Good Governance.
Email: econjustice@jesuithakimani.org

© Jesuit Hakimani Centre 2008