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Tackling the Global Food Crisis: A Mission Unaccomplished
The High Food Price Challenge: A Review of Responses to Combat Hunger
A New Report from the UK Hunger Alliance* and the Oakland Institute
OAKLAND, Calif. - July 8 - A new report released today, The High Food Price Challenge: A Review of Responses to Combat Hunger, by the UK Hunger Alliance and the Oakland Institute, reveals that a major initiative, launched by the Group of 8 (G8), in July 2009 has failed to address the global hunger crisis, which currently affects more than a billion people. The G8 announced the L'Aquila Food Security Initiative in July 2009 to support food security, nutrition, and sustainable agriculture, with a promise of $20 billion worth of investment over three years. However, one year on from the L'Aquila commitments, it is evident that the international response to the food price crisis has been insufficient and often inappropriate, despite rising levels of hungry people.
"Despite lofty aid commitments at international summits, only a marginal proportion of the G8's financial pledges to address hunger have actually been disbursed," said Frederic Mousseau, Senior Fellow at the Oakland Institute and author of the report. "The bulk of the response to the food crisis was borne by remittances from migrants to their home country, which outstripped aid to the developing world by a margin of three to one in 2008," he continued.
Based on a thorough review of national and international responses to global hunger and featuring case studies from individual countries and regions that confronted the food price crisis using diverse strategies, The High Food Price Challenge shows that, beyond providing aid money, it is imperative that governments and international institutions rethink their policies to mitigate hunger by, above all:
* Broadening the vision of social protection beyond cash and food transfers into a comprehensive range of measures that include support to local food production
* Scaling up treatment of malnutrition and expanding the scope of nutrition beyond feeding and treatment programs to include responses that recognize the importance of agricultural policies and practices
* Boosting food production in a sustainable way focused on investments in favor of small-holders, the rural poor, marginal groups, and women
* Providing more resources to food and agriculture and ensuring donor announcements on responses to the food price crisis are closely monitored.
The High Food Price Challenge: A Review of Responses to Combat Hunger is a joint publication of the UK Hunger Alliance and the Oakland Institute. The UK Hunger Alliance is a forum concerned with tackling hunger and working towards the achievement of the first Millennium Development Goal. Alliance members who participated in the publication of the report include Action Against Hunger, CARE International, Concern Worldwide UK, Oxfam GB, Save the Children UK and World Vision UK.
The Oakland Institute is an independent policy think tank whose mission is to increase public participation and promote fair debate on critical social, economic, and environmental issues. (www.oaklandinstitute.org).
Download the Full Report at
http://www.oaklandinstitute.
(*Alliance members who participated in the publication of the report include Action Against Hunger, CARE International, Concern Worldwide UK, Oxfam GB, Save the Children UK and World Vision UK)
1 Comment so far
Show AllThis is a very important issue. Monitoring it like this is crucial.
They mention food reserves in the report. This should be in the US farm bill. Early work on the food crisis by many groups and my most articles at Common Dreams failed to mention reserves.
There are other general shortcomings in this report and in most other progressive responses to the food crisis, (ie. in the lead up to the 2008 farm bill) including those of Oxfam, World Vision, Bread for the World, and the (US) Religious Working Group on the Farm Bill, though this may be slowly changing.
As in this article (and see the title of the report) there is no standard for fair trade, living wage farm prices. The main assumption is that lower prices are good, higher prices are bad. However, about half of the people of the world are rural people dependent upon a farm economy. The figure is about 70% if the population for Least Developed Countries. Being dependent upon living wage farm prices, the problem is usually low, not high prices. There is very little reference to low prices in the full report.
A few years ago, export dumping (low prices for farmers) was the big issue, below cost farm exports. That is largely forgotten here, beyond a mention of price volatility (which usually emphasizes only high prices. A word search finds no use of the word dumping in the full report. With no price standard, a return to severe dumping is made to sound like a good thing. Really it's usually the main root cause. Hunger is caused by poverty, and for rural countries (ie. LDCs) low farm prices are the main causes of poverty.
US farm prices were low, below full costs, for many commodities (ie. the sum of corn, wheat, rice, cotton, soybeans, barley, grain sorghum, oats) from 1981-2006* (when prices spiked), (*except 1996 when corn had a good year). So then we see a price spike for a few years and that quarter century becomes largely invisible in documents from progressives and hunger organizations. We had $7+ corn one day, the peak of the price spike, in our Iowa elevator. Corn has long since fallen into the $3 range. That's still higher than the dumping period, although costs of production have rapidly spiked and prices are already often below full costs.
Discussions of farm subsidies and WTO (where subsidies can be protested) were and are the main issues among progressives, though they miss the point. The full report briefly mentions "rice subsidies" as "trade distorting," but otherwise ignores these key policy factors. While it is unfair that farmers, (with subsidies) in developing countries do NOT go broke under dumping, when they do go broke, it does not help LDC farmers and LDC poverty. Dumping is a policy where the US and other developed countries purposely lose money on exports over decades while providing below cost grains to processors, exporters, CAFOs. Part of this involves oversupply so that the input complex can sell more inputs than are needed, as no land is taken out of production.
Income to LDC farmers is considered to be the best way to stimulate wealth creation in LDCs. That is missed here.
The US dominates world grain markets, often more than OPEC in oil. Our policies have been hijacked, not by big farmers, as progressives typically claim, but by the much bigger grain buying corporations and other agribusiness output and input mega corporations.
By the way, as OPEC raised oil prices to make more money, the US lowered grain prices to subsidize corporations at the expense of our own economy. A bushel of wheat for a barrel of oil? That was said in 1973, the last time farm prices spiked. U.S. Wheat averaged $3.95/bushel while oil averaged $4.75. In 2008 dollars, that would be By 2008, wheat had risen (skyrocked, we were told, from 3.42 in 2005, which was actually lower than 1973) to an average of $6.80, while oil averaged $91.48. With the new food crisis, it is often said that oil and wheat have risen about the same amount. Ok, to be fair, take the 1971 wheat price, $1.34 and oil price, $3.60. Adjusted for inflation, the 2008 wheat spike was nearly 20% above the low 1971 price, while oil was nearly 500% above the 1971 price.
We've created a world in which dumping on the poor in farming countries (where economic and jobs multipliers were devastated for a quarter century) can't even afford dumping prices for grains.
We need to resolve the dilemma with adequate farm and trade policy. We need US and worldwide price floors with supply management to prevent the devastating dumping, and price ceilings with reserves to prevent spikes. Trade policy must support this, not hinder it. The article addresses important additional aspects of this. More depth is needed.
For links to US and world wide support for my views and documentation (from major progressive organizations) of the key issues, see my online "Food Crisis 101 Primer" here: http://www (dot) zcommunications (dot) org/zspace/bradwilson