Bridges Weekly Trade News Digest • Volume 16 • Number 3 • 25th January 2012

Ag Ministers: Sustainable Farming Key to Tackling Hunger

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Agriculture must become more sustainable if it is to help end hunger and malnutrition, farm ministers said on Saturday 21 January in Berlin.

A communiqué agreed by ministers from 64 countries underscored the importance of tackling food waste and improving environmental sustainability in the run-up to the Rio+20 conference on sustainable development. The conference is due to be held in June of this year, twenty years after the original Earth Summit in the Brazilian city (see Bridges Weekly, 11 January 2012).

The new declaration, issued this weekend at the conclusion of the fourth Berlin Agriculture Ministers’ Summit, called on the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to “draw up concepts for reducing the loss and waste of food,” and to co-operate with governments and other actors to implement such policies.

Ministers from Brazil, France, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, and the UK were among those present at the high-level gathering, which also included some three dozen developing countries.

Hunger and malnutrition

Farm ministers also stated their “commitment to renewed efforts to eliminate hunger and malnutrition,” although they did not further specify how they would achieve this goal.

While economic growth in some Asian countries has spurred rapid progress towards Millennium Development Goal targets - as well as more ambitious milestones from the 1996 World Food Summit - high and volatile food prices have recently exacerbated difficulties in achieving such targets in sub-Saharan Africa and other regions (see Bridges Weekly, 9 March 2011).

One government official involved in organising the event told Bridges that it was inevitable that such a large gathering would only be able to generate a “watered-down” communique that was limited to agreement on general principles.

“The more ministries and governments you gather, it’s usually like this,” he said.

However, another claimed that the outcomes of the conference were “very concrete,” giving as an example the ministers’ stated commitment “to the promotion and protection of the rights of women.” The official nonetheless observed that discussing any of these statements in detail at the conference was not possible, given the large number of countries present.

Some observers argued that the Berlin summit represented a political opportunity for agriculture ministers to underscore the importance of farming and food security ahead of the sustainable development summit this June - still seen in many circles as primarily the preserve of environment ministers. “Politically, it’s saying ‘we are important as well, agriculture and food security are important’ pre-Rio+20,” said Marita Wiggerthale, agricultural expert at Oxfam Germany.

da Silva: new paradigm needed

The FAO’s Director-General, José Graziano da Silva, said that a new agricultural paradigm was needed - “one that allows us to increase yields while using fewer resources.”

Countries need to shift away from the current model, based on intensive use of natural resources and inputs, he said in a keynote speech delivered at the event.

“About 80 percent of the increase in food production that is needed to eliminate hunger and feed a growing world population will have to come from increases in yields and cropping intensity in developing countries,” said da Silva, who took office three weeks ago.

The conference communiqué stressed that “increases in agricultural production must be made in a sustainable way,” although again did not specify how governments will ensure this result.

Consumption and waste

German farm minister Ilse Aigner, who hosted the event, cautioned that policymakers needed to tackle both unsustainable consumption patterns as well as problems with production.

“Every single consumer bears a great responsibility in respect of food because food wastage brings additional pressure to bear on resources such as energy, soil and water,” Aigner said.

Her remarks were echoed by da Silva, who noted that “roughly one-third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year - approximately 1.3 billion tonnes - gets lost or wasted.”

The FAO chief told participants that rich country consumers waste “almost as much food - 222 million tonnes - as the entire net food production of sub-Saharan Africa - 230 million tonnes.”

Access to food

da Silva also argued that poverty, and not a lack of available food, was the fundamental cause of hunger. “People are hungry not because there is not enough food available but because they do not have the money to buy food,” he said.

The new director-general previously served as Brazil’s minister of food security, where he oversaw the country’s ‘zero hunger’ programme credited for lifting 28 million people out of extreme poverty.

“We cannot ask them to wait for the structural changes to happen, we need to provide immediate assistance while we work on those changes,” da Silva said. He instead recommended that policy-makers explore “cash for work and cash transfer programmes” to stimulate growth in local markets - tools that had formed the cornerstone of Brazil’s own food security strategy in recent years.

Trade: subsidies and tariffs spark debate

In comments at a press conference in the margins of the summit, Aigner told reporters that she opposed “all subsidies for exports.” She added that export subsidies “have no role in agriculture in this day and age”.

Trade-distorting support in the developed world has traditionally been a contentious issue with trading partners, who have argued that it provides an unfair competitive advantage to producers in subsidising countries, to the detriment of their counterparts elsewhere.

However, Indonesian agriculture minister Asyraf Suswono replied that it was also important for developed countries to refrain from protecting their markets from developing country farm exports. “Too much protectionism makes it difficult for emerging developing countries to find markets for agriculture products,” Suswono said.

While the EU has substantially reduced the level of trade-distorting agricultural subsidies it provides its farmers, it continues to maintain relatively high tariffs on some farm products, whilst also providing preferential access to goods from many poor countries.

However, in stark contrast to the previous year’s summit, trade was almost completely absent from the final communiqué (see Bridges Weekly, 26 January 2011).

“It was deliberately chosen not to have trade as a part,” said one official who had been involved in organising the event. Another told Bridges that “you cannot discuss every topic every year.”

As food prices nudged record heights, last year’s event had focused extensively on agricultural trade and food price volatility, with the French government highlighting these issues under its presidency of the G-20 group of major economies.

Food security first

However, some observers expressed concern that, should prices now come down this year from their unusually high peaks, leaders’ interest in global food security could fall too. “That’s precisely what happened in 1973 and ‘74,” observed Stefan Tangermann, emeritus professor at the University of Goettingen in Germany, and a former head of trade and agriculture at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris.

“I’m afraid the same might happen again,” Tangermann told Bridges.

Others argued that a fresh approach to trade and food security was needed. Sophia Murphy, senior advisor to the Washington-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), argued that “there has been a big loss of confidence in international markets, and we need both to remove some distortions and probably to put some others back to proceed.”

“The point is to allow trade to be a tool again, situated in food security strategies rather than claiming to be sufficient for economic growth and development,” Murphy said.

ICTSD reporting.