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Food Sovereignty: Ending World Hunger in Our Time

Posted on: Thursday, 16 March 2006, 09:00 CST

By Mousseau, Frederic; Mittal, Anuradha

THIS PAST THANKSGIVING, while millions of Americans sat at a table overflowing with food, more than thirty children died each minute around the world due to hunger related causes.

Certainly hunger isn't a result of food scarcity. In fact, abundance best describes the worlds food supply. World agriculture produces 17 percent more calories per person today than it did thirty years ago, despite a 70 percent population increase. This is enough food to provide every person worldwide with at least 2,720 kilocalories a day.

International food aid, the most publicized instrument in the campaign against hunger, was initiated in 1954, and yet hunger is a bigger crisis now than ever before. Chronic hunger affects over 852 million people across the globe, and its victims include 6.5 million children who die from hunger related causes each year-one every five seconds. While millions of tons of food are shipped as food aid to the global south, apart from some specific disaster and war situations, this doesn't serve the hungry and malnourished whose numbers increase by 4.5 million each year.

So who then benefits the most from food aid? Specific crop lobbies, U.S. shipping companies, and NGO and relief organizations are some of the top winners. For example, Horizon Milling, a joint venture of Cargill Inc. and CHS Inc., has since 1995 sold to the U.S. government $1.09 billion of grain for food aid operations. The second player, the shipping industry, is supported by the 1985 Farm Bill, which requires that at least 75 percent of U.S. food aid be shipped by U.S. vessels. And the main U.S-based relief and development organizations rely highly on in-kind U.S. food aid for either direct food interventions or for funding of other activities. On average the main U.S.-based relief groups rely on the sale of food aid in developing countries for 30 percent of their resources.

This preferential treatment to food produced in the United States and for U.S. shipping companies makes U.S. food aid the most expensive in the world. The premiums paid to suppliers and shippers raise the cost of food aid by over 100 percent compared to local purchases. As reported in the New York Times, food delivered by NGOs and the World Food Program (WFP) in 2004 cost only 40 percent of the U.S. food aid budget. The rest was pocketed by suppliers.

In addition, this requirement delays delivery of emergency food aid by an average of nearly five months. In fact, most times, aid is too little and too late. It was appalling to see images of victims of starvation in Niger hit the Western media in July 2005, when the food shortage had been announced nearly a year before without triggering a response that could have prevented or ameliorated a famine. The severity of the situation was known in October 2004 when Niger's government and the WFP appealed for international support. Four months after its first appeal WFP had received only 10 percent of the required funding. According to Jan England, humanitarian coordinator for the United Nations, in October 2004 $1.00 per day could save a child's life whereas $80.00 dollars per day was required in July 2005.

Recognizing this, the European Union procures a majority of its food aid-90 percent in 2004-from developing countries. Canada increased local and regional purchases from 10 percent to 50 percent in September 2005. The United States is the only donor nation that has avoided local and regional purchases.

The White House and USAID have proposed to spend in 2006 one quarter of its food aid budget to buy food grown by local or regional producers. However, both House and Senate leaders have rejected this recommendation. Virginia Republican Bob Goodlatte, chair of the House Agriculture Committee, has gone on to warn that buying food aid overseas would erode congressional support for famine-fighting programs: "It must come from American farmers so it will circulate through the American economy." Instead of prioritizing feeding starving stomachs, Congress' focus remains fixed on fattening pockets of agribusiness and shipping companies.

A joint poll conducted by the Washington Post, Harvard University, and the Kaiser Family Foundation asked Americans which area of federal expenditure they thought was the largest. Sixty- four percent of the respondents said it was foreign aid, which in fact constitutes less than one half of one percent of the federal budget. Their response isn't surprising, though, given the number of people who are generously contributing to relief efforts from New Orleans to Niger. But Americans could do even more by challenging the lawmakers who have been blinded by corporate America's interests.

Food aid needs drastic changes if we really want to diminish world hunger. If kept separate from trade and other political interests and supported by a consistent aid budget, the replacement of in-kind food aid with local and triangular purchases would double the amount of food available. The current U.S. food aid budgets could be cut in half without a decrease in the overall volume delivered if the food were procured locally.

More importantly, a study on food aid-Food Aid or Food Sovereignty? Ending World Hunger in Our Time-conducted recently by the Oakland Institute, shows that while the European and Canadian shift to local purchases is good it doesn't necessarily promote food security in developing countries. The study recommends that, first, local procurement of food aid must prioritize small-scale farmers, given the dumping of subsidized food as aid adversely affects local agricultural capacity and erodes farmers' livelihoods.

Since most low-income, food-deficit countries (LDCs) specialize in non-food exportable commodities like coffee, cocoa, tea, and tobacco, the top ten list of WFP suppliers include, instead of LDCs, a number of "more advanced" developing countries, such as Brazil and South Africa, which specialize in industrial production of exportable food commodities. For example, in 2005 South Africa will be the origin of most WFP purchases for interventions in Southern Africa, and triangular purchases will consist of cereals produced by large-scale commercial farmers and agribusinesses. Small-scale farmers in Mozambique will also produce a surplus in 2005, yet they are unlikely to supply food to the WFP because of higher marketing costs due to the country's poor road and storage infrastructure.

Another factor that requires emphasis be put on purchases from small farmers locally is the fact that large companies dominate export trade in developing countries. Two corporations-Cargill, the United States' largest privately owned corporation and Archer Daniels Midland (ADM)-control 75 percent of the global grain trade. These corporations dominate the agricultural sector of many developing countries. For instance, Nestl controls 80 percent of milk production in Peru. Cargill Paraguay sells more than 30 percent of the total production of soy, wheat, and corn of the country.

In the aftermath of the devastating tsunami that struck Indonesia in 2004, local farmers groups organized a farmer's network to supply fresh food to the affected populations of Banda Aceh, demonstrating the feasibility of addressing acute emergency needs with food produced locally by small producers. In the West Bank, WFP buys olive oil from destitute farmers who have been cut off from their markets by the separation wall. This type of local purchase requires flexible and decentralized procurement systems and eventually benefits local agriculture and reduces the need for food aid in the long run.

Second, donors must not only review their procurement system and dissociate food aid from their national interests but also increase the amount of resources for agriculture and rural development which have been cut by half from $5.14 billion to $2.22 billion in the past two decades. Examples from situations of extreme hunger around the world have proven that, in the long run, policies that emphasize helping affected countries develop their own agricultural sectors actually help feed more people and decrease developing countries' dependence on aid programs.

Third, it is essential that strategies are put in place to reduce food aid needs over the long term. This requires support for national policies that are built on the foundation of food sovereignty and support small farmers through land redistribution, extension services, and support for the production of staple food rather than cash crops. In addition, the protection of prices and markets and the management of national food stocks will be essential to mitigate the effects of the fluctuations of national food production on producers and consumers, thereby reducing the need for food aid.

Under the dictates of the international financial institutions, marketing boards, which stabilized prices and managed national food stocks, have been systematically dismantled in many developing countries. These state-run institutions emphasized self- sufficiency, thereby reducing the need for food imports. This allowed governments to buy agricultural commodities from farmers, keep them in a rolling stock, and release them into the market in the event of a bad harvest in the following years. Marketing boards also o\rganized the redistribution of food from surplus to deficit areas of the country. Preventing price volatility, they protected both producers and consumers against sharp rises or drops in prices. Today in Niger or in Malawi, as pointed out by the humanitarian relief organization Doctors Without Borders, the root cause of hunger is poverty, and the group is distributing food to those who are too poor to buy food. In the absence of price controls, the poor have seen price increases of 100 to 200 percent during the lean periods.

During the 1990s Indonesia signed the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) which reduced state intervention in food production and opened up domestic markets to foreign imports. By the end of the 1990s Indonesia became a large importer of rice and one of the largest recipients of food aid. In 2002 the government reintroduced tariffs and imposed tighter control on rice imports. Bulog, the state agency whose role had shrunk in the 1990s, was again put in charge of stabilizing the market and acting as a safety net. Decentralized and operating countrywide, the agency not only supplied the market with rice during lean seasons and periods of high prices but also redistributed surpluses to regions that encountered staple food deficits. In 2004 the country became self- sufficient in the production of rice for the first time in twenty years and had to ban imports to protect its market and producers.

Zimbabwe underwent a similar experience in the 1990s. Under structural adjustment, extreme poverty increased by 50 percent between 1990 and 1995. Recognizing that agricultural growth did not benefit the poor, but rather largescale farmers and agribusinesses, the government decided to return its market and safety net function to its Grain Marketing Board, which had almost been eliminated following the recommendations of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Affected by severe food shortages over the past three years, Zimbabwe has been able to import and distribute over one million tons of food through its board.

Some would say that this is an idealistic vision. But the world is desperate for answers. The worst is happening right now from Niger to Malawi. So the next time we sit down to an overflowing banquet we must face some simple questions: do we want freedom from hunger or freedom to trade? Do we want a corporate-profit steered world as that envisioned by Cargill and Continental or do we want strong native cultures proud of their ability to feed their people?

Frederic Mousseau is the senior fellow and Anuradha Mittal is the executive director at the Oakland Institute, a policy think tank whose mission is to promote fair debate and increase public participation by bringing dynamic new voices into policy debates on critical economic and social issues. To order a copy of the food aid report, contact them at info@oaklandinstitute.org (www.oaklandinstitute.org).

Copyright American Humanist Association Mar/Apr 2006

Source: Humanist, The

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