An article by Alexandra Spieldoch at Foreign Policy in Focus criticises liberalisation of trade and investment, as well as many national governments and accuses them of worsening the food crisis.
She believes that:
“the failed [Doha] talks signal a growing understanding that trade liberalization has destabilized local food systems and hurt farmers, contributing to both the long-term and short-causes of today’s food crisis.”
Doubtless trade liberalisation has hurt some farmers. But it has helped others. It has both hurt and helped others. It’s partly a judgment call, really, to say whether liberalisation has been beneficial or not on balance. I find I must disagree with Spieldoch. There is no question that farmers’ livelihoods are being harmed under current trade arrangements, but I would suggest that liberalisation, if properly enacted, would greatly help the farmers the author refers to. Her implicit claim that such policies aid agribusiness concerns me. In the US and EU agribusiness is a great – perhaps the greatest – beneficiary of protectionism!
Spieldoch goes on to compare recent reports of the World Bank and the UN Interagency Task Force on the Global Food Crisis.
The World Bank’s “New Deal on Global Food Policy” is attacked for its focus on expanding trade rather than helping farmers. It seems too much for Spieldoch to suppose that the World Bank might think that the two are intimately related.
Subsequently, the UN’s framework is accused of paving the way for agribusinesses to dominate, at the expense of smaller-scale farming – due to its support for World Bank loans to public-private partnerships. It is worth remembering, that the UN is generally considered to be a far less economically liberal organisation than most international economic institutions. At any rate, Spieldoch is begging the question. The UN draft document she refers to explicitly and openly states that “supporting smallholder farming is not enough”. Indeed, I find it hard to argue with that. Of course, the devil is in the detail, something that this draft offers little of. Nonetheless, it seems perverse to reject out of hand any attempt to engage with private large-scale industry.
The article asserts that intergovernmental “institutions are still focused on investment and growth in agriculture based on privatization schemes, deregulation, and trade facilitation” and that “this is exactly the approach that has contributed to many of the problems we are seeing today in the food system”. I find it hard to accept that the heavy regulation and widespread nationalisation of agriculture would have resulted in a better situation in “the food system” than we see today. Indeed, it seems likely that such a state of affairs would lead to a far worse crisis.
Meanwhile, Lord Haskins argues the case for free trade as a superior guarantor of food security. I was surprised to read that “today Britain is about 60 per cent self-sufficient in food production.” Haskins believes that the EU should encourage greater food output:
“All restraints on production should be abandoned. Plans to switch land from food to biofuels should be urgently reviewed. Finally, the downward trend in expenditure on food research should be reversed.”
Whilst he does not see the short-term crisis as too severe, he warns that “in the medium term there may well be a global food crisis of Malthusian proportions if current demographic and climate trends continue.”
In the FT, it is reported that the Director-General of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation has criticised the “neo-colonial” plans of countries (such as China and Saudi Arabia), as well as western corporations and investors to buy up agricultural land in Africa to grow food for domestic markets. Apparently, “countries such as Sudan, Ethiopia and Ukraine are opening their doors.” One is unsure whether to condemn the gall of the investors, or to commend their imagination. Of course, if Ethiopia is “very eager” to rent out her land, who am I to criticise? But at the same time, one can’t help feel an almost instinctual sense of concern and alarm.
