Millions of people suffering from hunger; regular food crises and famines; irresponsible policies; regulators who cannot adopt the necessary measures because of lobbying by the industries; marginalized populations: These are but a few of the challenges the world is confronted with in the area of food.
On the occasion of World Food Day (Oct. 16), MintPress had an exclusive interview with the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter, to discuss these challenges. The special attention he pays to all the nuances in his answers is very revealing, we thought, of the high political sensitivity the issue has acquired.
MintPress News (MPN): How many people are suffering from hunger or famine today?
Olivier De Schutter (ODS): As you know, famine – the sudden fall in the food people have access to – is not the same as structural hunger or chronic malnutrition. We currently have a very important famine in much of the Sahel region (of Africa) with up to 18 million people affected. Yet structural hunger, which is much less visible, much less picturesque for the media, is a much wider phenomenon, linked to extreme poverty and marginalization rather than simply to weather-related events. We don’t know exactly how many people are affected, assessment methods have been questioned, so all we can say for now is that around 900 million people are food insecure, i.e., people who wonder every day whether they will be able to feed themselves …
MPN: Add to that the fact that we are regularly faced with food crises …
ODS: It has become the new norm now. These crises repeat themselves and we always pretend to be taken by surprise whereas it is clear that we are entering a period where these crises will happen more frequently and be increasingly severe. In that context, it is foolish to continue with these biofuel policies when we have such tied markets and such a tension between supply and demand. That tension in itself is not the cause of the volatility of prices but it certainly makes markets nervous. It is irresponsible for the United States, for example, to continue to dedicate 40 percent of its corn production to producing ethanol: Cars in the U.S. consume 13 percent of the total global corn production in the world! I fail to understand how we can continue to tolerate that policy, it defies common sense.
The second reason why these crises keep repeating themselves and shall continue is because of the severe impact of climate change on agricultural production. Most of the crises we have seen, although they have been magnified by speculation and the irrational reactions of markets, have as their departure point some weather-related event, such as the severe droughts in the United States, in Kazakhstan and in Ukraine last summer. And these extreme weather events are going to be more frequent in the future as a result of climate change.
MPN: Yet, it is not a problem of food shortage, since the world produces enough food to feed everyone …
ODS: No, it is not, although we have modes of consumption developing – particularly a taste for meat – that, in the long term, will increase the pressure on natural resources, and we will have to increase production faster than population itself.
But no, for the moment, there is no shortage. What there is, though, is a reaction of markets to the information they receive that is sometimes pushing prices upward beyond what would be justified by the fundamentals of supply and demand and the levels of stocks. And these reactions lead to what I call “artificial scarcity.” What I mean is that if speculators bet on prices going up, traders on the physical markets will delay sales, they will hold stocks instead of releasing them and governments may limit exports; or they might buy as much as possible because they panic in the face of rising prices. … And these combined reactions by traders and governments lead to an artificial scarcity which has nothing to do with the amount of food actually available but everything to do with the irrational reaction of the markets in the light of the information they receive.
MPN: If these food crises occur regularly, if we know the causes, how come we still have not found a way to prevent them?
ODS: We have to distinguish between the different causes – we only mentioned some of them – and each calls for a different type of response. For example, the reason why we are unable to tackle financial speculation on the markets for derivatives, i.e. financial products linked to agricultural commodities, is simply because of the very strong lobbying by the financial services industry that makes it extremely difficult for regulators, both in the U.S. and in Europe, to tackle seriously that problem.
To a large extent, it is the same with biofuel. We have an irresponsible policy of promoting biofuel but again this is partly because of the difficulty politicians have in retreating from the promises they made to the agricultural producers that we cannot make progress on this issue. This is linked to the way decisions are made in our democracies: We tend to prioritize the short-term interests of important constituencies of voters, rather than the long term and the needs of those who are underrepresented.
MPN: What, according to you, are the most important or urgent measures to take?
ODS: The immediate priorities should be to abandon the biofuel policies and to tackle speculation by adequate regulation. This is feasible technically; it is just a matter of political will. We are not up against nature here. All we need is that some bold political decisions be made which, if they were made, would immediately reduce the volatility and the tension on the markets.
In the long term, however, we must invest in the right kind of agriculture. We must invest in farmers working in developing countries, especially small-scale farmers. We must have them create cooperatives and improve their access to markets in order to give them an incentive to produce better. We have not invested in agriculture in developing countries for about 30 years because it simply was not considered profitable enough.
MPN: Isn’t part of the problem that those who could or might do something are not the ones who suffer from hunger?
ODS: That is certainly a major concern. Global governance in the area of food security has been improved over the past few years but there still is a serious under-representation of poor food-deficit countries in the structures that lead the decisions at the global level in this area. And what is particularly striking is that these poor food-deficit countries are well represented within the Committee on World Food Security, a body of the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO); but in the G20 [representing the 20 major economies in the world] only the largest economies are represented, not the very poor. Yet the G20 is a very important structure and may not always take the concerns of poor countries into account.
MPN: Should we hold governments more accountable and improve the poor’s participation in the decision-making?
ODS: This is in part what the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) is about; it is a forum in which NGOs, farmers’ organization and others participate, allowing them to hold governments accountable for the decisions they make. It is an extremely encouraging development: The CFS is influential and it has a high degree of legitimacy but it has no decision-making powers. Its visibility and impact should be further increased.
Beyond that, it is very clear that the question of hunger is essentially a question of marginalized populations, being disempowered and not being able to hold governments accountable for the choices they make. And this is what the Right to Food is about. The reason why the Right to Food has become so important is because of the realization that hunger was not something natural that was inevitable; it is something that can be fought against and it is something for which governments should be held accountable. So, accountability and democratization of the decision-making in this area are absolutely vital to ensure that governments deliver on their promises and take decisions based on the needs of the poorest segments of the population.
MPN: But aren’t we still thinking in the box there? As long as food will be considered a commodity, as long as society as a whole is biased toward economic interests, as long as we accept that people die from hunger, we will be faced with the same problems, because in the end, it is still the same system. … Isn’t it the entire economic system that needs to be reordered?
ODS: The problem of food being treated as a commodity is that on markets, supply follows demand, rather than need; therefore, those whose purchasing power is insufficient can be easily priced out. Look at it this way: There are essentially three ways by which people can access food. One is by producing food themselves. We must better support families in the developing world who depend on small scale farmers for livelihood. This is one thing we should do. That means not seeing food as having to be produced by the most powerful or efficient actors in the agro-business sector but also food as having to be produced – as is already the case – by families for themselves, i.e., subsistence agriculture. We can provide them with this essential safety net that consists for these families to have one or two hectares of land to produce better and we can support homestead food production where possible.
A second way by which access to food can be ensured is by providing employment to people so that they have income allowing them to purchase food on the market. To create employment, we must ensure that in developing countries the industry and the services sectors can be developed, which I think requires the proper trade rules to be adopted to allow these countries to diversify their economies.
And the third way is by providing social safety nets for people who are without employment and who cannot produce food for themselves. And here much more could be done, should be done, to promote social protection schemes in developing countries. We have a situation today where about 80 percent of families have no access to social protection when it would cost, globally, 2-6 percent of global GDP to cover everybody against the risk of unemployment, disability or ageing.
All this is quite feasible, again, if the political will is there. For 30 years, we have been considering that hunger could be addressed simply by increasing production. That has been a mistake: It has led to food production being increasingly concentrated in a smaller number of regions and the food system to be held hostage to a relatively small number of corporations. We must now de-concentrate food production. Hunger is not just about increasing production but also, and more especially, about reducing poverty by creating employment, establishing social safety nets and by allowing small-scale subsistence farmers to produce better.
What is required really is redirecting our efforts toward these ends.
MPN: What can you, as U.N. Special Rapporteur, do in this regard?
ODS: With others, I help to shape international discussions on these issues. To a large extent, I am able to translate into political recommendations either concerns expressed by NGOs or findings by scientists that work on these questions. I am, if you wish, an interface between scientists who feel that their conclusions are not acted upon by politicians, like those working on the loss of agro-biodiversity or climate change for example, and governments. I am exchanging and consulting with NGOs, social movements, farmers’ organizations to understand what their real demands are and to ensure that governments provide adequate answers to these demands. In many cases, even well-intended policies can fail because we have not been listening enough to the poor. We have been deciding on these issues in a top-down, very technocratic fashion, and I hope to contribute to give more voice to those who have been marginalized in the decision-making process in the past.