Development & Aid, Europe, Farming Crisis: Filling An Empty Plate, Food and Agriculture, Global, Headlines

G20 Remiss in Tackling Food Security

Cléo Fatoorehchi

AIX-EN-PROVENCE, Nov 10 2011 (IPS) - Last Friday Benoit Miribel, President of Action Against Hunger, delivered a strong indictment of the outcome of the Group of 20 (G20) summit in the south of France: “The G20 meeting in Cannes has been a missed opportunity.”

He was referring to the paucity of discussions on agricultural policies and food security between the heads of state of twenty major industrialised and emerging market economies during their long deliberations on the future of the world economy last week.

Olivier De Schutter, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on the right to food, told IPS, “The food crisis and (questions of) food price volatility were overshadowed by the Greek crisis and the Eurozone crisis.”

But “unless decisive action is taken now, vulnerable populations will grow hungrier, food markets will be increasingly unstable, and the world will remain completely unprepared for the challenge of feeding nine billion people by 2050,” he added.

G20 leaders ended the summit declaring they fully understood that “Promoting agricultural production is the key to feeding the world’s population.”

But Michael Klosson, vice president of policy and humanitarian response at Save the Children stressed to IPS that the problem is not about the quantity of food supplies but the quality.

He regrets the G20 leaders did not agreed on bolder actions, such as collectively promoting the SUN (Scaling Up Nutrition) Movement, already supported by a handful of nations and U.N. agencies since its launch in 2009.

In a nod to the increasingly vociferous movement for food justice and sovereignty, the G20’s final communiqué last Friday promised actions “in the framework of the Action Plan on Food Price Volatility and Agriculture agreed upon by our Ministers of Agriculture in June 2011.”

A key component of the Action Plan is the creation of the Agricultural Market Information System (AMIS), to reinforce transparency in agricultural markets.

Carmel Cahill, senior counsellor of the directorate for trade and agriculture at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), believes that AMIS is critically important to prevent the world from enduring food crises as devastating as those in 2008-2009 and 2010.

Indeed, “one of the major deficiencies in 2008-2009 and again in 2010 was a lack of timely or accurate information about the market situation, resulting in hasty and uncoordinated policy decisions,” Cahill told IPS.

“Some of the worst problems might have been avoided had there been better market information,” she added.

The G20 also agreed to the creation of food reserves to assist in the fight against poverty and hunger but experts believe this, too, is a largely symbolic gesture.

According to De Schutter, “the Action Plan refers to food reserves only in the context of humanitarian emergencies or as a response to humanitarian crises,” when it should be done to reduce food price volatility.

“If we buy from the poorest farmers and release the food stocks when prices go up to make food affordable to the poorest segment of the population, these food reserves can be a useful way to reduce volatility at the local level of food commodities; yet it is apparently not a step the G20 is ready to take,” he told IPS.

He believes this lack of political will in the G20 is a result of strong commercial interests, particularly in countries producing biofuels.

Back in 2008, a note released by the World Bank’s development prospects group spotlighted how biofuels were responsible for a full 75 percent of the then skyrocketing food prices.

But in spite of strong evidence that biofuels and agrofuels are “one of the major drivers of speculation on the commodities markets and one of the major reasons why we have such high pressure on land in developing countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa,” according to De Schutter, the G20 completely bypassed the issue.

The issue of biofuels also raises thorny questions about speculation, a practice many experts believe needs to be terminated altogether.

The G20 made some inroads here by endorsing the International Organisation of Securities Commission (IOSCO)’s recommendations about improving regulation and strengthening market infrastructure.

But De Schutter is pessimistic, believing that powerful financial actors will continue to adopt a ‘herd mentality’, mimicking each other in the realm of speculation and paving a path towards a future of fragile ‘bubbles’ on commodity markets.

According Matt Davies, head of international policy and advocacy at ATD Fourth World, a necessary step towards food security, especially for the most vulnerable populations and low income countries, requires “states to set up mechanisms which enable the participation of extremely poor people in policy making, as they possess the knowledge of what works best for the most vulnerable.”

If the G20 adopted this approach, they could move closer to the grassroots call for “people first, not finances.”