Refugees at the Greek-Macedonian border near the town of Idomeni. Credit: Nikos Pilos/IPS

By Andrew MacMillan and José Graziano da Silva
ROME, Jun 20 2016 (IPS)

European nations from which millions once left to escape hardship and hunger – Greece, Ireland, Italy – are today destinations for others doing the same.

Many people are on the move. The really big numbers relate to rural-urban migration in developing countries. In 1950, 746 million people lived in cities, 30 percent of the world’s population. By 2014, urban population reached 3.9 billion (54 percent).

By comparison, about 4 million migrants have moved into OECD countries each year since 2007.(*) And 60 percent of Europe’s 3.4 million immigrants in 2013 came from other European Union member states or already held EU citizenship. Those from outside amounted to less than 0.3 percent of the EU’s population.

Conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, along with the breakdown of law or of freedom in Libya, Eritrea, Somalia and South Sudan, have catalyzed a surge in asylum seekers – whose numbers climbed to 800,000 in OECD countries alone in 2014 and who, under international law, must be protected.

Growing apprehension in some recipient countries has led to calls for fences and walls to cut migrant flows. Barriers, however, are costly, can be circumvented, and are all too reminiscent of the restrictions on liberty from which many migrants are seeking refuge.

The urge for a better life is the main driving force for migration, both local and international. People are “pulled” by the belief that better prospects exist elsewhere. As mobile phones and internet access have reached the remotest corners of the world, such beliefs have proliferated.

For those countries wishing to reduce cross-border migratory pressures, the best option is probably to address the root causes. This entails actions that foster peace and security where there is conflict and oppression. It also implies closing the widening gaps in living standards, both between nations and between rich and poor in the countries that economic migrants are leaving.

José Graziano da Silva. Credit: FAO/Alessandra Benedetti

Some destination countries have cut social security allowances for new arrivals in a bid to reduce their attraction. But more fundamental policy shifts in wealthier societies towards deterring their own people’s most conspicuous consumption behavior are needed. This will not be easy. It could involve having consumers meet the full costs of the environmental and social damage incurred in the production and use of what they buy.

Extreme poverty is found mainly in rural communities, where most internal migration begins. Poverty is not simply a matter of low incomes but also of limited access to adequate housing, clean water, energy, decent education and health services. On almost every score, rural people are worse off than city dwellers and also more vulnerable to shocks. Paradoxically, the incidence of hunger and malnutrition is highest in the very communities that produce much of the world’s food.

Urbanization seems bound to further widen these gaps. Cash remittances sent by first-generation local and international migrants to their relations back home help, but are usually modest in scale.

Policies to eliminate rural poverty must respond to locally expressed priorities for improved access to infrastructure and public services, including competent and honest local government institutions. They also need to include social protection programmes, ideally based on regular and predictable cash transfers to the poorest households, ensuring that all people are, at the very least, able to eat healthily and cope with periods of shortages.

The European Union has endorsed the principle of addressing the root causes of migration from Africa to Europe and, at a November 2015 summit in Malta, declared that investing in rural development is a priority. However, the EU’s nearly 30 members approved only EUR1.8 billion in extra resources. This is trivial, given the scale of poverty. It is about a quarter of what they offered Turkey to stem the flow of migrants into Europe.

Andrew MacMillan

The link between the reduction of extreme deprivation and peace was acknowledged by FAO’s founders in 1945 when they wrote:
“Progress towards freedom from want is essential to lasting peace, for it is a condition of freedom from the tensions, arising out of economic maladjustment, profound discontent, and a sense of injustice which are so dangerous in the close community of modern nations.” (**) FAO today is guided by these principles in its ongoing work in rebuilding food security and creating greater resilience in countries torn apart by conflict.

Remittances and aid can help reduce inequalities but a more sustainable way of closing the urban-rural gap is offered by fairer trading in food, the main saleable output of most rural communities. When consumers begin to pay food prices that reward producers fairly for their investments, skills, risk exposure and labour, and for their responsible stewardship of natural resources, the market can become the main vehicle for eradicating the extreme deprivation and hunger that “push” migration. (***)

This move towards fairer food prices would be a first step towards harnessing the great power offered by the processes of globalization to create a world in which all people know they can, through their work, lead a decent life even when they choose to live where they were born.

(*) See OECD (2015), International Migration Outlook 2015, OECD Publishing, Paris

(**) See United Nations Interim Committee on Food and Agriculture, The Work of FAO, Washington DC, 1945

(***) Contrary to most predictions, the food price rises of 2008 and 2011 reduced extreme poverty in the long term in both rural and urban communities. See Headey, D., Food Prices and Poverty Reduction in the Long Run, IFPRI Discussion Paper 01331, Washington DC, 2014

Excerpt:

By Andrew MacMillan
ROME, Jan 13 2015 (IPS)

About a week ago my wife was taken to hospital and diagnosed with pneumonia. She was promptly treated with antibiotics and, wonderfully, is now on the mend.

What has struck me about this experience is not so much the high professionalism of the health workers or their up-to-date hospital equipment but the fact that she has become immersed in what can best be described as “a culture of caring”.

Andrew MacMillan

She and the other patients in her ward are looked after round the clock by an extraordinary team of state-employed nurses in a quiet, efficient and courteous way that inspires confidence.

I suppose that there is nothing particularly unusual about this. Caring for others is a very natural human trait. Everywhere, mothers care for their children; sons and daughters care for their aging parents; and neighbours rush to help each other when they hit problems.

Perhaps, however, “modern” societies – if one dares to generalise about them – are driven more by the quest for individual material wealth than by any widely expressed wish to do things for the general good of humanity.

Unless you live in Bhutan, your country’s performance is measured not in terms of the happiness of its people but by the growth of its Gross Domestic Product; bankers and businessmen reward themselves with salary bonuses rather than with extra time with their families; and those who enjoy the highest pinnacles of wealth vie with each other over the size of their fleet of private jets or the tonnage of their personal yachts.

The idiosyncrasies of the super-rich and celebrities would not matter much if they had not become the new role models for people who aspire to “do well” in life and if their wealth did not entitle them to a voice in the corridors of world power. It seems odd that Presidents and Prime Ministers flock each year in January to [the World Economic Forum in] Davos to rub shoulders with the rich and famous, but perhaps this is simply a tacit admission of the influence that the latter have.“I believe that most people, at heart, want to see globalisation bring greater fairness and justice
even if this comes at the partial expense of our own material well-being”

Much of the recent material gains all around the planet is the result of the processes of globalisation that have successfully combined inventiveness, capital, low-cost but increasingly skilled labour and cheap transportation in new ways that have flooded the world’s markets with an amazing array of tantalising goods.

This apparent success of globalisation, however, may distract political attention from the idea that it could perhaps work better in everyone’s interest.

It seems absurd that 6 billion mobile phones have been produced and sold but 800 million people still go hungry every day; that, as people travel further, faster and more frequently, diseases such as Ebola spread more rapidly and more widely but the institutions responsible for protecting us from increased threats remain desperately under-funded; and that governments hesitate to upset their voters by acting to trim greenhouse gas emissions while, as predicted, the increasing frequency of extreme weather events is repeatedly wreaking havoc upon the unfortunate.

We tend to take these problems for granted rather than face up to the need to identify how to best manage globalisation in the interests of humanity.

I believe that most people, at heart, want to see globalisation bring greater fairness and justice even if this comes at the partial expense of our own material well-being.

I do not think that there are many people who, if asked, would want to see others starve for lack of food, who welcome greater weather instability or who think that it is right that their children should suffer from the environmental damage that results from our unsustainable lifestyles.

In a sense, President Lula of Brazil put this idea to the test during his successful 2002 campaign. Breaking out of the normal political mould, he did not promise his voters higher incomes but simply pledged that all Brazilians would enjoy three meals a day by the end of his term in office.

He unveiled his Zero Hunger Programme on his first day as President, with the State assuming the responsibility for assuring that all the poorest families in the country could fulfil their right to food. There was huge outpouring of popular support for his efforts to create the more just and equitable society that has now emerged.

What many of us would like to see is the emergence of a new international consciousness of social justice similar to that proposed by Lula and embraced by Brazilians twelve years ago.

It must be founded on a growing public recognition of the unique role that multilateral institutions have to play in ensuring that globalisation is harnessed to benefit all people, especially the poorest of the poor. It must also assure greater inter-generational fairness in the use of our planet’s scarce resources.

Nowhere is the need for greater fairness more apparent than in the realm of food management – where we face a crazy situation in which, though ample food is produced, the health of more than half the world’s population is now damaged by bad nutrition.

It is fitting that the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, should have launched his personal “Zero Hunger Challenge” in Brazil in 2012 when he called for the elimination of hunger “within my lifetime”.

The fact that the current Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) – the United Nations agency that that oversees global food management – is José Graziano da Silva, who was the Brazilian architect of Lula’s Zero Hunger Programme, inspires confidence that it will do all in its power to bring about a world without hunger.

We can already see a renewed FAO in action – committed to ending hunger and malnutrition, more focused in its goals, working as one and embracing partnerships for a better present and future. Four more years will allow Graziano da Silva to consolidate the transformations he has begun and realise their full effect to the benefit of the world´s poor and hungry.

Hopefully 2015 will be a year in which the world’s leaders will become the champions of the justice and fairness – the caring society that my wife has experienced – to which so many of us aspire.

At the very least, they should pick up the thought that, as in Brazil, it should be a perfectly normal function of any self-respecting government to ensure that all its people can eat healthily.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By Andrew MacMillan
ROME, Jun 25 2014 (IPS)

The choice of foods displayed on supermarket shelves can be quite bewildering. This abundance encourages us to take it for granted that we will always be able to buy the food we want at affordable prices.

Any customers who give thought to how and where all the different foods are produced and end up in their shopping trolleys will start to uncover a rather disturbing situation.

They will find that in most countries, people working at all levels in the food system – in supermarkets, in meat processing and packing plants, as fruit harvesters or farm labourers, or as waitresses in fast-food restaurants – are among the worst paid of all workers.

Andrew MacMillan

They will discover that many of the skilled families that run the small-scale farms that produce most of the world’s food live precariously  They are exposed to multiple risks caused by fluctuating markets, pests and diseases and extreme weather problems, whether frosts, hailstorms, floods, typhoons or droughts.

They will also learn that in most developing countries hunger is heavily concentrated in rural areas, where some 70 percent of the world’s 842 million chronically hungry people live, largely dependent on farming, fishing and forestry. Much urban poverty results from people fleeing rural deprivation. And many of the conflicts that threaten global stability have their origins in areas of extreme poverty.

It seems dreadfully wrong that the very people who produce so much of our food should be those who suffer most from deep poverty and food shortages.

One reason for this apparently unjust situation is what economists call asymmetrical relationships in the food chain. For instance, supermarkets engage in cut-throat competition for customers by lowering their prices, reducing what they pay to their suppliers who, in turn, cut back on their workers’ pay.

Most governments like to keep food prices “affordable”, claiming that it makes food accessible to poor families, thereby preventing hunger and malnutrition. The main policy instruments used by rich and emerging nations include tax-funded subsidies that compensate their farmers for low-priced food sales. They also set low taxes on most foods.“It seems dreadfully wrong that the very people who produce so much of our food should be those who suffer most from deep poverty and food shortages”

The idea that low food prices will reduce the scale of the hunger problem is flawed since the main reason for people being hungry is that they cannot afford the food they need, even when prices are low.

Rather than, as now, shielding all consumers from paying a full and fair price for food, it seems to make more sense to let prices rise and increase the food buying power of the poor. As Fair Trade customers have discovered, higher retail prices can be passed back to all those involved in the food production chain, especially farm labourers. They probably offer the best market-driven option for cutting rural poverty and hunger.

But to eliminate hunger quickly, income transfers, targeted on poor families and with their value indexed to food prices, are also needed, at least until countries begin to manage their economies more equitably.

Policies that support low food prices, apart from exacerbating rural hunger, also add momentum to the other big food-related problems now facing the world, including:

• The serious mismatch between healthy diets and what people choose to eat as their incomes rise. This is most visible in the rapid rise in over-consumption of food, leading to more than 1.5 billion people being overweight or obese, creating a massive future health burden and huge losses in human productivity. It also shows up in the fast growth in demand for foods with high environmental footprints;

• The horrendous wastage of food at retail and household level, amounting to about 30% of output in industrialised countries (or more than the total annual net food production of Africa!);

• The rapid expansion of non-sustainable intensive farming systems. These are placing huge stresses on the increasingly scarce natural resources needed by future generations to meet their food needs – soils, fresh water, forests, marine fish stocks and biodiversity. They are also stoking the processes of climate change by generating large green-house gas emissions.

Many people think that the big food challenge for the future will be to produce enough to feed the hungry. Closing the hunger gap for over 800 million fellow humans, however, can be done today if we are willing to take direct measures to improve food access.

When I calculated what this would take, I was surprised to find that enabling all the world’s hungry to rise above the hunger threshold would raise demand by under 2 percent of present global food production.

Others see population growth as the main concern. Birth rates are dropping fast, but obviously further reductions will make the task of feeding the world easier. Interestingly, much of the growth in the number of mouths to feed – from 7 billion now to 9 billion in 2050 – will come from people living longer, the positive result of better hygiene, health and education.

The reality is that we who already have more than enough to eat and those who expect to emulate our unhealthy diets as their incomes rise are the main culprits, accounting for about half of the 60 percent increase in food demand forecast by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) for 2050!

What seems to be needed now is to mainstream the concepts of fairness, healthy eating and sustainability throughout the food management system. We could usefully adopt the aspiration of the Slow Food movement that “all people can access and enjoy food that is good for them, good for those who grow it and good for the planet.”

Already many developing countries, inspired by the success of Brazil’s Zero Hunger programme, are starting to move in these directions. They are linking expanded social protection for poor families and the buying of food for school lunches to the promotion of small-scale sustainable farm development.

But industrialised countries must also deliver on their responsibilities for cutting their negative impacts on food management which hurt not only their people but also the rest of the world. A first move could be to redirect existing farm subsidies towards promoting healthy eating, cutting food wastage, and accelerating the necessary shift to farming systems that are truly sustainable from technical, environmental and social perspectives.

Rises in retail food prices would be part of the adjustment process, with consumers meeting a progressively rising share of “full and fair” production costs. Though they may complain, this should be readily affordable for the hundreds of millions of people who typically spend less than 20 percent of their disposable income on food. It will also be accessible for poorer families when they are served, as we propose, by expanded social protection.

If you think about it, it is a small price to pay for a healthier and safer world for us and our children! (END/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Excerpt:

By Andrew MacMillan
SCANSANO, Italia, Nov 10 2009 (IPS)

It is scandalous that in a world of ample food supplies, over one billion people face constant hunger -and the number is still rising. What makes matters worse is that we know how to end hunger, and yet few governments are doing so.

Brazil’s Zero Hunger programme shows that it is possible to make very rapid progress towards eliminating hunger and malnutrition.

While the world committed itself to halving hunger by 2015, Brazil set out to eradicate it as quickly as possible. The halving target condemns millions to a lifetime of utter misery, ill-health, and social exclusion. Going for eradication creates a sense of urgency and triggers immediate action.

From his first day in office in January 2003, President Lula made hunger eradication his top priority. The full impact of Zero Hunger will only be felt when today’s children grow up. But there are already many signs that it is moving in the right direction. Brazil tops the list in ActionAid International’s recent scorecard of countries fighting hunger. It is not only improving nutrition on a vast scale but also stimulating economic growth where it is most needed, in the poorest corners of the country. And it is enabling millions of Brazilians to begin to play their full part in the life of their nation.

In just 6 years, infant mortality fell by 73 percent and the number of people in extreme poverty dropped by 48 percent.

Brazil’s success shows what can be done by combining strong political commitment to an unambiguous goal; institutional reforms that lead central, state, and local governments to work together within a common strategy; and the full engagement of civil society.

Zero Hunger balances immediate measures to relieve suffering with fundamental reforms to address the underlying reasons for people being hungry in the first place. Lasting solutions are based on the formal recognition of the human right to food. They involve managing the economy more equitably, improving income distribution, broadening employment opportunities, raising minimum wages, and enabling more people to have access to land.

Zero Hunger, however, also recognises that, as in many other countries, the immediate cause of hunger is not lack of food. It is the fact that, even when economic growth is strong, many families simply cannot buy it. This recognition led to launching a monthly cash transfer programme that enables almost 12 million of the country’s poorest families to buy the food they need for a healthy life. By linking these grants to children’s school attendance and regular health checks, it ensures that the young are better fed, educated and healthy. An expanded school meals programme reinforces these effects.

Brazil is showing how the twin-track approach to hunger reduction, recommended by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), can be put into practice. It calls pairing immediate measures to improve access to food with an expansion in food output, especially by small-scale farmers. The increased demand for food stimulated by cash transfers is expanding markets for the output of Brazil’s family farmers, including the million who have benefited from land reform and are themselves vulnerable to food insecurity.

This support for small-scale farming is reinforced by targeted credit programmes and by state-run food procurement for emergency and institutional feeding programmes.

Zero Hunger demonstrates the vital role that direct action against hunger can play in reducing poverty and increasing the resilience of the poor to shocks. This has been very evident during the current economic crisis. Zero Hunger has enabled almost all Brazilians to enjoy a guaranteed income and access to essential food. It has also helped to sustain domestic consumption levels, which is one of the reasons why Brazil was able to overcome the crisis more quickly than many other countries.

The World Summit on Food Security, convened by FAO in Rome from November 16-18, will provide an opportunity for all governments to follow Brazil’s example and commit themselves to eradicating hunger -for once and forever.

In the last two Food Summits, in 1996 and 2002, heads of state made bold promises, but most have failed miserably to deliver on their commitments. Hopefully this time, when the presidents, queens, kings and prime ministers go home, they will, like Lula, launch their own Zero Hunger programmes and help other countries to do likewise.

But history suggests that unless their people demand urgent action on hunger, many leaders will forget their pledges. There is thus a need for a global campaign built on growing popular understanding of the scandal of hunger and malnutrition to galvanise leaders to declare their commitment publicly and agree to be held accountable.

If they do, the world will be a better -and safer- place for all. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Andrew MacMillan, rural economist and former Director of the Field Operations Divison of FAO.

Excerpt: