Eight decades ago, during the Great Depression, newly elected U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt introduced the New Deal consisting of a number of mutually supporting initiatives of which the most prominent were:

• A public works programme financed by deficit financing
• A new social contract to improve living standards for working families, and
• Regulation of financial markets to protect assets of ordinary citizens and to channel financial resources into productive investment.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram. UN Photo/Mark Garten

Today, we are in the midst of another protracted economic slowdown. The world needs a New Deal, which is both global and sustainable. The current system and crisis are global in nature, requiring a corresponding response.

It also has to be sustainable. We are in the midst of economic, social and environmental crises, with global warming looming larger. We are also threatened by pollution, natural resource degradation, loss of forests and biodiversity, as well as socio-political instability due to growing disparities.

The Global Green New Deal (GGND) should move all to a different, sustainable developmental pathway – in the spirit of Rio. The GGND should have ingredients similar to the original New Deal – namely public works employment, social protection, and increased productive investments for output and job recovery.

After half a decade of economic contraction and stagnation, with even developing countries slowing down recently, it is urgent to prioritise economic recovery measures, and not to expect recovery at the expense of others. The GGND should be part of a broader counter-cyclical response with three main elements.

First, national stimulus packages in developed and developing countries aiming to revive and green national economies. Second, international policy coordination to ensure that developed countries’ stimulus packages generate jobs in the North and strong developmental impacts in developing countries. Third, greater financial support for developing countries, as with the Marshall Plan.

Such investments should lead to the revival of growth that is both ecologically sustainable and socially inclusive. Support for agriculture should be an important feature of national stimulus packages in developing countries, with special attention to promote climate smart and ecologically sustainable agriculture.

After a half century of decline, except in the mid-1970s, real agricultural commodity prices were rising from about a decade ago. The recent price trend reflects yield growth slowing in recent years, while demand continued to grow rapidly. Rising incomes have increased food demand for humans and animal husbandry, while demand for biofuels has expanded rapidly in the last decade.

Higher and more volatile food prices threaten the food security and nutrition of billions. Prices were increasingly volatile for over half a decade, with successively higher peaks in 2007-08, 2010-11 and 2012. “Financialisation” – linking markets for commodity derivatives with other financial assets – also worsened price volatility.

Coordination and collaboration

Creating jobs in developed countries with strong developmental impacts should be part of developed countries’ stimulus packages. Over the longer term, reforms of the international financial and multilateral trading systems should support sustainable development.

Until recently, official development assistance for agricultural development in developing countries had declined for decades. Meanwhile, rich countries have continued to subsidise and protect their farmers, undermining food production in developing countries.

Food security should be treated as a global public good since the political and social consequences of food insecurity has global ramifications. Hence, there should be a multilateral response to ensure food security.

The Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s – with considerable government and international not-for-profit support – greatly increased crop yields and food production, reducing hunger, starvation and poverty. However, efforts for wheat, maize and rice were not extended to other food crops.

We need a second generation Green Revolution to promote sustainable, including ‘climate smart’ agriculture, especially for water-stressed, arid areas. Public investments – with international assistance – must provide the incentives and other support needed to increase family farm investments.

Many other complementary interventions are urgently needed. Food security cannot be achieved without much better social protection. Resources are needed to strengthen social protection for billions in developing countries to ensure decent employment, food security and more sustainable development.

But sustainable social protection requires major improvements in public finances. While revenue generation requires greater national incomes, tax collection can still be greatly enhanced through improved international cooperation on tax and other international financial matters.

Clearly, the agenda for a Global Green New Deal requires not only bold new national developmental initiatives, but also far better and more equitable multilateral cooperation offered by a strong revival of the inclusive multilateralism of the United Nations system.

Jomo Kwame Sundaram is Assistant Director General and Coordinator for Economic and Social Development at the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations.

Many farmers will be forced to adapt to a changing climate. Geoffrey Ndung’u, from Kanyonga village in semi-arid Eastern Kenya, earns a living growing watermelons on his dry land. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Lester R. Brown
WASHINGTON, Aug 21 2013 (IPS)

Agriculture as it exists today developed over 11,000 years of rather remarkable climate stability. It has evolved to maximize production within that climate system. Now, suddenly, the climate is changing. With each passing year, the agricultural system is becoming more out of sync with the climate system.

In generations past, when there was an extreme weather event, such as a monsoon failure in India, a severe drought in Russia, or an intense heat wave in the U.S. Corn Belt, we knew that things would shortly return to normal. But today there is no ‘normal’ to return to. The earth’s climate is now in a constant state of flux, making it both unreliable and unpredictable.

Since 1970, the earth’s average temperature has risen more than one degree Fahrenheit. If we continue with business as usual, burning ever more oil, coal, and natural gas, it is projected to rise some 11 degrees Fahrenheit (six degrees Celsius) by the end of this century. The rise will be uneven. It will be much greater in the higher latitudes than in the equatorial regions, greater over land than over oceans, and greater in continental interiors than in coastal regions.

As the earth’s temperature rises, it affects agriculture in many ways. High temperatures interfere with pollination and reduce photosynthesis of basic food crops. High temperatures can also dehydrate plants. When a corn plant curls its leaves to reduce exposure to the sun, photosynthesis is reduced.

The earth’s rising temperature also affects crop yields indirectly via the melting of mountain glaciers. As the larger glaciers shrink and the smaller ones disappear, the ice melt that sustains rivers, and the irrigation systems dependent on them, will diminish. The continuing loss of mountain glaciers and the resulting reduced meltwater runoff could create unprecedented water shortages and political instability in some of the world’s more densely populated countries.

Scientists also expect higher temperatures to bring more drought – witness the dramatic increase in the land area affected by drought in recent decades. A team of scientists at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in the United States reported that the earth’s land area experiencing very dry conditions expanded from well below 20 percent from the 1950s to the 1970s to closer to 25 percent in recent years.

As the earth’s temperature rises, scientists expect heat waves to be both more frequent and more intense. Stated otherwise, crop-shrinking heat waves will now become part of the agricultural landscape. Among other things, this means that the world should increase its carryover stocks of grain to provide adequate food security.

From “Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity” by Lester R. Brown (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.) Supporting data, video, and slideshows are available for free download at www.earth-policy.org/books/fpep.

Despite a sudden increase in July this year, prices of cereals on world markets remained fairly stable. But there are no grounds for complacency, as cereals markets remain vulnerable to supply shocks and disruptive policy measures. In this context, the good harvests that are expected in the Southern Hemisphere are important.

José Graziano da Silva, director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO). Credit: FAO News

In the last ten years we have seen major changes in the behaviour of food prices. Up until around 2002 real food prices were falling but they have now been above trend for longer than at any other time in the previous forty years.

Food prices have also been volatile and the combination of high and volatile food prices will continue to challenge the ability of consumers, producers and governments to cope with the consequences.

All this makes it timely to reflect on recent price events and the reactions of the international community, especially since price volatility is likely to continue for the foreseeable future.

Set against this backdrop, the Ministerial Meeting on Food Price Volatility held on World Food Day on Oct. 16 was particularly relevant.

Twenty-five ministers and 13 deputy ministers met to discuss the issues and exchange views on how to strengthen measures to contain food price volatility and to reduce its impact on the most vulnerable populations.

The meeting recognised that a lot was learned from the 2007-8 and 2010-11 price hikes about appropriate responses at international, regional and national levels. They also agreed that much more could be done based on the Action Plan on Food Price Volatility and Agriculture that was adopted by the G20 leaders in November 2011.

This action plan launched major international initiatives, in particular the Agricultural Market Information System (AMIS), hosted at the headquarters of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). AMIS monitors developments based on the latest available information, analysing the global supply/demand situation and providing objective assessments.

Born just one year ago, AMIS is already a fully functioning mechanism and played a key role this summer in calming markets and preventing the deterioration of a vulnerable food market situation into the potential crisis that countless commentators were so quick to predict.

AMIS is providing an objective assessment of the market situation and risks, while calling on G20 member states to refrain from adopting policy measures that might further destablise markets.

This experience shows that coordinated international action and enhanced transparency and information on agricultural markets can make a difference in limiting food price spikes and excessive volatility.

Even when they are affected by adverse weather conditions that reduce production and export capacity, it is important that governments of exporting countries act transparently and dialogue with commercial actors to assure local availability of cereals without creating uncertainty in international markets.

This coordination is crucial because it can stop a drought or a flood from becoming a crisis.

Other actions to limit price spikes and excessive volatility ­ adjustments to trade rules, the creation of emergency food reserves, reform of biofuel policies and control of speculation ­ are all still works in progress. ‘Excessive’ is the keyword, because some degree of volatility is a characteristic of agricultural markets.

Action also needs to be taken to build resilience to that volatility in the medium-term.

This requires substantially increased investment in agricultural production with a particular emphasis on support to smallholder farmers.

Financing will need to come primarily from the private sector including smallholders themselves and major companies. This is a controversial area and concerns, especially over large-scale land investments, are well founded.

It is vital that any investment is made responsibly and for the benefit of all stakeholders. This is where the Principles for Responsible Investment in Agriculture, which will be discussed by the Committee on World Food Security (CFS), and the Voluntary Guidelines on Land Tenure previously endorsed by the CFS, have an important role to play.

FAO is prepared to assist governments in implementation of these safety measures. AMIS, Voluntary Guidelines and the Principles for Responsible Investments are all elements of the new global governance on food security that we are building, and that has the CFS as its cornerstone. We are making up for lost time, as food security governance was neglected until a few years ago. Fortunately we are learning that, in a globalised world, it is impossible to ensure food security in a single country or region. (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

*Jose Graziano da Silva is the director-general of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).