World Food Summit

U.N. Says Food Plan Could Cost $30 Billion a Year

Faced with an immediate hunger crisis and the need to double food production in the next 30 years, world leaders meeting Tuesday to discuss soaring food prices were mostly in agreement on how the problem could be resolved. The questions were how to get there and who was going to pay for it.

The steps needed? Immediately deliver more food aid to the world’s hungry. Provide small farmers with seeds and fertilizer. Scrap export bans and restrictions. And vastly increase agriculture research and outreach programs to improve crop production.

The cost? Jacques Diouf, director general of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the host of the meeting, estimated it could run to $30 billion a year. “The problem of food insecurity is a political one,” he said. “It is a question of priorities in the face of the most fundamental of human needs. And it is those choices made by governments that determine the allocation of resources.”

As expected, biofuels emerged as the most contentious issue of the conference, and several speakers criticized government policies that diverted food crops to energy use, particularly at a time of increasing hunger.
President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt called for “an urgent international dialogue” on the food crisis that “sets standards for the responsible utilization of agricultural crops as food for human beings, not as fuel for human beings.” He suggested that biofuel production be restricted to agricultural waste and nonfood crops.

Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, also took a swipe at the United States’ ethanol production, saying that corn-based ethanol could “obviously only compete with sugar-cane ethanol when it is shot up with subsidies and shielded behind tariff barriers.” Brazil and the United States are the world’s largest producers of ethanol. Most of Brazil’s ethanol comes from sugar cane and most in the United States comes from corn. “There is good ethanol and bad ethanol,” he said, adding that ethanol from sugar cane was far more energy efficient than corn ethanol. “Good ethanol helps clean up the planet and is competitive. Bad ethanol comes with the fat of subsidies.”

The United States’ agriculture secretary, Ed Schafer, who attended the meeting, dismissed the criticism, saying Brazil could be planting food crops like corn and soybeans on the acres it devotes to sugar cane from ethanol. “They’re choosing to grow sugar cane, and we choose to grow corn,” said Mr. Schafer, who maintains that ethanol has played a minor role in food inflation. “I don’t understand the distinction.”

The three-day conference drew dozens of world leaders, like President Nicolas Sarkozy of France and Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda of Japan, to discuss food security. Food prices are at their highest in more than three decades and stockpiles are at perilous lows.

The reasons for the rise in food prices include weather problems that reduced crop yields, growing demand for food among the emerging middle class in China and other developing countries, and the increasing production of ethanol and other biofuels.

Mr. Diouf of the Food and Agriculture Organization sharply criticized wealthy nations for cutting spending on agricultural programs for the world’s poor, while spending billions of dollars on carbon markets, subsidies for their own farmers, weapons and biofuel production. “The developing countries did, in fact, forge policies, strategies and programs that — if they had received appropriate funding — would have given us world food security,” Mr. Diouf said, adding that countries had finally mobilized to help only after images of food riots and hunger emerged in the news media.

Susan Shepherd of Doctors Without Borders said that in Niger, where she has worked for the past few years, higher prices meant that families bought less food — or less nutritious food — for their children. “The only one who really focused on hunger and malnutrition — about the people who go hungry — was the pope,” she said, referring to a message from Pope Benedict XVI that was read at the conference.

New York Times

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BACK in 1996 and again in 2002, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation arranged summits to reverse the miserable condition of world farming. They failed. This week yet another food summit got under way, in Rome. It takes place when, for the first time in a generation, there is widespread acceptance that something is needed beyond windy promises. But what?

Joachim von Braun, the head of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), a Washington, DC, research group financed by governments, sees several things that the world food conference should do.

1, First, it needs to finance the world’s food-aid shortfall. Earlier this year, the World Food Programme (WFP), the main agency handing out emergency relief, put out an all-points bulletin asking for over $750m to offset the impact of higher cereals prices. Last week, it completed its fund-raising, thanks to an extraordinary gift of $500m from Saudi Arabia. Unlike most offers of “new money”, this turned out not to be old promises repackaged.

2,Next, the conference could help to rationalise biofuels policy. It probably won’t. Some non-governmental organisations want a moratorium on ethanol production. Even some big food companies would support something milder, such as international restrictions on producing ethanol from maize. In practice, the Rome conference cannot discuss even that. Just before it began, America’s secretary of agriculture, Ed Schafer, claimed that ethanol accounts for only 3%, at most, of the increase in world food prices—a highly contentious view, and one that is likely to leave the summit split and paralysed over biofuels.

3, The conference could come also up with some short-term fixes to bring down world prices. The most obvious such fix would be to reduce export bans, imposed by about 40 countries. A study by IFPRI calculates that getting rid of these would reduce world cereals prices by an average of 30%. Here, there is some good news. Vietnam has promised to resume some of its rice exports; Kazakhstan has done the same with wheat; India has said it will restart rice exports to some African countries. Summits have a way of persuading heads of state not to beggar their neighbours, so the Rome one could encourage more such promises.

“The underlying problem,” says Lennart Båge, the head of the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development, “is the decline in agricultural productivity growth. Unless we reverse that, we’ll be back in the same situation in a few years' time.”

4, A world trade deal on agriculture. Japan’s prime minister, Yasuo Fukuda, called on everyone to “smooth trade in agricultural products”, which sounds waffly but since any action will have to come at the next meeting of the G8 group of rich countries and since he will chair the meeting, it may count for something.
5, But most important, the Rome meeting could make a start on the main task of farming: a second green revolution. Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, suggests that world food production needs to rise by half by 2030 to satisfy growing demand. Behind the scenes, countries are preparing an avalanche of promises to help finance research into new seeds, build irrigation canals and spread fertiliser use (seeds, irrigation and fertilisers were the main components of the first green revolution of the 1960s). These promises could be the main achievements of the Rome summit. But they will be flawed and partial.

Economist