By Tracy Sorensen
Are United Nations agencies in the Third World neutral providers of technical expertise, or do they follow a political agenda that may conflict with their stated goals?
This question has been sharply posed in regard to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, subjected to searing criticism of its policies by the British Ecologist magazine. Rather than ameliorating world hunger, argue the influential magazine's editors, the FAO has promoted policies which have made things worse.
The Ecologist originally set out its case in its March/April 1991 edition. In an open letter to FAO director-general Eduoard Saouma, it announced that it was launching a campaign to urge member states to withhold payments from FAO "pending a radical reappraisal of its policies and a complete restructuring of its organisation".
The letter, written by Ecologist editor Nicholas Hildyard, pointed out that, despite a 1974 UN commitment to eliminate hunger within the decade, by 1991 there were "more people starving than at any time in human history, the environment is more degraded than ever and conditions for growing food have never been less propitious".
The massive human tragedy was not the result of a lack of resources, or the failure of traditional farmers to modernise vigorously enough. It was largely the result of FAO policies.
Hildyard told Saouma: "Whether in agriculture, in forestry, or in aquiculture, you have promoted policies which benefit the rich and powerful at the expense of the livelihoods of the poor. Policies that are, in effect, systematically creating the conditions for mass starvation."
The open letter was signed by 41 major environment and development groups from around the world, including Friends of the Earth, the US Sierra Club and the Transnational Institute. It was followed by a series of articles detailing the case against the FAO.
The crux of the criticism, elaborated by FAO insiders writing under pen-names and internationally renowned ecologists such as Vandana Shiva of the Research Centre for Science and Ecology, is that the FAO has aligned itself with multinational agro-chemical companies and Third World political elites against the interests of increasingly marginalised peasant farmers.
The ecologists noted that the FAO's power came not so much from the funds it controls, although these were substantial, as from the role the organisation played in providing technical advice and assistance. This "assistance", argued the Ecologist's writers, often involved the destruction of traditional farming techniques and pendence on an increasing array of expensive external inputs.
In many countries, new strains of "high yield" seeds, for example, had replaced seeds set aside from current crops. The new seeds, in turn, generated plants responsive to increasing amounts of chemical fertilisers and requiring increased use of dangerous pesticides (often banned in the West). Poor farmers were slipping further into debt, while the promised bounty — expanded food production — shifted further out of sight in a welter of ecological disasters.
Vandana Shiva's article damned the celebrated "Green Revolution", a strategy for agricultural development in the Third World which took shape within the international aid agencies and large US foundations in the 1960s.
She wrote: "Alarmed by growing peasant unrest in the newly independent countries of Asia, agencies like the World Bank, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the US Agency for International Development and others looked towards the intensification of agriculture as a means of 'stabilizing' the countryside — and in particular of defusing the call for a wider redistribution of land and other resources".
By the 1980s, it was clear the strategy was a failure. It had led, wrote Shiva, to reduced genetic diversity, increased vulnerability to pests, soil erosion, water shortages, reduced availability of nutritious food crops for the local population, the displacement of vast numbers of small farmers from their land, rural impoverishment and increased tensions and conflicts.
The beneficiaries had been the agro-chemical industry, large petrochemical companies, manufacturers of agricultural machinery, dam builders and large landowners.
Other writers in the special edition of the Ecologist outlined the damage being wrought by the drive to expand cash crops at the expense of local self-sufficiency in food; the destruction of tropical rainforests associated with an FAO policy for the "transfer" of land from forest to agriculture; and the organisation's "blind spot" on the issues of global warming and ozone depletion.
The Ecologist concluded its special edition with a declaration from the International Movement for Ecological Agriculture, which stressed that alternatives to current mainstream international aid and development policies do exist, many of which combine "the insights of modern holistic science with the wisdom of traditional practices".
These alternatives included permaculture, organic farming, no-tillage systems and systems employing companion planting. The declaration noted that their success would "depend critically on addressing the wider social, economic and political forces that underlie hunger", and not a simple return to the past: "One should not forget that the slave plantations of the past used non-chemical systems of agriculture."
The Ecologist printed a reply from the FAO in its November/December 1991 issue. The FAO statement pointed out that the organisation was not a "Global Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry with the power to set policies and programmes". Instead, the FAO was guided by its members, all of which were sovereign states.
"FAO's role is to act as a catalyst by providing advice and guidelines on policy, to serve as a neutral forum for global accords and to offer the technical assistance that member countries need to implement their food, agricultural and rural development policies."
While the FAO reply admitted there might be "room for improvement", it added that the organisation was essentially "sound, solid, innovative and dynamic", and denied that fundamental changes were needed.
The Ecologist renewed the attack by presenting a new article by Hildyard, "Sustaining the Hunger Machine", in the same issue. The article was scathing about the FAO's increasing use of green rhetoric, arguing that the organisation's new Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Development (SARD) strategy differed little from past policies.
Hildyard: "Quite apart from the ecological damage that intensification (as promoted by SARD) would cause, the problem is not simply one of inadequate output but rather of the denial of access to food and the means to produce it: people are starving and malnourished because the production and distribution of food has become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, primarily as a consequence of the very process of intensification that SARD seeks to extend."