BY SEAN HEALY
While trade bureaucrats from the rich countries begin negotiations in Geneva to extend the World Trade Organisation's Agreement on Agriculture, a new report released by the United Nation's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) shows that little is being done to reduce the numbers of hungry people in the world.
The FAO's The state of food insecurity in the world, 2000, released on September 15, warns that the pledge made at the 1996 World Food Summit to halve the number of hungry people by 2015 will not be achieved until 2030 at least. "Hungry people cannot wait another 15 years", the report states.
It estimates 826 million people do not get enough to eat each day, a number which has not changed since last year. The great majority of these people, 792 million, live in the Third World.
The number of hungry people was declining by eight million a year in the early 1990s, the FAO states, before slowing more recently. If the World Food Summit's pledge is to be realised, the number of hungry people must decline by 20 million.
Other FAO figures indicate that in the 48 least developed countries (LDCs), the percentage of undernourished people, 38%, has barely changed since the early 1970s.
War, drought and natural disaster were major reasons for the depths of hunger experienced in many of the 18 worst-affected countries. Somalia, Ethiopia, Liberia, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, the Democratic Republic of Congo, among others, have all suffered catastrophic dislocation in the countryside, as hundreds of thousands have been forced off the land and into refugee camps.
But such reasons cannot explain the prevalence of hunger in other, more peaceful, parts of the world, where economies and agricultural sectors continue to function.
The global food problem is not one of insufficient agricultural production but of inadequate distribution. According to the Berkeley, US-based progressive think-tank Food First, there is enough food to feed everyone in the world: two kilograms of food per person per day, by its calculations. An FAO technical report, released in July, predicts that food production will outstrip population growth for at least the next 30 years.
Meanwhile, 78% of countries reporting child malnourishment export food.
Food First's co-director Anuradha Mittal, writing in the September 15 Washington Post, explained: "A third of the world's 800 million hungry live in my country, India, where the number of the hungry and malnourished has been steadily rising. At the same time India is faced with an unmanageable food glut. From a food grain surplus of 10 million tons in 1999, the stocks have multiplied to 42 million tons. Instead of distributing the surplus among those who desperately need it, the government either wants to find an export market or release it in the open market."
Commercialisation
The stubborn prevalence of hunger is an indictment of the commercialisation of world agricultural production, embodied in the WTO's Agreement on Agriculture (AoA), which has proven incapable of feeding the needy and has worsened food insecurity and dependence for the poorest countries.
Nevertheless, the major world powers look set to expand this commercialisation. While the collapse of trade talks in Seattle in November has prevented a comprehensive new "Millennium Round" of trade liberalisation agreements, negotiations on two of the most controversial agreements, the AoA and the General Agreement on Trade in Services, are under way in any case.
The WTO Secretariat is currently receiving submissions from member-countries on agenda items for talks on the AoA and is expected to kick off a review and then substantive talks early next year.
Already, the battle lines repeat those in the initial talks on the AoA: on the one side, the United States and the Cairns Group of agricultural exporters (which includes Australia) demanding faster liberalisation; on the other, Europe and Japan demanding their high tariff walls against agricultural imports be allowed to remain; and on the sidelines, their demands ignored, the poor countries which will suffer most.
The AoA aimed to replace all countries' non-tariff barriers (such as quotas on particular food imports) with tariffs (a tax on imports) and to then steadily reduce the tariffs of all countries except the least developed. It was also supposed to reduce other means of support, such as export subsidies.
When it was signed in 1994, the developed countries <197. the "North" — promised the underdeveloped "South" that agricultural liberalisation would offer them the best of all possible worlds: easier access to rich markets for their produce, more competitive domestic agricultural sectors, cheaper food, compensation for those that would be (temporarily) hit. What they received was the exact opposite, the worst of all possible worlds.
Greater market access turned out to be a cruel hoax. Rich countries have begun to reduce their Aggregate Measurements of Support (the official figure of how much they assist their own agricultural industries), in line with their AoA commitments. But their AMS base levels were artificially exaggerated to begin with and remain far higher than on any other class of product — the average agricultural tariff is 27.1%, compared to 3.5% for industrial products and 3.7% for all merchandised products.
Further, the rich countries have used many different tactics, all perfectly legal under the AoA, to assist their own producers and keep Third World produce out, especially more highly value-added goods.
Northern agricultural protectionism has actually increased since the AoA was signed. According to the South Centre in Geneva, by one measure, the Producer Subsidy Equivalent, the European Union's total support has increased from US$100 billion in 1986 to US$130 billion in 1998 while the corresponding increase in the US has been from US$41 billion to US$47 billion.
As a result, the South's export industries constantly hover on the brink of bankruptcy, hostage to the North's regulations. They are unable to break into the more profitable, high-value added products or diversify from dependence on one or two price-volatile cash crops.
Competition
The underdeveloped countries, by contrast, have virtually no protection for their agricultural sectors. Sixty per cent of the WTO's 134 member-countries list an AMS of zero or negative — and all of them are in the Third World. The stipulations of the AoA outlaw them raising their protection levels, while their lack of financial resources makes it almost impossible to use the North's tricks to get around the AoA.
The result of this near-complete liberalisation has not been the creation of highly competitive agricultural sectors, but rather their destruction.
Facing little or no import restrictions and bolstered by export subsidies and credit guarantees from their own governments, large First World transnational corporations have been able to dump produce in Third World markets. Between 1994-98, for example, the US dumped grain on the world market at prices 15% below domestic costs of production.
The South's agricultural industries, particularly those based on small family farms, were unable to compete and went under. Already poor countries became even more dependent on the vagaries of the world market.
According to the FAO, per capita cereal production in the poorest countries, for example, is declining and imports are rising rapidly. Seventy percent of the world trade in wheat is controlled by six corporations.
The British non-government organisation ActionAid has documented the case of Kenya, where it says: "The liberalised trade of commodities has led to an increase in imports of foodstuffs... This has resulted in Kenya becoming a net food importing country." In 1990 the country supplied 93% of its food requirements; six years later, the figure was 82%. Poverty among small farmers has skyrocketed; many have been forced off the land and into the cities, where there is little chance of gaining employment.
Some food prices have declined. But, as over 75% of the country's population depend on agriculture for their livelihoods and farm incomes have collapsed, few can afford these goods, even though they're cheaper.
Food security campaigner Vandana Shiva gave a similar account of the impact of agricultural liberalisation in her native India at a public meeting in Melbourne on September 10, saying that US food trade corporation Cargill now owns 70% of the India's trade in food. "The people lost, India lost, Cargill gained", she said.
Least developed and net food-importing countries were promised compensation and financial assistance, under the Marrakesh Decision of 1994, for what was supposed to be temporary dislocations associated with liberalisation.
In particular, they were supposed to receive help in meeting rising food import bills, which have increased by 50% since the early 1980s for least developed countries and 40% for net food-importing countries. This assistance never came. Ninety countries now spend more than half their foreign exchange earnings on food imports, double the proportion of three decades ago.
There is currently not a single rich country member of the WTO backing implementation of the Marrakesh Decision. Furthermore, two existing forms of assistance are declining or being wound back.
Food aid levels from rich countries are in long-term decline. Kenya's food aid in 1993-95, for example, was less than half the amount received in the 1980s.
Certain preferential access agreements to rich country markets are also being dismantled, as part of the AoA. According to an unpublished United Nations Conference on Trade and Development report quoted by Chakravarthi Raghavan in the South-North Development Monitor, 65% of least developed country exports entered Europe through such preferential deals, including the Lome Convention with former European colonies. If it's phased out, such countries are likely to lose significant market share.
While the AoA has been an unmitigated disaster for poor countries, it is unlikely that the rich countries will be able to get away with as much this time around and, if sufficient international public pressure is brought to bear, may even be forced back. Poor country governments look likely to prove more troublesome negotiating partners.
The collapse of attempts to launch a comprehensive new "Millennium Round", in part as a result of a revolt by poor country governments, has put enormous pressure on the rich countries and WTO officials. Concessions on agriculture may prove the only thing that gets poor country governments to agree to a new round.
Increasing numbers of poor countries are calling for a comprehensive review of the AoA, which could unearth the awful truth. The WTO Secretariat has refused a request by net food importing countries to study the impact of the AoA on their food import bills, and rich countries are keen to skip over the review and proceed straight to substantive negotiations, but pressure continues to mount.
Many countries, including Egypt, Sri Lanka, Uganda, Zimbabwe and India, are also demanding that poor countries be given greater flexibility in implementing their obligations. They have demanded respect for "multi-functionality", which would recognise the social importance of strong domestic agricultural sectors and grant exemptions from the AoA for food produced for domestic consumption and the products of small farmers.
More threateningly for the rich powers, "the upside of the WTO proposals is that they have helped a new global food movement coalesce", according to Food First's Peter Rosset.
The WTO's failed ministerial meeting in Seattle provided the focus for a coming together of farmer organisations in both the North and the South, including movements of the landless and indigenous peasants.
Rosset described it, to the July/August Multinational Monitor, as "an incredible international coalition of rural organisations all staying that the proposed WTO rules for agriculture would be a death sentence for rural communities and rural areas around the world".
The hopes of the hungry rest with them.