Cultivating Food Security

Up to 800 million people do not have enough to eat. At the World Food Summit in 1996, world leaders pledged to halve the number of hungry people by 2015. Yet current progress towards reaching this target is painfully slow, and there is growing concern that international trade policies, the activities of food and agriculture TNCS and the spread of industrial agriculture could be intensifying food insecurity in developing countries.

In preparations for the 1996 World Food Summit, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) defined the essential foundations of food security as meaning '… [that] food is available at all times, that all persons have means of access to it, that it is nutritionally adequate in terms of quantity, quality and variety and that it is acceptable within the given culture.'

Despite this recognition of the importance of access, structural adjustment programmes and other macro-economic policies have favoured a technological approach to food production and distribution. Dereje G. Michael of the Ethiopian Institute for Sustainable Development - a UKFG partner organisation - says, 'for the last seven years Ethiopia has physically produced enough food for all its people, but the market structure is so poor that farmers cannot sell their surpluses at a reasonable price, and the economy so weak that the poor cannot purchase the food they need. We feel these are fundamental problems completely ignored in most debates over food security.'

There is also growing concern that sustainable food production and livelihoods in developing countries are being undermined by increasing globalisation which has favoured the spread of high input, high tech farming methods. Genetic engineering has been hailed by the biotech industry as offering a new model of sustainable agriculture, which will 'feed the world'. Yet their products are forcing small farmers into a new form of serfdom by the extraordinary control the industry exercises over the way farmers must grow, harvest and buy genetically modified (GM) seeds. At the 1998 FAO negotiations on genetic resources, African delegates issued a statement objecting 'strongly that the image of the poor and hungry from our country is being used by giant multinational corporations to push a technology which is neither safe, environmentally friendly, nor economically beneficial to us.'

The effects of liberalisation have also marginalised small farmers and increased intensification of agriculture. Under current trade rules, market access has become an unequal bargain between rich and poor: while developed countries have maintained protectionist policies to protect their producers, unfair trade terms, the liberalisation policies of the World Bank and the IMF and lack of debt relief have put pressure on Southern countries to open up their domestic markets and switch to cash crops. For example, Haiti, the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, has slashed its import barriers on all staple food products, including rice, with severe impacts on its poor rice producers.

Globalisation has led to a greater concentration of trade and investment in the hands of transnational corporations. Many transnational corporations in the food and agriculture sector have merged, triggering alarm bells about the excessive power exercised by private profit-based companies over the world's food system. The regulation of TNCs - particularly their conduct in host countries and their impact on food security - is an issue of worldwide concern, as international law provides very few means of enforcing codes of conduct.

These issues of access and equity, sustainability and the negative effects of globalisation and trade liberalisation are fundamental issues, which must be addressed in order to achieve global food security.

Many UKFG members believe that communities must be enabled to feed themselves by supporting access to secure livelihoods, land and other essential resources which strengthen the ability of people to grow or buy food at household level. We are working to raise awareness of the potential of sustainable agriculture to meet people's food needs; to raise awareness of the effects of the global food trade - especially the WTO agreements and the CAP - on food security, environmental quality and community sustainability; to raise awareness of the need for coherent trade and development aid policies; and to raise awareness of the need for effective international regulation of TNCs, including the issue of intellectual property rights and their impact on farming communities.