Discussion: training manuals on food security

LIST OF CONTRIBUTIONS

Contribution by George Kent from the University of Hawaii, USA

The High-Level Expert Forum will take up the question of “How to Feed the World in 2050.” That is an excellent question, but it should not be confused with the hunger problem.

Globally, there are two major interrelated streams of work on food issues. One focuses on sustainability, especially in the face of global population growth, depletion of resources such as land and water, and uncertainties regarding the future such as climate change. The second focuses on hunger, which deals mainly with the plight of the poor, now and in the future.
At times people express concern for the current hunger in the world, and then turn their attention to the issue of sustainability. They may be more concerned with their own future food security than with the current food insecurity of others. Both are important, of course, but we should recognize the difference.

It is important to distinguish between food security for the general population and food security for the poor because they require different courses of action. Moreover, there is the fear that the powerful will deal seriously with the sustainability issue only when the dangers for the middle class become inescapably clear, and then they will devise remedies that come at the expense of the poor. There are signs of this in the pattern of rich countries buying up land in poor countries to ensure the food security of the rich.

In “The Politics of Hunger,” published in Foreign Affairs in 2008, Paul Collier insisted, “The solution must come from dramatically increasing world food supply.” If that is the answer, what is the question? Promoting large-scale commercial farming and increased use of genetically modified crops, as Collier advocates, would increase the food supply for the middle class, and thus reduce the prices they face, but these remedies would not put money into the hands of the poor to enable them to purchase that food. The world already produces more than enough food for all people with currently available technologies. The problem is that people who have little power are poor, and thus have little claim on the food that is produced.

Collier says, “allowing commercial organizations to replace peasant agriculture would raise global food supply in the medium term.” Certainly, increasing supply and the resulting decrease in price surely would benefit the middle class. That is because few of them are farmers. Collier does not examine the consequences for the displaced peasants and the poor in general.

For the hundreds of millions of subsistence farmers throughout the world, the problem is that the prices they receive are too low. Increasing large-scale commercial farming and the production of genetically modified crops could put them out of business. What is to be done to create new opportunities for them? Collier speaks dismissively about peasant agriculture, but offers no better employment for those who now work in small-scale agriculture. Collier holds up Brazil’s commercial agriculture as a model, but seems not to appreciate the slave-like conditions under which many of its employees toil.

Increases in the prices of globally traded food commodities should not distract us. The underlying global food system is fundamentally flawed. As the Cordoba Declaration of 2008 explained:

Hunger is a structural problem and therefore demands structural changes, with consequences for institutional development and food system governance. Food security for all must be considered as a global public good and it must be made a central focus of global governance as well as of national development, taking into account that often the main problem is not too little food production but the inability of many to have access to food.

It is important to distinguish between the concerns of the poor for getting adequate food in the immediate future and the general population’s concerns about their long-term food security. At times, discussions of the current hunger problem slide into addressing the anxieties of the general population, and as a result, the concerns of the poor are pushed aside.

While sustainability focuses on equity between generations, over time, the hunger problem is about equity through space, between different groups or categories of people. These are two different problems. Both need attention. They need to be addressed in different ways. The need to assure long-term food security for the general population should not be confused with the need to quickly reduce the current food insecurity of the poor.
Aloha, George Kent

Contribution by Andrea Markos from the Università La Sapienza, Italy

I would like to point out one really good reading on the subject:

The Feeding of the Nine Billion: Global Food Security for the 21st Century

Chatham House Report

Alex Evans, January 2009

http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/publications/papers/view/-/id/694/
Best regards,

Andrea Markos

Contribution by Rene Gommes from FAO, Italy.

Dear colleagues,

this is just to draw you attention to excellent documents produced in the ambit of the (1st) WFS, for instance
http://www.fao.org/wfs/index_en.htm

http://www.fao.org/DOCREP/003/X3002F/X3002F00.htm#TOC 

http://www.fao.org/docrep/003/w2612e/w2612e04a.htm
most of which were of excellent quality and remain largely valid.
Be so kind and ensure the forum is aware of earlier good work of FAO
Regards

Rene

Contribution by Moleka Mosisi from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

Dear Hartwig de Haen,
Asked at the time the word food security is on the verge of collapse, the question “How to Feed the World in 2050?” appears to ignore the current food crisis and unnecessarily postpone to 2050 urgent solutions desperately needed by over 1 billions people who are currently hungry and thousands of children who die every single day because they don’t have food. Perhaps the fundamental question that could have been asked is one of the many specific questions of this topic “What should be done to make the eradication of hunger a top priority in national and international policies and budget allocations?”

Food Summits and High-Level Expert Forums have come and gone and will come again. Studies have been undertaken, commitments made and goals set but we all agree for example that founders of the Millennium Development Goals where totally wrong as “any goal that is less than eradication [of hunger] represents an implicit acceptance that large numbers of people should be denied their right to adequate food”. Equally, it can be said that any question that seeks to feed the world in the future is an implicit acceptance that feeding the world is not an immediate problem”.

Another worrisome point from this topic is that “If the FAO perspectives [to feed the world in 2050] materialize...the number of chronically undernourished in the world would thus remain at almost 400 million people. To bring it further down will require extra efforts, including targeted measures to improve access to food for the neediest”.  In other words, in 2050 the question asked today will still stand.

While the question “How to Feed the World in 2050?” may be valid, its timing may not. However, the fundamental question (What should be done to make the eradication of hunger a top priority in national and international policies and budget allocations?) has, in my opinion, a simple answer: food security experts and practitioners should press economists and politicians to measure country economic growth and development with the improvement of people’s life whereby household food security is the top indicator. Rather than striving and competing on their GDPs, countries will be have household food security, health, shelter and so on as growth measure and indicator.

Best Regards,

Moleka