Reacting to the Global Food Crisis – The 44th Otago University Foreign Policy School

July 13, 2009 13:57

By Anthonie Tonnon

It’s 5.30pm on a Friday night, the beginning of the last weekend of my holiday. Damn, it’s been good not writing for Critic. I’m just about to cap it off with a trip to Inch Bar for some delicious local beer and some serious ranting with old dudes. But then – drama. A quick check of my diary reveals that I need to attend to some sort of food crisis in one hour.

It can’t be Paul down the road: Skinny gave him a loaf of bread last week, so between that and his pouch, he’s set. And I just consumed the largest serving of chop suey I’ve ever seen – how on earth did Botanical Takeaways decide that the right serving size for me was one-sixth of my body weight? No, the undeniable conclusion is that I must have agreed to attend the 44th Otago University Foreign Policy School, the subject this year being the Dimensions and Dynamics of the Global Food Crisis. Dammit! But little did I know that this two-day, twenty-hour-long school would re-awaken the political geek inside me and turn out to be be ten times more exciting than an Al Gore movie. Nor did I realise that there would be hilarious amounts of buffet food and alcohol waiting for me when I arrived. No food crisis at Salmond College then, eh?

The annual foreign policy school brings together world experts from inside and outside of academia to present papers and hold discussions on a theme in foreign policy. While the line-up of speakers attracts academics from across the country, one of the school’s main purposes is to introduce new recruits to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) to the kinds of issues they will deal with in their jobs. This year’s highly political topic ensured a tense atmosphere from the outset as academics, politicians, and agribusiness representatives gave their various assessments of, and proscriptions for, the global food crisis. You could feel the apprehension in the room whenever someone mentioned the words “neo-liberal” or “GM”. What made the political context extra interesting this year was the new government. Next year, there will be no new MFAT recruits to attend the school, as National is not hiring any more.

There’s a global food crisis?

One thing all the speakers agreed on is that the we face huge, complicated challenges in feeding the world this century. After the food price spikes last year, the number of undernourished people rose by 100 million to cross the one billion mark for the first time in history. While food prices were gradually decreasing over most of the last three decades, they are now on the increase, and without a change in production, will continue to be so, meaning more of the world’s poor will join the hungry club. But it’s not only a matter of feeding the poor. In the next 25-50 years, food production needs to double to feed a projected global population of nine billion, not only because there will be more mouths to feed, but because as living standards rise in Asia and South America, people in those areas will demand more food and more varied diets. We will need to face these challenges with fewer agricultural resources than we are using now, as rising temperatures due to climate change will make some areas too dry for agriculture, and deplete the world’s supplies of fresh water. Even more concerning is the sea. Over-fishing of the world’s oceans, and ocean acidification due to climate change, is leading some scientists to predict a fish-free world in the same period that food production needs to double. What is really scary is the way that the world is starting to grasp this. We are seeing a land-grab in Africa by governments and corporations to ensure future food security, at the expense of poor people who depend on that land for subsistence agriculture. In October last year, The Daewoo Corporation of South Korea announced it was leasing one million acres of Madagascar, an area half the size of Belgium, to grow corn and palm oil.

Oh, stop being so Malthusian!

This isn’t the first time we have worried about feeding a growing population. Professor Tim Lang, of the Centre for Food Policy in London, brought up a philosopher who until recently has been laughed at by policy makers. Two hundred years ago, the Reverend Thomas Malthus predicted that the world would need to implement population controls because food production, which grew only incrementally, could not possibly keep up with the exponential growth of population. The good news is that so far we have proved him wrong, and sceptics of the global food crisis argue that we will continue to do so because Malthus failed to foresee the role of technological innovation. In the second half of the 20th century, the “green revolution” put new machinery and chemical fertilisers into agriculture, and yields increased dramatically. The problem is that this increase in the food supply levelled off in the ‘90s, and hasn’t picked up again. One of the reasons for this is that the same industrial techniques that have proved so productive have also stressed our resources. Irrigation has used fresh water unsustainably, and intensive use of fertilisers has stripped soils of their nutrients. Clearing of forests and trees has allowed soil to erode into waterways, and the monoculture, (farming one crop in isolation) that industrial agriculture has favoured has limited the biodiversity that once kept agricultural systems in balance. And with the effects of climate change like increased drought and more extreme weather events rearing their heads just as agricultural productivity growth was already slowing, the odds are really starting to stack against us. Lang contends that we may not be able to keep laughing at Malthus for long.

Trade and distribution

Paradoxically, today the world actually produces more than enough food to feed its population. So what is happening in the distribution process to leave one billion people hungry? New Zealand is a rather pious supporter of free trade as a means of distribution. But while New Zealand is proud to have an open economy, and many developing countries have opened up their markets as requirements for aid assistance, the US and the EU still have not removed their agricultural subsidies. This means means that small-hold food producers in developing countries cannot sell food in their own regions because “dumped” food from subsidised EU farmers is available at less than the cost of production. It that farmers who should be able to produce the cheapest sugar in the world cannot sell their product, because they are undercut by subsidised sugar from the US. So areas that have the potential to be breadbaskets of the world are instead dependant on the West for food. The world’s hungry spend 80 percent of their income on food, and yet, they don’t have a trade system that lets them earn enough to buy it.

So, while people in the economic south struggle to get enough in one pay cheque to eat, the other side of the equation is you, vomiting up the parts of your slab of So-Go and $6.90 Domino’s Pizza that your body didn’t really need on a Thursday night. People in the economic north have so much money spare that they consume too much, or more specifically, too much of the wrong foods. The proof of this is the obesity epidemic that has hit rich countries over the last three decades.

Local food movements

A grossly unfair trade system, and concern about issues like food miles, have caused some to turn back to locally grown food, for example switching to “100-mile diets.” Professor Lang actually started the food miles debate, making him very unpopular with MFAT. Professor Caroline Saunders, of Lincoln University, came to the rescue by proving that even though New Zealand food products travel all the way to Europe, they often release less carbon than many European equivalents because they are produced more efficiently. For example, New Zealand lamb, shipped 11 000 miles to Britain, produces four times less CO2 emmissions than British lamb, partly because poorer British pastures force farmers to bring in feed.

Professor Saunders believes that a consequence of trade is that people in developed countries like Britain have become completely out of touch with how food works. Because supermarkets offer so much choice all year round, shoppers believe they should be able to buy whatever food they want, whenever they want it. But while she likes the idea of locally-grown food as a niche industry, she argues that the anti-trade sentiment growing in Europe is counter productive, and that trade must be part of the solution. “You’re never going to feed a city the size of London from 100 miles around.”

Professor Jules Pretty, of the Department of Environmental Studies at Essex University, argues that while trade is important, local food movements are also important for both the developing and the developed worlds. In the face of a volatile and unfair trade system, people in the developing world need locally grown food to ensure their food security and to insulate them from events like food price spikes. In particular, community and household gardens are extremely valuable when run by women, because if food gets into the hands of the women, it has the best chance of being spread around families. In the developed world, farmers’ markets, community gardens, and local food movements reconnect people with food and agriculture, and are powerful tools to educate people about better nutrition and environmental sustainability.

So what can we do?

Well, eat less, for a start. If the entire world ate as we in developed countries ate, we would need the resources of six to eight Earths to make it sustainable. So, unless we figure out how to farm and transport food across parallel universes, the habits of people in the developed world will need to change. We need to eat foods that are sustainable, and we need to eat less meat – there are 2 400 litres of fresh water used to make one cheeseburger. How exactly we do this is the tricky part. On one side, business groups like Fonterra argue that change must come from consumers - that they must demand sustainable alternatives and be prepared to pay a premium for them. But Professor Lang argues that the situation is too urgent to leave the fate of the world in the hands of consumers. He argues that businesses selling food and other goods are better equipped to tackle problems like sustainability, and that consumers want companies to make changes “upstream” so that they know whatever they buy from a company is sustainable. “We need to de-emphasise choice, and emphasise ‘choice editing’ … just putting labels on products won’t work, the problems are so complex you’ll never put a label big enough on the box!” This is already happening in the UK, with companies like Tesco’s imposing strict rules for sustainability on their producers. Recently, governments in countries such as Germany and Sweden have advised households to move to diets lower in meat, and encouraged meat-free days. But Professor Pretty contends that people don’t react well to be being “told what to do,” and that the most important thing we can do is to educate the generation currently in our primary schools on how to eat healthier and more in balance with the planet.

Innovation and the GM debate

Associate Spokesperson for Foreign Affairs, John Hayes, caused a stir in his opening address when he said that in his opinion, we would have no choice but to use genetic modification in farming if we were to feed the world. Other speakers were more cautious. Professor Watson stresses that all the technology we need to tackle the global food crisis without GM is actually available and well-known now; technology like more accurate and efficient irrigation. The challenge is convincing farmers in the developed world to implement this technology, helping developing world farmers get access to credit to invest in it, and building desperately needed infrastructure. Watson does say that GM may be needed to confront problems further down the line, but research has to be taken on a case-by-case basis, and that corporate control of GM seeds by companies like Monsanto could be damaging to small-hold farmers. Jules Pretty argues that genetic modification could be part of the solution, but it won’t be a solution in itself. He points out that there are promising alternative models to Monsanto. Governments could research and develop GM seeds for the public good, without charging for patents.

Pretty presents some impressive examples of successful production methods trialled in the developing world. Zero-till farming in Brazil allows farmers to grow crops without tilling the soil, reducing soil erosion and water pollution. Insect-pest management is a process where farmers farm beneficial insects to protect their crops rather than using pesticides. Where it is practiced in Asia on rice plantations, it has not only reduced costs by 80 percent, but without pesticides in the water, farmers are now able use the water the rice grows in to farm fish at the same time. The most important factor, Pretty stresses, is social capital - farmers and community groups, and government extension services to farmers, are vital in ensuring that advances in knowledge through experimentation can be shared, and best practices spread.

The role of New Zealand

So what are our agriculture industry and our government doing to help solve hunger and bring agriculture into the future? Professor Saunders and the representatives from the agribusiness sector make it clear that New Zealand agriculture’s goal is not to create huge volumes of food to “feed the world,” as that would be impossible, but to create luxury food items to generate economic growth for New Zealand. At the same time, Stuart Grey of Fonterra believes that New Zealand agriculture should be treated as a “special case” in climate change laws because it has the essential role of creating food people need to survive.

John Hayes argues that as a country smaller in population than Sydney, there is not much we can do, and that our priorities should be on pushing for free trade, and aiding the hungry that inhabit neighbouring Pacific islands. He also argues that we can have a leading role in the science of agriculture. Because of this, he wants to see more people studying science and fewer people studying for arts degrees: “people with politics or theatre degrees aren’t going to create money for our economy.” It would seem that our government is sceptical of political academics in general: Hayes didn’t stick around for the rest of the school, and the New Zealand government has so far refused to ratify the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development, which Professor Watson chaired – “the New Zealand government didn’t believe knowledge was important.”

Something many of the speakers emphasise is New Zealand’s role in trade negotiations. As an agricultural country, and one of the few developed nations that practices as it preaches on free trade, New Zealand has a strong moral voice in WTO negotiations. Barry Coates, of Oxfam, believes that free trade is an important goal, but argues that New Zealand has to push for free trade in a way that is pro-poor. He argues that if developing nations are forced to remove their subsidies and tariffs before developed nations, they will feel all the pain of restructuring, with few gains from trade. Removing tariffs takes away money that Pacific governments can spend on health and infrastructure, and joining the WTO comes with high compliance costs. He says that rich countries are asking unfair conditions of Pacific countries while only offering minimal commitments themselves. New Zealand, he says, was going along with these conditions in the hope that it would lead to free trade - “high ambitions shouldn’t be paid for by countries with the least ability to afford them.” He also argues that in aggressively pursuing unilateral free-trade deals with countries like the United States, New Zealand is removing rich countries’ incentive to commit to a world-wide free trade deal which would benefit New Zealand’s Pacific neighbours.

“No answers here”?

By the end of the last day of the school, I was actually surprised at how much common ground the speakers shared, and it was refreshing to see delegates from opposite sides of the debate striking up conversations. After the quality of the presentations, I was surprised to hear an MFAT delegate give in her closing address that old cliché - “there have certainly been no answers here, but it has shown the complexity of the problems.” Echoing my thoughts, one of the speakers, Claire Mahon from the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law, got up to say that she thought there had been lots of answers over the weekend, and urged the MFAT recruits to look harder at their notes. To say that there aren’t solutions to the global food crisis or climate change is bollocks. If anything, this weekend showed me that there are more solutions than we are led to believe, but governments need to get their heads out of the sand and start implementing them. While it’s easy to be sceptical about how much these new bureaucrats can achieve under a National government, I think the weekend will have been successful in providing an engaging formative experience for at least some of them.

I suspect that most of the food prepared in the weekend made its way into dumpsters – every time we left the buffet there seemed to be more food left over than was there in the first place. And I don’t think anyone told Table Seven catering that lots of political scientists are vegetarian, and might not be super-impressed at having the option of eating five different South Island animals in one meal. But the weekend was as inspiring as it was tiring, and I certainly can’t complain about going hungry. It was well worth the $95 I didn’t pay to get in, and as there will likely be about 50 fewer MFAT recruits there next year, I strongly recommend getting along to next year’s school on China, if that’s your kind of thing.