Thirteenth Chamber of the Czech Presidency

It should spark off more than our compassion and charity and push us to question why parents are unable to feed their children and how governments do perform their duty to tackle chronic hunger and malnutrition. These questions unfortunately did not make their way through to the priorities of the Czech presidency of the EU.

The European Union, being the first donor of development aid, but more importantly because of its role in shaping international agricultural markets is part of the solution to global food insecurity. Glopolis regrets that the Czech Presidency has not played an active role in making this issue central to its EU agricultural and foreign policies when there is an urgent need of pushing the risk of a new crisis away. Let us go through the food security agenda of the first half of 2009.

On reaching the poor

A positive achievement of the EU during the year 2008 was the agreement over an aid plan, the so-called “Food Facility” worth 1 billion €, of which one third was nevertheless only redeployed funds, thus not any “new money”. Its chief objectives were to boost agricultural production mainly by easing access to intrants for food producers and also to help local population in buying food.

This implementation plan has been detailed at the beginning of 2009. The value of this initiative is to be assessed less whether it will increase the overall agricultural output than whether it supports poor farmers in securing their income. A good step in this direction is that for all 35 targeted countries, a part of the grant is open for civil society groups. Yet, this facility remains a short-term initiative as it will end in 2011.

Besides, it is indispensable to invest more and more wisely in the agricultural and supporting sectors as only agriculture can absorb the mass of unemployed people and help avoiding the negative effects of the dependence of poor countries on imports for staple food. But with at least S 8,7 trillion injected into the financial sector globally to weather the financial and economic crises, the EU and the rest of the donor community are drawing on empty pockets for durably reversing the trend of faltering investment into agriculture of poor countries.

On stabilizing prices and establishing fairer global market

In 2008, to advert price fluctuation, the European Parliament asked EU to take leadership in proposing a worldwide food stockholding programme, a demand which has not yet materialized. The EU not only fails to address the problem of price volatility on the international market, but also on its own market. This issue has been particularly visible these last months regarding the milk sector. After peaks in 2008, prices dramatically felt, forcing thousands of producers to sell their milk under their production costs. The mass tractors demonstration in front of European institutions in Luxembourg and Brussels pushed the question to the European Council.

In June, European leaders invited the Commission “to present an in-depth market analysis within the next two months, including possible options for stabilizing the dairy market, while respecting the outcome of the Health Check”. But as the CAP health check confirmed the disappearance of the milk production quotas by 2015, there is no hope for a structural solution to the lasting problem of overproduction of the sector. 

Moreover, leaders stay mute or adopt weak language regarding distributors and supermarkets that maintain prices low for increasing their margins. This situation not only threatens small milk producers in Europe but also those in poor countries. Export subsidies for dairy products were in fact reintroduced in January, a step backwards in regards of the commitments of the EU to definitively end them by 2013. These subsidies further drive price down on international markets and create unfair competition for producers in poor countries.

On pressing for global political will and action

There will not be any lasting support to agriculture and stable and fair food prices without political will. The French Presidency worked at institutionalizing the will revived by the food crisis through proposing a Global Partnership for Agriculture and Food Security. The international community has rather supported the renewal of the FAO Committee on World Food Security (CFS), established as a result of the food crisis in the 1970s. This Committee could then be the place for further setting a global partnership. If the Czech Republic has not taken over active leadership in exhorting for such tools, other EU member states such as Spain that organized the High level Meeting on Food Security for all in March, did. The 3d World Food Summit planned in November 2009 should be approving the CFS terms of reform and implementation plan. It could represent a concrete step towards a multilateral system more responsible for the realization of the right to food.

[1] Oxfam Briefing Paper, Investing in Poor Farmers Pays, June 2009

In brief: why and how...?

The reason why parents are unable to feed their children and themselves has less to do with a lack of food than with poverty. And soaring food prices since 2007 worsened the situation for millions of poor people by making them unable to afford even the minimum sufficient daily intake of food. Therefore, for the biggest part, the answer to food insecurity lies on one side in raising incomes of the 1 billion hungry people and on the other side, in stabilizing food prices, avoiding as much high or low levels. For this two-fold answer, pro-poor agricultural policies are the key.

In fact, agricultural policies are central because food production is the main occupation of the vast majority of the hungry and poor: 50% percent of them are smallholder farmers living on about 2 hectares of cropland, 20% are landless laborers, 10% are pastoralists, fishers or forest users and the 20% remaining are poor living in cities. Under-financed and mostly oriented on large and intensive production for export such as coffee, banana, cocoa, agricultural policies of developing countries have failed to support these vulnerable populations in making a living out of their work. Moreover, through several policy tools such as food stocks or production quotas, governments can reduce price volatility and help maintaining level of prices which would be remunerative for the producers and affordable for the consumers. But liberalization and deregulation of the agricultural sector have for most of the countries reduced governments´ bouquets of policy tools for agriculture, many considered incompatible with trade agreement requirements.