NGOs Cry Foul at FAO Food Conference
I’ve just come from the NGO’s presentation of their fiery declaration, which is in stark contrast to the bland ‘declaration’ of the high level conference which is bogged down in negotiations and still hasn’t been agreed to.
The Minister Jim Anderton was pleased with New Zealand’s participation in the conference and felt we ‘waved the flag well.’ And I am sure this is true from the perspective of the main conference. Speaking to NGO’s however, a very different perspective emerged. The President of one of the main Italian NGO’s, for example, Antonio Duovati, from the Committee for Food Sovereignty, explained that New Zealand is seen, thanks to our flag waving for free trade liberalization policies, as ‘an enemy of the third world’ and a slave of America and Europe.
He also told me that the FAO had personally invited 350 private institutions, such as the biotech, fertilizer companies and other agri-business, while at the same time excluding most NGO’s from the conference. He said the exclusion of NGO’s from the conference was in sharp contrast to previous conferences, where NGO’s were well integrated into the conference and their exclusion reflected the growing corporate agenda of the FAO and other organizations.
The NGO’s denounced the main declaration of the conference as being irrelevant, containing no new ideas, and basically pushing an agenda of corporate globalization and free trade liberalization which had caused the crisis in the first instance.” There are no answers here -they are just skirting around the problem, pushing the same agendas, promoting global agribusiness control of the food supply and thus undermining the rights of small farmers aroundthe world, the NGOs said in a press conference I have just attended.
They pointed out that millions of small farmers around the world had been excluded, and their voices had never been heard. “They have been totally excluded from the conference while the private sector has been welcomed.”
[Frog: This is the third and last post in a series sent to me by Sue K, attending the conference in Rome. First post here. Second here.]
June 9th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
Here’s my two cents on the issue…..
World cereal crops have increased by a factor of 3 since 1961 (When the FAO records begin).
In the same time world population has only doubled - this means there is actually more food than ever.
Recent years have seen record cereal harvests - if we can have a food crisis in years of record crops, what would happen if there was a large reduction due to pests or drought?
Shouldn’t we try and make the world food system robust enough to handle such shocks? The current food crisis is a wake up call that we have some work to do.
According to the FAO the 2.1 billion tonnes of cereal, only 1 billion are eaten directly by people. 756 million are fed to animals, which results in large reduction calories in the resulting animal products. i.e 5 calories of grain are required to make 1 calorie of milk (assuming grain feed cows).
Collectively as a society we choose to eat luxury food products (meat and dairy), and by doing so we take food away from the poor, the global market conveniently insulates us from this reality.
Perhaps developed countries could agree to slaughter a small fraction of their animals if cereal prices go too high - thus dropping the need for grain to feed them. Meat and dairy prices would rise, cereal prices would fall. Farmers would need to be compensated. This is similar to what is practiced at a village scale to get through bad years.
Us rich paying a little more for meat seems a small price to pay in order achieve a planet with stable food prices where everybody can afford to eat.
June 9th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
I can see an alignment here with socialist policies, but no reference to the green agenda. How about Ms K has a fourth post and makes some aligned comments as oppsed to those better suited to a National Socialist blog.
June 9th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
I see now that David Farrar of kiwiblog is having a go at Sue for questioning why the large corporates like Rockefeller and Bill Gates were admitted to the main conference, but not the NGOs working in the area. His argument is that the Rockefellers and Gates are the good guys. I guess he must have forgot about when Nelson Rockefeller helped plan the carving up Indonesia’s resources in preparation for general Suharto’s bloody coup, in which 500,000-1 million people belonging to democratic social movements were slaughtered.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvnEc48A7yM&feature=related
He’s trying to convince us that the Rockerfellers are the good guys. Give us a break hey DPF?
June 9th, 2008 at 4:29 pm
Sorry that was David Rockefeller - in any case I think David Farrar’s claim, that the Rockefellers are angels, goes down in a screaming heap.
June 9th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
Roger Nome should learn the difference between the Rockefeller Foundation and an individual Rockefeller. The Foundation was set up in 1913, aim is aimed at helping or or vulnerable people. Only one of the 18 Trustees is a Rockefeller and
I suggest people look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockefeller_Foundation rather than listen to the prejudices of Roger Nome.
June 9th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
Strings -
The current form of globalisation, with regard to food, has been largely a disaster for the third world.
The two key mechanisms involved in bringing about this crisis were created by the corporate and political elites of the “developed” world in tandem in order to achieve penetration of the “developing world’s” food markets, and access to its natural resources.
1) Food Aid
http://www.rpex.org/press/pub_speeches/Fifty%20Years%20of%20Internatio nal%20Food%20Aid.pdf -
Food aid undercuts domestic food produces, driving them out of business making way for step two of he process, cash cropping.
The land where indigenous food crops used to be grown is confiscated or bought up by the multi-national corporatesfor cash-cropping, usually tobacco, Coffee, Tea, which the locals can’t eat.
Now the indigenous people are dependant on subsidised US rice for food, and if they can’t afford it they go hungry.
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/83859/?page=1
June 10th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
Farrar - whether you choose to acknowledge it or not, the Rockefellers have a dark history which has been characterised by a “profit at any cost” attitude. The Rockefeller foundation has been run chaired by the likes of the murderous Nazi-supporter “John Foster Dulles.
As director of the CIA Dulles was involved in the successful plot to overthrow the democratically elected government of Iran, putting in place a dictatorship, run by a man who had previously been jailed for being a Nazi collaborator (the Shah).
.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Foster_Dulles
As such I tend to look at the Rockefeller’s philanthropic work as a PR exercise, rather than take Farrar’s wide-eyed child-like view.
June 10th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
Interesting article from George Monbiot in the UK Guardian on food productivity:
“There is an inverse relationship between the size of farms and the amount of crops they produce per hectare. The smaller they are, the greater the yield.
In some cases, the difference is enormous. A recent study of farming in Turkey, for example, found that farms of less than one hectare are 20 times as productive as farms of more than 10 hectares.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jun/10/food.globaleconomy
June 10th, 2008 at 11:29 pm
hmmmmmm
Actually killing off stock fed by grain when the price of grain rises (to reduce the price of grain for humanity) would reduce the price of meat in the short to medium term. This would adversely impact on grassland fed meat economics (in the short to medium term). It would of course immediately increase dairy food prices.
However, what guarantee would their be that grain would not be diverted to bio-fuel production would there be?
June 10th, 2008 at 11:34 pm
hmmmmmm
And you should note the difference between the types of meat farming.
The meat and dairy we eat is from grassland farming and makes no contribution to the rising price of grain for human consumption.
And it is the rising consumption of meat and dairy outside the First World which is the cause. Are we to say their middle class should not eat what we have and do?
June 10th, 2008 at 11:46 pm
I read such comments from Green MP’s and I suppose once again note that I only vote for the Green Party because they have no influence on whether free trade occurs here, or in the rest of the world.
The Food Safety Committee reminds me of the Public Safety Committees of France of past centuries. It also reminds me of an organisation formed by the Cheka to oppose the Soviet Union (so they could both subvert and exploit their opposition) - on this occasion the “food security” protectionism policy of the EU. It seems the NGO’s concerned are only marginalised when the issue is pushing EU and US technology into the Third World (just as they push their foreign ownership of utilities and free access of industrial goods). Sometimes Greens can have their buttons pushed all too easily.
On a wider theme, one should note - food security is a nebulous concept while we face climate change - as areas currently suitable for farming may face temperature change and water shortage. Thus we are all the more dependent on a global supply system which can adjust location of supply to meet global demand. Free trade is the only model which allows for this to occur.
Greens correctly note we do not yet have fair free trade in food. But to cite that as the reason not to allow fair free trade is nonsensical.
June 11th, 2008 at 12:11 am
kiwinuke
More interesting is the conclusion.
Though the rich world’s governments won’t hear it, the issue of whether or not the world will be fed is partly a function of ownership. This reflects an unexpected discovery. It was first made in 1962 by the Nobel economist Amartya Sen, and has since been confirmed by dozens of studies. There is an inverse relationship between the size of farms and the amount of crops they produce per hectare. The smaller they are, the greater the yield.
In some cases, the difference is enormous. A recent study of farming in Turkey, for example, found that farms of less than one hectare are 20 times as productive as farms of more than 10 hectares. Sen’s observation has been tested in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Malaysia, Thailand, Java, the Philippines, Brazil, Colombia and Paraguay. It appears to hold almost everywhere.
The finding would be surprising in any industry, as we have come to associate efficiency with scale. In farming it seems particularly odd, because small producers are less likely to own machinery, less likely to have capital or access to credit, and less likely to know about the latest techniques.
There’s a good deal of controversy about why this relationship exists. Some researchers argued that it was the result of a statistical artefact: fertile soils support higher populations than barren lands, so farm size could be a result of productivity, rather than the other way around. But further studies have shown that the inverse relationship holds across an area of fertile land. Moreover, it works even in countries such as Brazil, where the biggest farmers have grabbed the best land.
The most plausible explanation is that small farmers use more labour per hectare than big farmers. Their workforce largely consists of members of their own families, which means that labour costs are lower than on large farms (they don’t have to spend money recruiting or supervising workers), while the quality of the work is higher. With more labour, farmers can cultivate their land more intensively: they spend more time terracing and building irrigation systems; they sow again immediately after the harvest; and they might grow several crops in the same field.
In the early days of the green revolution, this relationship seemed to go into reverse: the bigger farms, with access to credit, were able to invest in new varieties and boost their yields. But as the new varieties have spread to smaller farmers, the inverse relationship has reasserted itself. If governments are serious about feeding the world, they should be breaking up large landholdings, redistributing them to the poor and concentrating their research and their funding on supporting small farms.
There are plenty of other reasons for defending small farmers in poor countries. The economic miracles in South Korea, Taiwan and Japan arose from their land reform programmes. Peasant farmers used the cash they made to build small businesses. The same thing seems to have happened in China, though it was delayed for 40 years by collectivisation and the Great Leap Backwards: the economic benefits of the redistribution that began in 1949 were not felt until the early 80s. Growth based on small farms tends to be more equitable than growth built around capital-intensive industries. Though their land is used intensively, the total ecological impact of smallholdings is lower. When small farms are bought up by big ones, the displaced workers move into new land to try to scratch out a living. I once followed evicted peasants from the Brazilian state of Maranhão 2,000 miles across the Amazon to the land of the Yanomami people, then watched them rip it apart.
But the prejudice against small farmers is unchallengeable. It gives rise to the oddest insult in the English language: when you call someone a peasant, you are accusing them of being self-reliant and productive. Peasants are detested by capitalists and communists alike. Both have sought to seize peasants’ land, and have a powerful vested interest in demeaning and demonising them. In its profile of Turkey, the country whose small farmers are 20 times more productive than its large ones, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation states that, as a result of small landholdings, “farm output … remains low”. The OECD states: “Stopping land fragmentation … and consolidating the highly fragmented land is indispensable for raising agricultural productivity.” Neither body provides any supporting evidence. A rootless, half-starved labouring class suits capital very well.
Like Mugabe, the donor countries and the big international bodies loudly demand that small farmers be supported, while quietly shafting them. Last week’s Rome food summit agreed “to help farmers, particularly small-scale producers, increase production and integrate with local, regional, and international markets”. But when, earlier this year, the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge proposed a means of doing just this, the US, Australia and Canada refused to endorse it as it offended big business, while the United Kingdom remains the only country that won’t reveal whether or not it supports the study.
Big business is killing small farming. By extending intellectual property rights over every aspect of production, and by developing plants that either won’t breed true or don’t reproduce at all, big business ensures that only those with access to capital can cultivate. As it captures both the wholesale and retail markets, it seeks to reduce its transaction costs by engaging only with major sellers. If you think that supermarkets are giving farmers in the UK a hard time, you should see what they are doing to growers in the poor world. As developing countries sweep away street markets and hawkers’ stalls and replace them with superstores and glossy malls, the most productive farmers lose their customers and are forced to sell up. The rich nations support this process by demanding access for their companies. Their agricultural subsidies still help their own large farmers to compete unfairly with the small producers of the poor world.
This leads to an interesting conclusion. For many years, well-meaning liberals have supported the fair trade movement because of the benefits it delivers directly to the people it buys from. But the structure of the global food market is changing so rapidly that fair trade is now becoming one of the few means by which small farmers in poor nations might survive. A shift from small to large farms will cause a major decline in global production, just as food supplies become tight. Fair trade might now be necessary not only as a means of redistributing income, but also to feed the world.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jun/10/food.globaleconomy
Fair free trade is both just and the only way to feed the world.