G20 must tackle hunger by fighting its roots causes

The Caritas-CIDSE G20 Network of Catholic agencies says making sure all people have access to appropriate food must be the priority for the leaders of G20 economies as they meet 18-19 June in Mexico. There are 925 million people in the world without enough to eat. About 300 children die from malnutrition every hour while one in four children is stunted, and in developing countries that figure rises to one in three. Yet we produce more than enough food globally to feed everyone. The Caritas-CIDSE G20 Network says reducing inequality and promoting sustainable development must be at the heart of the G20s plans to address food insecurity in the short, medium and long term.

Caritas Internationalis Secretary General Michel Roy said, “Hunger is not inevitable. It must be tackled by fighting its structural causes, primarily by promoting sustainable agricultural development of poor countries.” CIDSE Secretary General Bernd Nilles said, “The Mexican G20 has a real opportunity to show leadership on the issue of food security by ensuring better regulation of markets, strengthening of local food production and creating better access to markets for small-holder farmers. The G20 also have a particular responsibility to lead the fight against global poverty, since more than half of the world's poorest people live in G20 countries.”

Caritas-CIDSE G20 Network calls on the G20 to live up to the promises they made in Seoul in 2010. The Caritas-CIDSE G20 Network says increasing food production alone will fail without addressing the problems of access and distribution by building food reserves, curbing speculation in commodities´ markets and introducing social protection schemes. The G20 must act on the financial markets where under-regulated speculation is increasing food prices that are harming the poor. Tackling this problem requires greater intervention by public authorities, including at a global level, to rein in speculation, improve supervision of and increase transparency of markets. Emergency reserves and buffer stocks are needed in the poorest countries to protect the most vulnerable and stabilise market prices.

The Caritas-CIDSE G20 Network is a Network of 180 Catholic agencies working in collaboration to advocate at the G20 for the most vulnerable in our world.

No land investments without consent of local communities, CIDSE says

This week, the UN Committee on Food Security (CFS) held its 37th session in Rome, which looked at food price volatility, gender, food security and nutrition and agricultural investment. The session was meant to open with the adoption of new voluntary guidelines on land tenure, but governments were unable to finalise negotiations. The international alliance of Catholic development agencies CIDSE welcomes the efforts put into the talks so far, while urging governments to finalise negotiations as soon as possible and move towards putting the guidelines in practice. The Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests are meant to protect land tenure of small scale food producers, urgently needed in view of land grabbing which has dramatically increased in recent years.

CIDSE and other civil society organisations who participated in the negotiations in Rome highlight the progress made. Nearly three quarters of the text of the Voluntary Guidelines were successfully negotiated, including critical issues such as the recognition and protection of customary tenure, the tenure of forests and fisheries and the protection of rights defenders responding to the critical issue of their criminalisation. Several controversial issues, such as those relating to investments in agriculture remain open, however. According to CIDSE, “The land belongs to those who work it. Acknowledging the right of small farmers and local communities to cultivate their own land is an important step towards food security, as their right to food should always have priority over land investments.”

The issue of land governance is of growing importance. As much as 227 million hectares of land in developing countries (about the size of Western Europe) has been sold or leased since 2001. The bulk of these have taken place in the last 2 years, an overwhelming majority in Africa. The increase in land grabbing is linked to the 2007-2008 food price crisis which has triggered the interest of investors and governments in agriculture because of its profit making potential. The demand for food, timber, carbon sequestration and mineral exploration, as well as agro-fuels directives in developed countries, are key drivers of land grabbing. Investors include national elites, foreign companies and international governments, including oil rich states and China looking to secure food for their populations.

G20 action plan fails to address root causes hunger

According to CIDSE, the catholic development network, the G20 Agricultural Ministers’ Action Plan on Food Price Volatility and Agriculture contributes little to tackling global hunger. The alliance says the plan is more concerned with mitigating the consequences of price volatility than with addressing its root causes. It is “a band aid for a big gaping wound; it won’t cure the ailing global food system,” as Gisele Henriques, CIDSE’s food expert said. “Although the recent spike in commodity prices has worsened the situation, we should not forget that even before the 2008 food price crisis there were over 800 million hungry. We must look beyond the markets for an answer to this injustice.”

The action plan, which has been significantly diluted during the negotiations on 22-23 June in Paris, aims at improving agricultural production, increasing market information and transparency, strengthening international policy coordination, improving and developing risk management tools for governments, firms and farmers, as well as improving the functioning of agricultural commodities’ derivatives markets. G20 Agricultural Ministers propose the establishment of emergency food stocks, necessary to address food crises, ignoring regulatory stocks which could resolve food price volatility in the mid-term. CIDSE urges the G20 to support the re-establishment of regulatory stocks, at local, national and regional levels, which would help curb the excessive volatility in prices for both consumers and producers. Yet matters of financial regulation of the food markets agricultural ministers left to their fellow financial ministers and central bank governors.

CIDSE emphasises that current production models must be reconsidered. A recent report by the UN Special Representative on the Right to Food demonstrates that agro-ecological innovations can double production in a period of 3 to 10 years and it is precisely this kind of production model that must be supported. This also means creating food policies which strengthen local production by small holder farmers, because they account for 75% of the world’s hungry. The G20 also failed to take serious its own inter-agency report on price volatility. This report, coordinated by the FAO and the OECD, underlines the negative role of biofuels on price volatility and recommends a rethink of policies which incentivise biofuels, adopted by many G20 States members. “The poor progress made at the Paris meeting confirms once more that the G20 is not the most legitimate forum to pre-determine decisions on global food security. It should reinforce more democratic multilateral bodies such as the FAO’s Committee on World Food Security instead,” said Henriques.

G20 agricultural meeting: Biofuels, food reserves and stock transparency need urgent attention

The G20 must scrap their most damaging biofuel policies and demand more open information about food stocks as part of urgent measures needed to tackle global food price volatility. International agency Oxfam is also calling on G20 Agricultural Ministers meeting in Paris 22-24 June) to reconsider the case for food reserves so that countries can better handle the kind of price spikes that left an extra 150 million people hungry during the last food price crisis. Many poor people are continuing to be hurt by rising food prices.

An early draft of the G20 communiqué, leaked last week, was disappointing. Oxfam said it did not go far enough in trying to tackle the problems. Oxfam says that a recent expert report on price volatility into the G20 made it crystal clear that biofuels were part of the problem. The G20 must urgently remove the types of biofuels subsidies and mandates that are increasing price volatility and failing to tackle climate change. The G20 must have immediate contingency plans to adjust their biofuels targets when food supplies are endangered.

Oxfam also said the G20 must require major private sector traders and investors to provide governments with adequate and timely information on their food stocks in order to improve market transparency. In a new briefing paper, Oxfam says policy-makers should re-examine evidence from countries like Madagascar and Indonesia that show that properly designed food reserves combined with other measures could help developing countries to tackle food price volatility. Oxfam’s call comes with a warning that global grain stocks are again dropping alarmingly. When global cereal stocks fall below 15-20% of world consumption, price hikes and market break-down have followed. By the end of this year, Oxfam says, this ratio could be as low as 17%.

A global grain reserve of just 105 million tons would have been enough to help avoid the food price crisis in 2007-8, the paper said. The cost of maintaining this would have been $1.5bn “or just $10 for each of the extra 150 million people who joined the ranks of the hungry as a direct result of the last food price surge. The paper says that India managed to stabilize food prices in 2008 because the government made a massive purchase and release of rice and wheat. International institutions have warned G20 leaders that renewed food price volatility is now a high risk. However, the same institutions have summarily dismissed food reserves as one of the ways to stabilize prices,” report co-author Thierry Kesteloot from Oxfam said.

Oxfam acknowledged that in some cases food reserves may have been poorly managed in the past but that did not mean the policy itself was wrong – rather, it meant that the reserves themselves needed to be better implemented and governed. “The prevailing view that food reserves in themselves don’t work is unsophisticated and short-sighted. There are smart new ways that countries can maintain sufficient food reserves as part of a bundle of policies that could work to limit price surges. We’ve already seen the huge human cost of countries not having food reserves,” Kesteloot said. Oxfam says that G20 governments should agree to scale up national and regional reserves in developing countries and support public intervention of developing countries in buffer stocks managed in a durable, transparent manner. The G20 should commit technical and financial resources to establish these reserves and encourage other governments to do so.

G20 must go beyond market tango to tackle global hunger

CIDSE – Measures to reduce price volatility in agricultural markets is one of the issues G20 Agricultural Ministers will discuss when they meet on 22-23 June next week in Paris. As food price volatility persists, with prices now fluctuating around a level twice as high as the average level in the period of 1990-2006, the issue can no longer be ignored according, to The international alliance of Catholic development agencies CIDSE. This increasingly frequent volatility is a result of a complex web of factors with dire consequences for the world’s poorest consumers who spend 50 – 70% of their income on food. CIDSE welcomes the fact that curbing of price volatility is high on the G20 agenda, while warning that poverty in general, and access to food in particular, are structural issues that must be addressed in order to reduce the number of hungry people in the world.

In an open letter to G20 Ministers CIDSE says that in order to achieve global food security the G20 is right to aim at preventing excessive speculation and regulating commodity markets as well as addressing the issue of food reserves. However, the alliance argues that regulating markets is but one piece of the puzzle and that the G20 should also support measures to strengthen local small holder production whilst supporting the harmonisation of the various global food security initiatives towards a multilateral food governance within the UN. “Food security cannot be addressed through markets alone; it is not because of a lack of production that nearly 1bn people go hungry. Sufficient food is produced globally, but tremendous quantities go to waste after production, during processing, transport or on supermarket shelves,” said CIDSE’s food expert Gisele Henriques, who will be attending the G20 meeting in Paris.

As agriculture is the mainstay of 75% of the developing world’s poor, CIDSE believes food policies should strengthen local production by small holder farmers, who account for 75% of the hungry in the world. It is extremely worrying that aid to the agricultural sector has decreased from 18% of Official Development Assistance (ODA) in 1979 to less than 4% currently. This trend must be reversed in favour of agricultural policies which support modes of production that develop and promote food and livelihood systems with greater environmental, economic and social resilience in face of climate change and future economic and food price crises.

European Parliament: Food security high on the agenda

EP press service – A new report on food security in developing countries by the European Parliament was presented in the development committee on 25 May. MEPs used the opportunity to highlight the importance for the EU to focus on combating hunger effectively. To this end, policies should support the development of local food production and infrastructure for distribution and formulate measures to address food speculation and land grabbing, Rapporteur Gabriele Zimmer stressed. The report, An EU policy framework to assist developing countries in addressing food security challenges, comes at a time when the subject of food security and the right to food are growing in importance, according to Rapporteur Gabriele Zimmer. In light of the upcoming G20 meeting that is expected to address the problem of price volatility in commodity markets, Zimmer called upon the world’s leading economies to tackle the widespread problem of poor nutrition in developing countries, nutrition defined as “high quality food supply”, with increasing food prices further aggravating the problem.

In the wider context of food security, it was also stressed that the ever popular Washington Consensus, where trade deregulation, liberalization and tariff cuts are the order of the day, should be rethought. To this end, Zimmer stressed the EU has an important role in this shift. The draft report also refers to the ever controversial concept of food sovereignty. It is defined in the report as “the capacity of a country or a region to democratically, implement its own agricultural and food policies, priorities and strategies”.

The report was welcomed by MEPs in the development committee as an important contribution to the current discussions on food security and sovereignty. Thijs Berman (S&D) pointed to the report’s call to tackle food speculation and land grabbing as a means to foster the right to food for everyone and stressed the necessity for the EU to fundamentally reform its Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) with the aim to abolish export subsidies, even though it was recognized subsidies have been reduced by the EU over time.

The same week, the Committee for Agriculture and Rural Development (AGRI), adopted a report, entitled “the Common Agricultural Policy by 2020”, calling for a reformed CAP policy that provides for food security and environmental protection, focuses on renewable energy and fosters the creation of new jobs. The report sets out the committee’s priorities for the current debate on the reform of the CAP, which is running in parallel with the discussions on the EU’s next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF). As a major step forward, the report explicitly refers to the principle of Policy coherence for development and long term food security in developing countries, a clause that was welcomed by the NGO Confederation for Relief and Development (CONCORD). According to the report, “the EU [must] ensure consistency between the CAP and its development and trade policies” and urges the EU to “not jeopardize food production capacity and long term food security in [developing] countries and the ability of those populations to feed themselves, while respecting the principle of Policy Coherence for Development (PCD)”.

Appeal to G20: Stop Gambling on Food & Hunger

More than 100 civil society organizations from all over the world have sent an appeal to the G20 Finance Ministers meeting this weekend under the French presidency in Paris. The appeal urges the G20n for immediate action on financial speculation on food commodities. The document says:

Over the past few years, price hikes in basic foods have created dramatic shortages in many of the world’s poorest countries. In 2008, the world saw a major crisis with skyrocketing prices over a short time span for crops like rice, wheat and corn. Food riots erupted in 25 countries and more than 100 million people were added to the world’s undernourished and starving.

Now, with food prices rising again, a similar crisis could be just around the corner. We urge political leaders and heads of government in the European Union, United States and elsewhere to act immediately to avoid the repetition of such a scenario. While developing solutions to hunger and malnourishment in the world is a huge challenge, reining in financial speculation on agricultural commodities is of paramount importance. With global financial markets still in turmoil, agricultural commodity ‘futures’ have become increasingly attractive to financial investors and speculators. Enormous amounts of capital are flooding these markets, causing sudden food price spikes that can be lethal for low-income families in developing countries. Increased volatility caused by the influx of ‘hot money’ into and out of commodity markets is also causing havoc for farmers, who cannot predict what price their crops will command from one month to the next.

At the moment, action to crack down on excessive speculation in commodity markets is being considered in the US and EU, and in both places there are opportunities to implement reforms that would stabilise food prices. The G20 governments have also identified it as a top priority. This political context represents an historic opportunity to secure a sustainable relationship between financial markets and agricultural markets.

The financial services industry has already spent billions of Euros trying to persuade governments not to limit speculation. These lobbyists represent a small but powerful group of vested interests who are profiting from an activity that is fundamentally harmful to the vast majority of people.

We call on governments and parliamentarians to listen instead to the millions of consumers, workers, farmers, businesses, religious groups, academics, international development activists and others who believe effective controls over financial speculation on agricultural commodities is necessary to defend the world’s poorest people and the world’s food producers from exposure to sudden food price hikes and extreme price volatility.

Rules are needed in several key areas. These include ensuring full transparency and supervision of financial markets in food commodities, imposing strict limits on the level of participation by purely financial actors in commodity futures markets, and banning financial institutions from buying up physical stocks in food and farmland.

This is an urgent matter. Not only because of the live discussions in the US, EU and G20, but mostly because prices in agricultural and food markets are becoming more volatile with each passing month. Unless steps are taken to stop excessive speculation, it is only a matter of time until a disastrous new chapter in the global food crisis begins.

* Please find the signatories >>> here.

Finance Ministers in Paris: Early acid test for G20

The world’s leading economies must act now to stop the price of basic foods from surging further out of the reach of poor people. They must also commit to a Financial Transaction Tax (FTT) to help millions of people hit by the economic crisis and climate change. International agency Oxfam has welcomed the promise of action on these issues from France, the current G20 chair. Oxfam says that this week’s Finance Ministers’ meeting in Paris, on Feb 18-19, is an early acid test as to whether the G20 can turn words into action.

“Finance ministers will define the G20’s development credentials this weekend. They could make or break Sarkozy’s pledges to tackle the food price crisis and push through an FTT,” said Oxfam spokesperson Luc Lampriere. “The G20’s money ministers must now plan how exactly they will deliver on these promises – or otherwise G20 leaders will be left looking like emperors with no clothes.” Oxfam is seeing mounting impacts on poor people as a result of the economic crisis and food price hikes. Countries are being affected differently, but in general poor people are having to spend more of their limited income on food, and are therefore eating less, less often, and in some case less nutritious food. “We see anecdotal evidence of people slipping into food insecurity and malnourishment,” Lampriere said.”We hear about affected rural communities cutting back on health spending and having to sell productive animals earlier than they normally would in order to buy food.”

On a Financial Transaction Tax, Oxfam says: “This is the zeitgeist tax, a popular and progressive policy worth as much as $400bn a year. It would be small change from those who can most afford it but make a big difference to those who most need it. A financial transaction tax would be like a breath of fresh air clearing away the stench of bankers’ bonuses and offering hope to those trapped by the economic crisis,” he said. Oxfam is calling for an average tax of 0.05% on share, currency, bond and derivative deals. Recent research for Oxfam shows that 56 of the poorest countries in the world face a combined $65bn hole in their budgets as a result of the economic crisis. Oxfam also wants the G20 to endorse a recent finding by the UN High Level Advisory Group on Climate Finance (AGF), that at least $12 billion a year can be raised from levies on international transport, particularly on shipping.

Agribusiness and the right to food

“Agribusiness can play a key role in realizing the right to food. But States have to give more support to their small producers and push corporations to change their pricing and standards policies”, said the UN Special Rapporteur on Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter, as he presented his second annual report to the UN Human Rights Council on 5 March 2010. His report concludes that in an increasingly globalized food sector dominated by large transnational corporations, smallholders have a very limited number of buyers, and are in a deeply unequal bargaining position in respect of a fair price for their crops. In these circumstances, sourcing and pricing policies of commodity buyers have a huge and sometimes negative impact on the right to food. This situation partly explains why smallholders in developing countries are the single most important group of those suffering hunger in the world today.

To address this situation and the specific needs of smallholders, the Special Rapporteur makes a series of recommendations to the agribusiness corporations and the States. According to the report, States have a number of tools they could use to strengthen the position of smallholders and allow them to reap a larger proportion of the food dollar in their transactions with buyers. In particular, De Schutter said “States could support the establishment of farmers’ cooperatives through appropriate legal frameworks, capacity building programs or tax incentives, thus enhancing the capacity of small producers to obtain higher prices when they seek to sell their produce. These organizations present many advantages in terms of services and information, and help the producers to implement the increasingly complex norms and requirements of buyers and public authorities active on regional and global food markets.

The UN Special Rapporteur also called on States to act against unfair practices of corporations, excessive concentration in the food chain, or abuses of dominant position acquired by certain actors. National competition laws play a fundamental role here. “Competition law as it currently stands is not appropriately tailored to the circumstances that weaken the bargaining position of smallholders”, he explained. “States where suppliers are based should extend the reach of their competition laws to foreign buyers whose abuses affect national sellers, developing regional responses if they are concerned about being vulnerable as a small economy.”

Noting that the pressure to produce at low prices was increasing on suppliers, leading to repress wages of agricultural workers and to the casualization of this workforce, the Special Rapporteur also made a number of recommendations on this issue. States must establish a clear legal framework with robust enforcement mechanisms. But in addition employers have a responsibility to respect the right to food, even where laws are insufficiently protective of agricultural workers or where the existing labour legislation is inadequately monitored: agribusiness companies must not contribute, directly or indirectly, to human rights abuses through their relationship with suppliers.

Please find the full report >>> here.

World Food Summit must tackle hunger with just and sustainable solutions

CIDSE and Caritas Internationalis, together the world’s largest development alliance, working with communities impacted by the food crisis across Asia, Africa and Latin America, travel to Rome for next week’s World Food Summit to call on world leaders to harness the potential of small-scale farmers. The catholic alliances believe urgent action is needed now; every day over a billion people go to bed hungry and currently over 23 million people across East Africa are in need of emergency food aid due to drought and a food price crisis made worse by the global economic recession. Since the global food crisis hit in 2007 there is increasing recognition by governments of the need to invest in small-scale agriculture in developing countries to ensure that small producers earn a decent income and enjoy the universal right to food.

“This is a very positive development, but recognition needs to be translated into national country policies and donor support strategies that promote small producer organisations and strengthen their ability to improve production, processing, and marketing - including their capacity to negotiate with buyers and other market actors. The Summit leaders should particularly prioritise farmer’s engagement in policy development, their access to land and water, inputs, credit, insurance, markets, training and extension services,” said Bob van Dillen, from the CIDSE and Caritas networks. However, there is a significant threat that the international community will promote the use of high-tech agricultural techniques, many of which are socially or environmentally unsustainable and create dependence on external inputs, rather than investing in what these farmers really need. The World Food Summit is also expected to reiterate support for further opening of markets and completion of the Doha Round of trade negotiations, which CIDSE and Caritas believe would hurt small-scale farmers rather than help them unless significant changes are made to current proposals.

CIDSE and Caritas believe that if the international community is serious about harnessing the potential of small-scale farmers, policies should particularly target women producers, who are the backbone of the rural economy and crucial actors in ensuring household food security. Both networks call on developing country governments to allocate, within 5 years, a minimum of 10% of their annual budgets to implement these urgent policies. The international donor community should make at least an equivalent commitment to agriculture and rural development in their Official Development Assistance (ODA), whose share within overall ODA spending has fallen from 17% in 1980 to around 5% today.

Parallel to the Summit a Civil Society Forum is taking place in Rome from 14-17 November. An APRODEV and CIDSE Briefing Paper and recommendations to the EU for the World Food Summit is available: >>> here

G8 Agriculture Ministers admit failure on hunger

Agriculture Ministers have admitted that they will probably fail to deliver on promises to halve world hunger by 2015. The final communiqué from the G8 Agriculture Ministers meeting in Northern Italy says the world is “very far from reaching” the United Nations goal of halving the number of people facing chronic hunger by 2015. This is the closest Ministers have come to admitting they will not deliver on the Millennium Development Goal – one of the eight international development goals that 192 United Nations member states agreed to achieve by the year 2015. "G8 Ministers have made an extraordinary admission of collective failure. This would be a sack-able offence in any other arena," said Chris Leather, Oxfam International’s Senior Food Advisor. “The G8 has failed the world’s one billion hungry people.”

An extra 150 million people have become chronically hungry in the last year as a consequence of high food prices, making the world total near to one billion people. Without urgent action the number will increase rapidly due to the global economic crisis and in the face of climate change. The United Nations Food and Agriculture agency (FAO) has called on world leaders to take action in order to eradicate world hunger by 2025. However setting a new goal will achieve little if rich countries fail to deliver on their promises.

It now falls to G8 Development Ministers, who are meeting at the end of April, to come up with concrete proposals to tackle the food crisis. These proposals must be agreed by Heads of State when they meet in July. “When leaders of the world’s richest countries meet in July they must put an end to the grandstanding and take concrete action to end hunger," said Leather. Oxfam is calling for G8 leaders to commit to a legally binding international convention that aims to eradicate hunger. There is currently no way of holding governments to account for their failure to deliver on promises to tackle hunger. A legally binding commitment would enable civil society to hold governments to account for their failure to prevent people dying from hunger in a world where we have the means to prevent it.

The meeting of the G8 and G5 agriculture ministers in Cison di Valmarino, near Treviso in the Veneto region of northeast Italy, was the first of its kind. The ministers were asked to come up with concrete proposals to address food security in a declaration by the G8 Summit in Japan in 2008. But the meeting has not produced a single concrete proposal to fight hunger, not to speak about new financial commitments.

Global food crisis will worsen - 1bn people need help now

Urgent action is needed to prevent hundreds of millions more people slipping into hunger as a result of volatile food prices and increasing energy and water scarcity, said international agency Oxfam today. Decades of underinvestment in agriculture coupled with the increasing threat of climate change mean that despite recent price falls, future food security is by no means guaranteed, and in fact the situation could get worse, said Oxfam on the opening day of a UN conference in Madrid to address the issue. Oxfam’s warning comes on the day that two new reports are published, detailing the threats to global food security and exposing the lack of adequate coordinated international action to tackle hunger.

The reports, A Billion Hungry People and The Feeding of the Nine Billion are published by Oxfam and the UK think tank, Chatham House respectively, and together are a call to action to politicians, and representatives from the private sector and civil society meeting to discuss the implementation of the UN Taskforce’s response. Although global food prices have fallen in the last few months, they are not back to previous levels, and are likely to rise sharply again in the future. Furthermore, price volatility itself is a problem, and more needs to be done to address the underlying structural issues that cause the chronic hunger affecting 1 in 6 people in the world today, according to Oxfam. Current severe food shortages in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique and Zimbabwe are evidence that the global food crisis is far from over. Even before recent price rises, there were over 850m people classified as undernourished. Now, there are nearly a billion, as a result of the price rises, alongside other factors such as political instability and conflict.

“Not enough has been done to tackle the situation. There is a lack of coordination at all levels and the opportunity for root and branch reform of the aid system has not yet been taken. International institutions and donors must reverse decades of under-investment in agriculture and scrap blatantly distortionary polices such as biofuels mandates that make things worse,” said an Oxfam representative, who is attending the conference. “The recent decision by the EU to reinstate export subsidies for dairy is the direct opposite of what’s needed: a retrograde step that calls into question their commitment to longer term reforms,” he added.

The Feeding of the Nine Billion, published by Chatham House and part-funded by Oxfam, predicts demand for food will increase as the world’s population grows by 2.5bn to 9.2bn by 2050. It also notes a UN prediction that climate change will increase the number of undernourished people worldwide by between 40m and 170m. Meanwhile, Oxfam’s A Billion Hungry People includes recommendations for reform of the humanitarian aid system and makes a strident call to poor countries to do their bit by investing more in agriculture, targeting women and small-scale producers. Developing countries must increase social protection measures for vulnerable populations – including cash payments and employment creation programs for those at risk of hunger. Rich countries must ensure long-term predictable funding to developing countries for investment in agriculture and climate change adaptation.

World must learn lessons from food price crisis

Small farmers in developing countries have not benefited from higher food prices, thanks in part to flawed trade and agricultural policies that have made them vulnerable and weakened their positions in markets, said international agency Oxfam in a new report released today, World Food Day. In Double Edged Prices, Oxfam says that all governments, donors, and agencies, must learn the lessons from the crisis. These include the importance of investing in agriculture, having trade policies that ensure food security, and designing social protection systems that protect the poorest.

Teresa Cavero, author of the report and head of research at Oxfam in Spain, said: “The trend in agriculture, as in international finance, has been towards deregulation and a reduced role for the State. This has had devastating effects and innocent lives have been blighted by exposure to market volatility. It is time the world woke up to the need for developing country governments to support their poor farmers, and the obligation of developed countries to help them to do so. In countries where governments have invested in agriculture, and put policies in place to target vulnerable or marginalized groups, the impacts of food price inflation have been less severe. In contrast, where there has been unmanaged trade liberalization, underinvestment in agriculture, and little support from government, the effects have been devastating.”

The sharp rise in global food prices has pushed 119m more people into hunger, taking the global total to 967m. Higher food prices mean people are eating less and lower quality food, children are being taken out of school and farmers are being forced to migrate to cities to live in slums (see case studies below). Women are especially vulnerable because they rarely own land and have limited access to credit and other services, but they bear much of the responsibility for feeding and caring for families. Meanwhile, some of the biggest international food companies have made windfall profits. Commodity-trader, Bunge, saw its profits in the second fiscal quarter of 2008 increase by $583m, or quadruple, compared with the same period last year. Nestlé’s global sales grew nearly 9% in the first half of 2008, and UK supermarket Tesco, has reported profits up 10% from last year. Seed company, Monsanto, reported a 26% increase in revenue to a record $3.6bn in the fiscal quarter that ended 31 May 2008.

Misguided or inadequate national agricultural policies, coupled with unfair trade rules and poor economic advice, has created a situation where big traders and supermarkets are gaining from price rises, and small farmers and consumers are losing out. Oxfam criticizes the international community’s inadequate response – both in terms of money and coordination. At an emergency meeting in Rome earlier this year, $12.3bn was pledged for the food crisis, but little more than $1bn has been disbursed so far.

New ActionAid report: Europe must fight, not foster, hunger

In a week which marks the observance of World Food Day, World Poverty Day and a crucial meeting of EU Heads of State in Brussels, ActionAid is demanding that the EU urgently revisits its plans to address the world food crisis. In a new report, Bread and Butter Solutions to the Food Crisis, ActionAid urges the EU to do more to stem the impact of rising fuel and food prices on the world’s poor. Since the crisis started, the number of people going hungry each night has risen to one billion – one sixth of the world’s population. Furthermore, the FAO has estimated that food prices will remain high for the next five to ten years.

“Rising food and oil prices are acting as a double whammy, driving hunger to new levels and people to desperation,” said Carol Kayira, Food Rights Coordinator of ActionAid Malawi. “Upsets in the banking sector should not divert attention from Europe’s commitments to the poor. The food crisis has not gone away and a coherent European response is badly needed.” This year high prices for European agricultural goods are likely to mean a surplus of billions of Euros in the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) pot. The EU is currently considering the use of €1bn of this excess cash to address the food crisis.

“The €1bn fund being proposed by the EU is a drop in the ocean when compared to what governments are spending to bail out the banks,” Ms Kayira added. “The EU should mobilise this food crisis fund and keep to its existing commitments on aid. By allocating more and better aid to agriculture, Europe can get back on track and address world hunger,” Ms Kayira added.

More and better aid is not the only action being proposed by ActionAid. The Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs), being negotiated between the EU and Africa, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries pose a major threat to food security in these countries and must therefore be renegotiated. French MP Christiane Taubira, who wrote an official report for the French Government on the EPAs spoke to ActionAid yesterday on the potential impact of the EPAs: “The EPAs cast a shadow over the potential for development of the EU’s southern partners…. In particular the agricultural sector has to be subject to specific treatment, and an international right to food must be a priority objective.” She also called on the French Presidency of the EU to listen to the concerns recently expressed by Caribbean countries negotiating the EPAs: “The French Presidency must take into account the strong reticence expressed by negotiators from ACP countries which has even come to light within the CARIFORUM grouping, the only one to have initialled the full agreements to date,” Ms Taubira added.

Bread and Butter solutions also highlights the role which agrofuels have played in the recent upsurge of food prices. “In 2007 the EU used 2.85m hectares of farmable land to grow crops for agrofuels, rather than food,” said Laura Hurtado, Food Rights Coordinator at ActionAid Guatemala. “This has fuelled rising food prices and threatened millions more with hunger. Because Europe does not have enough land, it is increasingly looking to developing countries to meet its targets on biofuels. This will only intensify the food crisis.” ActionAid also warns Europe that GMOs will not address hunger in the world. Rather they will contribute to rising see and food prices and make farmers dependent on supply chains in the hands of a few multinational corporations protected by intellectual property rights.

Rome summit: Much more needed says Oxfam

This week’s UN summit in Rome was an important first step in tackling the food crisis but greater action is now needed to resolve the crisis says Oxfam. “Recognizing you have a problem is the first step toward solving it. Leaders of the richest countries have acknowledged the importance of aid to agriculture after 25 years of decline. They have pledged money to provide immediate aid to those that need it. But a crisis like this, with so many contributing factors, needs a wide-ranging plan to resolve it and rich countries can’t continue to ignore their own trade and agriculture policies,” said Barbara Stocking, CEO, Oxfam GB.

The final communique acknowledges that biofuels offer both ‘opportunities and challenges’ and recommends more research into their impact. However, in the meantime, biofuels will continue to have a devastating impact on millions of poor people and recent estimates suggest that demand for biofuels is responsible for 30 percent of the global food price rise. Oxfam is calling on the EU and US to end their compulsory biofuel targets.

The communique also suggests that concluding the current WTO agreement will solve the crisis. Oxfam disagrees and argues instead that current WTO proposals do not give developing countries the flexibility they need to respond to volatile markets and short term rises and falls in prices. “Concluding a trade deal as it is currently framed will hurt poor farmers and consumers, not help them. Trade rules must protect poor people in times of both high prices and low. Developing countries need the ability to feed their people and support the poorest, most marginalized farmers to gain from current high prices. The current crisis illustrates starkly that what we need is not business as usual but deep reform of the international trading system," said Stocking.

The UN Task Force set up to deal with the food crisis must listen to representatives from the developing world’s 400 million small-holder farmers. These farms are not only important in feeding their nations but also providing economic development and must be part of any solution to the crisis. US$6bn has been pledged this week but this is less than half of the $14.5bn that Oxfam estimates is needed to provide immediate assistance to at least 290 million people threatened by rising food prices until the end of 2008. It is unclear whether the US$6bn is new money or comes from existing aid commitments, and what is the time frame for its delivery. (The money pledged this week includes: France €1bn (US$1.5bn), Spain €500m (US$800m), Islamic Development Bank US$1.5bn, World Bank US$1.2bn, African Development Bank US$1bn.)

“The baton of responsibility now passes to the G8 and its finance ministers meeting in Japan next week. As the world’s most powerful countries they must provide more money to deal with the immediate impact of the current crisis but also tackle some of the contributing causes by ending compulsory biofuels targets and providing more long term aid for to agriculture,” said Stocking.

For more information see >>> WDEV Dossier "The New Face of Hunger"

Trade unions at CSD: Food prices, green jobs and decent work

A 50 member trade union delegation commenced its work at UN Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) in New York this week by asking member countries to consider ‘decent work’ a vital part of any agenda for sustainable agricultural and rural development. Trade Unions, one of nine Major Groups under Agenda 21, are meeting with governments and international agencies this and next week to review progress made towards Sustainable Development since the 2002 World Summit in the following theme areas: agriculture, desertification, drought, land, rural development and Africa.

Initial remarks prepared for the Opening Session, Thierry Dedieu, Confederal Secretary of the ‘Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail (CFDT) reminded that although world attention is focused on the disastrous effect of escalating food prices, the major players in the agricultural industry, the millions of waged and informal workers that bring the food to our tables, should not be forgotten. “The ILO Agenda for Decent Work is critical for the agricultural sector,” said Dedieu. “Large segments of the industry currently encompass all aspects of precarious employment; unacceptable pay levels, unhealthy & unsafe work, insecure employment prospects, and numerous other substandard terms and conditions. In 2007, for example, over 170,000 agricultural workers died because of their work. During the next two weeks, trade union delegates will report on progress made by trade unions to render industries related to agriculture and rural development more sustainable,” he said. “We have been able to bring health and safety to millions of workers through worksite negotiations and international Framework Agreements, at the same time as we continue to promote such international agreements as ILO Convention 184 on Health and Safety in Agriculture.”

Green & Decent’ employment policies in agriculture and the global food system can yield a high payoff as solutions to deal with drought, desertification and rural development, especially when combined with energy conservation and environmental protection, he said. A progress on a ‘Green Jobs’ report by the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), in collaboration with the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) will be unveiled in a high-level luncheon with country delegates next week.

Trade unions at the CSD will also highlight the need to integrate climate change, water issues, as well as public and occupational health as key cross-sectoral issues. Trade unions will encourage the CSD to harness the full participation of workers and trade unions in decision-making for workplace solutions and in building support for the aggressive policies that are needed at the community level. See >>> information kit

Aid system not able to tackle impending food crisis, say CARE and Oxfam

According to Oxfam and CARE the international aid system was not fit for purpose and called for fundamental changes in order to tackle the challenge of food price hikes and impending food crises in East and West Africa. The call comes at the end of a conference on how best the world can address global hunger attended by some 30 leading UN and aid agencies in Rome. "Food riots have pushed global hunger onto the political agenda but the aid business will not be able to tackle global hunger while it remains stuck in the past, seeing food crises as one-off events and not tackling the underlining problem - chronic poverty. The world has become much better at sending in teams to save lives but it seems incapable of doing what is needed to prevent crises happening in the first place," said Barbara Stocking, Oxfam's Chief Executive.

CARE and Oxfam warned that besides the impact of food price hikes there are also early signs of impending food shortages in East and West Africa. These potential disasters could be averted if the world takes immediate action. In East Africa the March to May rainy season has been slow to start, triggering concern that another widespread humanitarian crisis might strike for the second time in less than three years. Although there has been some rain over the last week, CARE and Oxfam are particularly concerned about hunger striking the poorest in southern Somalia and the Somali Region of Ethiopia and in West Africa there are worrying warnings of increased hunger hot spots in Mauritania and Niger.

Acting earlier not only saves more lives but makes economic sense. In 2004 and 2005 early warnings alerted world donors that in West Africa, Niger needed aid to avert famine. There was no immediate response, and it was not until television cameras showed emaciated children dying that the world acted. The cost of the delay was high in human life and in economic terms. The UN estimated that acting earlier would have cost $1 a day to prevent a child suffering from malnutrition. Because of delay it cost $80 to save a malnourished child. Another area of concern is the inefficiencies and high costs resulting from self-interest on the part of those delivering aid. Shipping surplus food aid thousands of miles provides a boon to shipping companies, but also increases the cost of delivering food anywhere from 50% to 100%.

CARE and Oxfam are calling for more aid of the right kind in the right place at the right time. Specifically, the organizations want:

* Appropriate aid delivered according to needs: The nature of food insecurity and vulnerability needs to be better understood in order to design more appropriate responses.

* Alternatives to emergency relief, including food aid, to be delivered when appropriate, for example cash for work and other cash transfer schemes. Often food is available during a food crisis. The issue is that it is too expensive for the hungry to buy it. Buying food aid locally can help stimulate the local economy and keep farmers in work. Chronic and cyclical problems need to be addressed through social protection mechanisms, such as social insurance and assistance.

* Support development of poor country governments' capacity to respond to chronic crises: National governments need to invest in the social protection of their citizens, implement 'safety net' programmes (cash for work schemes or targeted assistance to the vulnerable) for populations at risk of hunger, intervene before livelihoods collapse. Donors need to commit resources to support the establishment of local response and safety net mechanisms, e.g. the donors backed 'Productive Safety Net Programme' ensuring predictable assistance to eight million people in Ethiopia. Mechanisms allowing more effective monitoring and coordination of international aid against hunger need to be established within the UN system, and with NGOs.

Disaster risk reduction is a key factor in preventing future crises. Many weather-related crises are cyclical and preparedness and risk reduction strategies can reduce the loss of valuable agricultural production, but this requires a substantial change in emphasis from donors, who will need to make an investment before public support has been mobilized by images of starvation.

* On the recent food price crisis CARE and Oxfam called for: Increase donor and national government investment in small-scale agriculture in developing countries, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. Most African governments have failed to meet their 2003 promise to allocate at least a tenth of their spending to agriculture and they are now reaping the consequences. Countries such as Malawi and Zambia have shown the way, moving from dependence on food aid to become cereal exporters in recent years. Greater international support is needed. It is important that humanitarian organizations ensure that women can access the opportunities that are created.

Large-scale growth in biofuels demand has pushed up food prices and so far there is little evidence that it is reducing overall carbon emissions. Natural carbon sinks such as rainforests and grasslands are being destroyed to make way for new biofuel plantations and biofuel crops are displacing food production. Countries driving biofuel demand need to monitor the impacts of their policies on global food security and provide financial support for affected countries. Mandatory targets need to be reassessed in terms of likely impact on emissions and negative social and environmental side effects in developing countries, including higher food prices, land grabs and labour rights abuses. Developing countries need to integrate their biofuel strategies with food security policies to address issues such as land allocation and crop use.

* Ensure financial services such as insurance and credit are available to poor farmers. In Thailand, for example, small producers are going to the wall because banks will not lend them money to manage between harvests.

* Allow space for national trade policies to manage food security and rural development and to support the poorest and most marginalised farmers to gain from current price rises.

* Recognise that climate change is going to exacerbate these problems, requiring urgent mitigation and adaptation response

* Eliminate trade-distorting export agricultural subsidies, export restrictions and price controls. This will correct distortions in world markets and pave the way towards a long-term solution to unstable food prices.

"There is clearly a lot that governments and aid agencies must do to tackle hunger," said Jonathan Mitchell, CARE's emergency response director. "What emerged from this conference is that humanitarian and relief agencies are committed to new solutions. We now need aid agencies to be held accountable and for donor governments to get behind these changes."

The full report can be found here.

Rethinking food crisis solutions

In the midst of a commodity prices boom, high volatility in the oil marker, and record high food prices, the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) sets a new agenda for global food production. A new report suggests that modern agriculture will have to change radically if the world is to avoid social breakdown and environmental collapse. See Al Jazeera's video: