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In 2009, the number of undernourished people in the world reached a record high of one billion. International trade rules must be fundamentally reshaped to put human rights, particularly the right to adequate food, at the centre of economic policy, says a report by IATP et al.

Link to full report: The Global Food Challenge

14th January 2010

The Global Food Challenge: An Introduction 

November 2009 - Sophia Murphy and Armin Paash, Institute for Agricultural and Trade Policy (IATP) et al.

It started with the tortilla crisis in Mexico. Slum dwellers had to renounce their daily staple food because of exploding corn prices. Their loud protest in January 2007 was just the first in a series of food riots in about 40 countries. The last straw came in April 2008, in Haiti, when car tires burned in, barricades were built and the Prime Minister was overthrown. Finally the global food crisis was a story for primetime in the international media. An almost unprecedented price explosion for important agricultural commodities on the global market triggered the crisis.

The price hikes were caused by growing use of commodities (such as soybean and maize) for agrofuels; excessive speculation on commodities’ futures markets; increased meat consumption; poor harvests in the United States, Australia and Turkey; increased oil and energy prices; and, depleted food stocks. In the first half of 2008 alone, prices for food staples such as rice and cooking oil doubled (FAO 2009a).

Particularly in those countries that most relied on food imports, this international development was almost immediately reflected in the prices of food on grocery store shelves. And within these countries, the people who were most affected were the poor. Several hundred million more people joined the ranks of those unable to afford their daily food. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations (UN) estimates that, because of higher food prices, the number of chronically undernourished people increased from 850 million to 915 million between 2005 and 2009.

In June 2009, the news worsened: for the first time in human history the number of hungry people passed one billion. It is striking that record hunger in 2009 followed record grain harvests in 2008. FAO clearly stated: The increase in undernourishment is not a result of limited international food supplies (FAO 2009b). In 2009 the global grain harvest would only modestly fall short of the previous year’s record output level of 2,287 million metric tons.

Instead, FAO identifies the main cause of still-rising hunger levels as the global financial and economic crisis, whose effects overlap with and worsen those of the food price crisis. Since autumn 2008, international agricultural commodity prices have dropped significantly but real domestic average prices for food staples are still 24 percent above June 2007 levels.

 As a consequence of financial market deregulation and speculation on commodity exchanges in industrialized countries, the economic crisis hit the global south with full strength. Scarcity of loans blocked badly needed investment in agriculture. Reduced orders and bankruptcies, especially in export sectors, destroyed the jobs of millions of people. And extreme inflation in a number of developing countries meant domestic food prices did not drop, despite lowering world market prices for agricultural commodities. To top it all off, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) says Overseas Development Aid (ODA) might decline by 25 percent in 2009 (FAO 2009b).

It would be unfair to say that the world’s governments and the international community remained passive in the face of the food crisis. In 2008, this global human disaster (which was a long time in the making) finally attracted the public attention it deserves. A range of international conferences like the High Level Conference on World Food Security organized by the FAO in June 2008 in Rome, a High Level Conference in January 2009 in Madrid and the G8 Summits in 2008 and 2009 made it clear that hunger had reached the top of the international agenda.

Since April 2008, the reaction of the international community to the food crisis has been coordinated by the High Level Task Force on the Global Food Crisis (HLTF), which was initiated by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and which is composed of all UN organizations dealing with food and agriculture, as well as the World Bank, the IMF and the World Trade Organization (WTO).

In July 2008, the HLTF released a Comprehensive Framework for Action (CFA). The document sets out the joint position of HLTF members on proposed action to overcome the food crisis (HLTF 2008). Like other recent reports of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), such as the World Development Report 2008 of the World Bank (WB 2008a), the CFA recommended that policymakers pay more attention to agriculture and increase their support for the sector for smallholder farmers in particular.

The CFA calls for developing countries to increase public spending in agricultural and rural development to at least 10 percent of the budget, and for developed countries to increase the percentage of ODA dedicated to  food and agricultural development from 3 percent (where it is today) to at least 10 percent within the next five years. These are proposals that point in the right direction. Also welcome is the declared objective to strengthen social protection systems. All of these measures, against the backdrop of soaring food prices, are more important than ever. On the other hand, social movements and NGOs are critical of the CFA for promoting the old paradigm of trade liberalization, ignoring the need for land reforms and more sustainable methods of production and following a very narrow understanding of social security (FIAN International 2008). There is still a lot of work to be done to get the global policy agenda right.

The declarations and promises were followed by action (Brock and Paasch 2009). Since June 2008 alone, the World Food Programme (WFP) has spent $5.1 billion USD on food aid (the larger share) and, to a lesser degree, on cash for work programs. The World Bank set up a Global Food Crisis Response Programme (GFRP) in 2008 to grant immediate relief to those countries that were hit particularly hard by high food prices and to assist countries to meet higher production and marketing costs (WB 2009).

The World Bank announced a rapid financing facility of $1.2 billion USD to this end. The budget was increased to $2 billion USD in April 2009 (WB 2009). FAO launched its Initiative on Soaring Food Prices (ISFP) in 2007. Between June 2008 and September 2009, it mobilized around $37 million USD of its own resources and received an additional $311 million USD in funding to assist governments to take emergency measures, in efforts to increase local production in the current planting season as well as to expand plantings in the dry season. FAO has also supported governments with policy advice (HLTF 2009).

The question arises, however, as to why these joint efforts have not had the expected result of lessening the food crisis. The main focus of these international responses to  the food crisis is the distribution of food aid, hybrid seeds and fertilizers. The measures are by and large focused on increasing productivity. Yet the FAO itself has said that lack of food is not the reason for the food crisis. The authors of this publication argue that fundamental causes of hunger are instead to be found in unfair market structures.

The articles focus in particular on global trade and investment policies that have impoverished and marginalized landless farm workers, smallholder farmers, pastoralists, indigenous people and slum dwellers, and particularly women within all these social groups. Moreover, these policies have led to severe violations of human rights, particularly the universal human right to food. This basic human right is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR).  The ICESCR has been ratified by 160 states. The right to adequate food establishes clear legal obligations for states and the international community, which, according to international law, precede other legal obligations states may have, for example in the areas of trade and investment (see chapter 1 by Olivier De Schutter).

However, governments and intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) are still largely neglecting these human rights obligations and risk repeating many of the same errors that caused the food crisis. The papers compiled in this publication analyze some of these errors: the displacement of farming communities from their local markets through a combination of export dumping by industrialized countries and forced market access in developing countries (see chapters 2 by Tobias Reichert and 3 by Armin Paasch); forced land evictions of small-scale farmers and rural workers as a result of investment in large scale plantations for cash crops or agrofuels and insecure land rights (see chapter 4 by Rolf Künnemann) and a systematic neglect and discrimination of women, who make up around 70 percent of the hungry, in food and agriculture policies (see chapter 5 by Alexandra Spieldoch).

The right to food of these marginalized food producers and poor urban consumers was further undermined though excessive speculation in the future markets in the context of the mortgage and more general financial crises (see chapter 6 by Peter Wahl). Furthermore, man-made climate change is heavily threatening harvests in poor countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia and will hit hardest those who are already facing hunger. (see chapter 7 by Thomas Hirsch, Christine Lottje and Michael Windfuhr).

These and other root causes of hunger were the subject of the international conference The Global Food Challenge Finding Approaches to Trade and Investment that support the Right to Food that took place in November 2008 in Geneva. The year 2008 marked the 60th anniversary of both the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the creation of the international trading system through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and WTO.

The participants of this conference 130 representatives of social movements and NGOs from 40 countries analyzed concrete cases of violations of the right to food through unfair trade and investment policies and their underlying structural problems. Beyond analysis, the conference aimed to identify alternative ways to integrate human rights principles in trade and investment policies and reconcile their distinct and sometimes competing legal regimes (see chapter 10 by Sophia Murphy and Carin Smaller). Existing human rights instruments that can already be used to influence trade and investment policies were assessed (see chapter 8 by Elvira Domínguez Redondo and Magdalena Sepúlveda Carmona) and the need for new instruments discussed (see chapter 1 by Olivier De Schutter and chapter 9 by Christophe Golay).

This publication compiles background papers that were presented at the conference as well as some more recent material that develops some of the arguments presented during the conference. Brot für Alle, Brot für die Welt, the Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance (EA), the FoodFirst Information and Action Network (FIAN), Germanwatch, the Heinrich Böll Foundation and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) decided to publish this book in order to make the analyses and approaches discussed in the conference accessible to a broader audience. The publishers are aware that there are no easy solutions for the food crisis, yet they hope to feed a debate that is attracting more and more interest and that remains front and center of any agenda for social justice and environmental sustainability.

Sophia Murphy is a senior advisor of the Trade and Global Governance Program at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP).

Armin Paasch is a senior adviser on agriculture and trade for the German section of the FoodFirst Information and Action Network (FIAN ) since 2001.

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