2011 Higher Prices for Food: World Citizens Call for Coordinated World Food Policy
UNITED NATIONS, 10 Jan 2011
Rene Wadlow – TRANSCEND Media Service
“Since the hungry billion in the world community believe that we can all eat if we set our common house in order, they believe also that it is unjust that some men die because it is too much trouble to arrange for them to live.”
— Stringfellow Barr in Citizens of the World (1952)
In its most recent January 2011 analysis of the world food situation, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) noted with alarm the extreme price fluctuation in global agricultural markets. This fluctuation in global agricultural markets is leading to higher food prices and is a threat to world food security. The impact falls heaviest on the poor who spend a high percentage — up to 70 percent — of their income on food. Often, the lack of dietary diversification aggravates the problem, as price increases in one staple cannot easily be compensated by switching to other foods. The United Nations estimates that one billion people worldwide do not get enough food and that this number is certain to increase as prices rise.
In a response to the FAO analysis, Rene Wadlow, Senior Vice President and Representative to the United Nations, Geneva, Association of World Citizens (AWC) addressed an urgent appeal to the Secretary General of the United Nations, Mr Ban Ki-moon on behalf of the AWC. Wadlow recalled the earlier World Bank evaluation that “The development community, and the world as a whole, has constantly failed to address malnutrition over the past decades. (World Bank. Repositioning Nutrition as Central to Development: A Strategy For Large-Scale Action (2006) )
A central theme which citizens of the world have long stressed is that there needs to be a world food policy and that a world food policy is more than the sum of national food security programs. Food security has too often been treated as a collection of national security initiatives. While the adoption of a national strategy to ensure food and nutrition security for all is essential, a focus on the formulation of national plans is clearly inadequate. There is a need for a world plan of action with focused attention to the role that the United Nations and regional bodies such as the European Union and the African Union must play if hunger is to be sharply reduced.
It is also certain that attention must be given to local issues of food production, distribution and food security. Attention needs to be given to cultural factors, the division of labor between women and men in agriculture and rural development, in marketing local food products, to the role of small farmers, to the role of landless agricultural labor, and to land-holding patterns.
However, for the formulation of a dynamic world food policy, world economic trends and structures need to be analysed, and policy goals made clear. There needs to be a detailed analysis of the role of speculation in the rise of commodity prices. Banks and hedge funds, having lost money in the real estate mortgage packages, are now investing massively in commodities. For the moment, there is little governmental regulation of this speculation. There needs to be an analysis of these financial flows and their impact on the price of grains.
The politically-destabilizing aspects of higher food prices and food riots had pushed the issue of food costs to the top of the agenda of UN Agencies in 2008 as highlighted by the Seventh special session on the Right to Food of the Human Rights Council in May 2008. However, the financial crisis and general recession of 2009 and 2010 have eclipsed food issues, and many governments have again become complacent, believing that the food security mechanisms that they had put into place permanently banished the dangers of large-scale unrest due to higher food prices.
Today, the FAO analysis is a call for cooperation among the UN family of agencies, national governments, non-governmental organizations and the millions of food producers to respond to both short-term measures to help people now suffering from lack of food and adequate nutrition due to high food prices and with longer-range structural issues. The world requires a World Food Policy and a clear Plan of Action.
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René Wadlow:
Representative to the United Nations, Geneva, Association of World Citizens.
Member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment.
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 10 Jan 2011.
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