Last week's decision from the socialist group at the Committee of the Regions (CoR), to invite Olivier De Schutter, UN rapporteur on global food security, was a welcome initiative. This column has on two occasions (EUROPE 9872 and 9873) commented on the importance of his work, which has harshly condemned the global policies hitherto pursued in the agricultural arena that prioritised the freeing up of trade, unbridled competition, and the encouragement of poor countries to produce for exports by developing single-crop farming (resulting in the destruction of their subsistence farming and making them totally dependent on food imports). This column has criticised these orientations for a long time. Thanks to Mr De Schutter, this criticism does not simply represent an opinion of one journalist but now features in the official texts of the UN and has finally been introduced into the Community debate.
Aberrations denounced. While having barely half an hour to speak (an internal polemic on the creation of the post of Deputy Secretary General at the CoR reduced the time planned for the agricultural debate), Mr De Schutter succeeded in explaining the main points. In his opinion, the world will lose the battle against hunger unless agricultural and trade policies are radically overhauled. While the world's population continues to grow inexorably, agricultural production capacity is only very slightly increasing or even decreasing because the room for expansion that existed over the last decades of the previous century has largely been exhausted. On top of this comes price instability, provoked by speculation. In the past, there was a minimum of speculation in the agricultural sector but this phenomenon has now become an invasion. At the same time, income disparities have increased enormously to the detriment of the poorest sections of society. Free trade has crushed small producers in poor countries, forcing them to leave the countryside and join the ranks of those provoking the monstrous sprawl of the big cities. Faced with these appalling developments, the expansion of global agricultural production is no longer able to offer a sufficient remedy. At the same time, it is imperative to create “distributive social policies”, modify production methods that exhaust natural resources and prevent disastrous competition from the main exporting countries, which harms small countries. The farmers in the latter have to purchase fertilisers, seed etc, at retail prices while their production is paid at wholesale prices. In addition to this situation is the recent trend of certain countries to purchase the land of poor countries or rent it long term.
Indispensable remedies. There is perhaps nothing new in this analysis but the tough and explicit denunciation of the causes, including the dogma of free trade in foodstuffs in the world, is a new addition. “The right to food” is recognised in the UN's rules but can only be put into practice through a radical overhaul of all the areas mentioned above, accompanied by agricultural policies that are appropriate to the poor countries themselves, in Africa and elsewhere (local people are often responsible for deforestation and other aberrations). The excessive disparities between the prices paid to producers and consumer prices have to be reduced. Mr De Schutter also considers it indispensable that certain global food reserves be created - nothing colossal: modest quantities made available to the World Food Programme (WFP) would have a significant effect on global price stability and help counter speculation.
If every country could afford a CAP…In reply to a question about the European agricultural policy (the CAP), Mr De Schutter acknowledged that in the past, it had provoked some negative effects in some poor countries due to export subsidies that created unfair competition against local producers, but this is all in the past and the EU has largely got rid of or is currently eliminating these mechanisms. Overall, given the corrections made along the way, the CAP has given Europe substantial food self-sufficiency and price stability and is having an increasingly beneficial effect on environmental protection, product quality and tradition production techniques. In Mr De Schutter's opinion, this is the path to follow everywhere, if all the other countries had the resources to do so…
The orientations outlined in Mr De Schutter's documents would have a direct impact on world trade policies and he has produced a specific report on this issue and the compatibility between the international trade regime and the right to food as recognised by the UN. There will be a special article in this column on this specific report tomorrow. (F.R./transl.rh)