The Challenge of Food Security

  
The images coming to us from Afghanistan, where some US airplanes dropped packages of food instead of bombs, served as an important reminder of the link between hunger and terror. Those of us who feel threatened by terrorism should keep in mind the sobering fact that 815 million human beings go hungry each day. Hunger robs communities of their talent and productivity. Disease becomes endemic, and community bonds break down. For all these reasons, the United Nations considers adequate nutrition to be both an individual right and a collective responsibility. States have an obligation to guarantee access to basic foodstuffs by all of their residents, regardless of race, religion or ideology.

In practice, this ideal has been difficult to put into practice. Five years ago, at the World Food Summit in Rome, 185 countries and the European Union committed themselves at to reduce world hunger by half by the year 2015. Since then, six million people have left the ranks of the hungry each year-a significant achievement, but one that falls far short of the 22 million needed to fulfill the goal set in Rome.

Hunger can stem from wars or civil conflicts; natural disasters such as droughts, floods, hurricanes and earthquakes (Central America and the Caribbean have been especially affected in recent years); or the underlying institutional problems that cause poverty. Emergency food aid is the appropriate response to crises caused by wars and natural disasters, but in the case of poverty, there is no substitute for development policies that ensure the food security of populations.

Food security depends on a number of basic factors, among them fertile soil and a favorable climate; technological inputs; financial resources; and a functional institutional and political framework. By separating the different factors, it is easier to see why hunger affects tropical countries more than it does temperate countries. Jeffrey Sachs has called this phenomenon "the ecology of hunger." ^[1]

Temperate countries tend to have more fertile soil than their tropical counterparts, (with some exception that include volcanic zones). Now, global warming is increasing the expanse of fertile areas in countries such as Canada and Russia, while the recurrence of El Niño-in South America in the 1990s, for example-further saps the resources of tropical zones. Paradoxically, it is the developed countries-mostly in temperate zones-that generate the gases responsible for global warming in the first place.

Developed countries also have greater access to technology and information. Technological innovations are the result of investment in research and development, which in turn respond to market signals, among them the profit motive that drives large corporations. Technological research therefore focuses on the needs of larger markets and consumers in developed countries. As Sachs points out, while new technologies may result from the labor of engineers who have immigrated from India, China and elsewhere, they do not respond to the health and nutrition needs of poor tropical countries.

Faced with poor soil, a hostile climate and technological limitations, countries can resort to importing food. But then financial restrictions come into play. First, exports from tropical countries-necessary for balancing the terms of trade-are less competitive as knowledge-based resources push aside primary commodities and cheap labor in the world market. Second, a supply of food that depends on world financial cycles, paid for with external debt, goes against the basic goal of states to guarantee the food security of their citizens.

Finally, functional institutions and political systems depend on the stability both of individual states and the international balance of power, including the risk of wars and civil conflict. In this context, food security depends, first, on internal institutions. These include the prevailing system of property and land use, and government policies that tend to favor urban investment over agricultural and rural production, at least in developed countries. Second, it depends on the international situation. Here it is important to mention that agricultural products do not trade freely on the world market, precisely because of the food security policies of developed countries, which subsidize as much as 40%-60% of their domestic agricultural production. Poor countries are forced to open their agricultural markets further to be able to trade their products at all. This situation is the subject of much debate in the World Trade Organization and was picked up at the Doha ministerial in November.

Another important factor in food security is international aid. Sachs provides some revealing figures: The United States has reduced its foreign assistance-including food aid-from 0.7% of GDP at the height of the Cold War in the 1960s to just 0.1% of GDP in 2001. Most developed countries have followed the same trend, and we are now seeing the results.

Even today, with humanity's unprecedented levels of abundance and impressive technological developments, ending hunger remains a complex challenge. Most recently, many of the issues above were taken up by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) at its 31st conference session in Rome. For more information, see http://www.fao.org/Focus/E/rightfood/right1.htm.
 

^[1] Approximately 93% of the population of the 30 highest-income countries is concentrated in temperate zones. In contrast, 39 of the 42 poorest countries in the world are in tropical areas or deserts (with the exception of Laos, Malawi and Zambia). See Jeffrey Sachs, "What's Good for the Poor is Good for America," www.economist.com, July 12, 2001.