When hunger riots broke out in Africa and in the Caribbean at the beginning of last year, fingers pointed at external policies as the culprits responsible for Africa’s inadequate levels of agricultural production. The message was that Africa is now dependent on global markets for its food security. The structural adjustment policies imposed on many poor countries in Africa by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were accused of having destroyed the public services that provided rural support and of making developing countries dependent on international market forces. The European Union’s policy, in other words its Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) was seen as subsidising European agricultural production while its development aid policies largely ignored the importance of agriculture.
But African agriculture is not disaster-stricken. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has produced data showing that agricultural production has steadily increased across Africa since the 1960s, picking up even more speed since the 1980s. This increase in production often fails, though, to keep up with demographic growth, creating major inequalities between access to food by Africa’s rural and urban populations, regardless of whether the food in question is produced locally or imported. A further problem is that the volatility of agricultural prices does not favour investment in agriculture, making it hard for African countries to meet their demographic and environmental challenges.
The least-developed food importing countries are the most affected by this crisis. Between 2006 and 2008, the number of people classified as undernourished by the FAO increased from 850m to 950m, the majority of whom live in these poor countries. The crisis in the spring of last year revealed the high degree of vulnerability of these countries to food shortages and even famine. These are populations that are today more urbanised than in the 1970s, and they are being simultaneously affected by increases in imported energy and food products, by the low availability of local produce to satisfy their new nutritional habits, and by high unemployment. These are countries that have reached the limits of their social solidarity systems, so crises indiscriminately affect the rural and urban poor, migrants and locals and even salaried people and producers. Food security has become a complex social issue as well as but also an economic and agricultural one.
The goal of increasing African countries' agricultural production is a trap, because the solutions most often suggested tend to be too simplistic. The classic model is that capital should be mobilised for investment in a sector that is lucrative, so that large irrigated areas are created and fertilisers and other inputs can be subsidised. But this way of thinking primarily focuses investors on areas where production costs are much lower than in Africa, such as the Ukraine, Brazil or Argentina. The Gulf countries, for example, are looking for production areas in which to invest to limit their own food dependency. Sudan remains the – never implemented – dream of being the “grain loft” of the Gulf region because of its rich land and abundant water supply from the Nile and its tributaries. Senegal has also been pointed to as suitable for this type of operations, yet the aim of these investors is to profit first from price increases in agricultural raw materials, and to sell the produce on global markets not national ones. It’s way of thinking that can be subject to brutal reversals when prices start to drop again, as has been the case since last summer. The global financial crisis has reduced global demand, so agricultural prices have been falling.
The factors that contributed to the latest food crisis illustrate that long-term food security means the emphasis must be on stabilising markets, improving the dynamics of rural sectors, and rebuilding food stocks close to the most vulnerable populations. The speculative bubble of agricultural products which burst halfway through 2008 was first created by the tensions between supply and demand for food products that had led brokers to speculate on price increases.
Ironically, one of the factors in tighter supply resulted from the CAP’s successful efforts to reduce and even eliminate Europe’s overproduction. But now the period of global overproduction is over and the EU measures taken at the beginning of 2008 to do away with leaving 10% of land to lie fallow and to increase milk quotas have helped to reverse the upward trend in food production. We in Europe must continue in this direction, while at the same time ensuring that we have the flexibility needed to regulate the global market. Rebuilding European stocks, and its corollary of selling off surpluses at discounted prices, will not in the long term improve the competitiveness of local agriculture in poor importing countries. The CAP must promote sustainable development and favour environmentally friendly intensification processes, but its contribution to global food security is also crucially important. Regulating the international markets without distorting poor countries’ national markets must become key aspects when we begin negotiating changes in the CAP beyond 2013.
During the FAO’s June 2008 summit on food security, participating nations and international institutions all made commitments to once again promote agriculture through their development and aid policies. The European Commission announced that the 10th European Development Fund (EDF) which came into force in mid-2008, will over five years inject €1.1bn in financial support for rural development, agriculture and food security. This amount may seem ridiculous when compared to the EDP’s total budget of €22.7bn for 2008-2013, or to the €363bn of CAP spending up to 2013 – not to speak of the amounts being allocated to limiting the effects of the financial crisis. But although Europe’s financing of agriculture in developing countries is relatively small, it is still an improvement on the past. Agriculture did not even feature in the priority sectors of the 9th EDF, and on a more positive note all of the community policy instruments combined should increase EU investment to promote food security in developing countries to €3.4bn.
The first steps in Africa, towards regional agricultural policies have been taken by the West Africa regional organisations; the West-African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA) in 2001 and the Economic Community of West African states (ECOWAS) in 2005. The latter is implementing a programme for agricultural development in Africa that was adopted by NEPAD in 2003. Now we need European policies to give priority to supporting these African versions of the CAP whose purpose is to eradicate national competition and act as an interface with international markets. Why deny, turns the argument, the countries hardest hit by the food crisis the community preference and support for agricultural production that formed the basis for the CAP in Europe, especially when agriculture is a significantly higher part of their GDP than in Europe? Regulating the markets and imports and developing food-producing crops that create employment can also be facilitated by the EU’s development aid policies. These considerations should form the new basis for negotiation of the next Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) between the European Union and the ACP states.
The competitiveness of rural communities in Africa as elsewhere is based upon their capacity to innovate and to diversify their activities. Whether innovation is of a social or technical nature, it is the key to motivating the younger generation in rural communities. Scientific aid programmes can contribute to this process and European policies can offer openings to wider research programmes. But the EU’s main tool is its framework programme for research and development (FPRD), and because its main focus is the competitiveness of the European economy, Third World countries were only allocated a 5% share in the projects selected in the course of the 6th FPRD, while for the 7th and current FPRD, the section allocated to scientific topics specifically for these rural communities was abandoned by the European Parliament, the Council and the Commission too.
The United Nations, the World Bank, the G8, the European Union and other world leaders were prompted by last year’s food riots in the developing world to make a commitment to food security. To ensure that this is not quickly forgotten, it will be vital to monitor the world food situation closely. The intergovernmental panel of experts on climate change, the IPCC, is doing this efficiently on environmental questions and now an international panel of experts on food security should be created on the IPCC model. Objective information would make it possible to avert crises, facilitate the management of resources on a global scale, regulate arbitrage by speculators and greatly clarify the policy choices where agricultural and broader economic questions have to be resolved.