A child cries at a women's community meeting in Swaziland's Egebeni district. Across Africa and elsewhere in the developing world, ancient traditions and modern circumstances have combined to place the burden on women to put food on poor families' tables.
Grain prices have fallen sharply from last year’s historic highs, but the world is losing the battle against hunger, and something must be done about it to avoid unleashing social unrest.
That much the world’s leading farm ministers could agree on at their recent summit in Italy.
Exactly what should be done is another matter.
A five-page statement issued by the G8 agriculture ministers declared that the world is “very far from reaching” the goal of halving poverty and hunger by 2015.
Commodity prices are still well above historical levels and the twin challenges of price volatility and growing demand for food are going to be around in the future, the statement said.
But the farm ministers largely steered clear of proposing specific solutions or amounts of funding. The tough decisions were left for their bosses, including President Barack Obama, when they meet in July.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack called the summit’s statement “a strong declaration of support for the critically important task of promoting food security.” He pointed out in an interview this week that the most senior of the agriculture ministers had been in office all of 18 months.
Some anti-hunger activists say the ministers kicked the problem down the road. Aid group Oxfam called the summit “an extraordinary admission of collective failure.”
The recommendations included a call for “sound agricultural policies,” which weren’t spelled out, and vaguely worded recommendations to reduce food waste and to increase “investments in agricultural science.”
The ministers said biofuels should be produced in an “environmentally sustainable manner” with an emphasis on moving toward second-generation fuels that won’t be made from food crops. However, the declaration didn’t criticize the use of food crops for biofuels.
“They barely touched upon the elephants in the room, which are subsidies and biofuels,” said Gary Blumenthal, who runs an agricultural consulting firm, World Perspectives.
One controversial idea the ministers did recommend studying is one guaranteed to give U.S. agribusiness heartburn – the creation of an international grain reserve.
The International Food Policy Research Institute, a think tank based in Washington, has been pushing the reserve idea to avoid price spikes like the ones last year and that are especially hard on consumers in poor countries who often spend most of their income on food. At one point last spring, the price of corn soared to nearly $8 a bushel, twice what it is now.
Institute experts warn that such price spikes can “result in long-term, irreversible nutritional damage, especially among children.”
At the summit, Vilsack strongly cautioned against stockpiling grain, according to news accounts, saying that trying to manage supplies through reserves was difficult and often didn’t have the intended effect.
Deciding when to stockpile grain and when to put it on the market can get caught up in political considerations. Holding commodities in reserve also masks price signals that farmers rely on to know when to increase production, said Bob Young, an economist with the American Farm Bureau Federation.
The Obama administration has indicated global hunger issues are a concern. The administration has called for doubling agricultural development aid to $1 billion and appointed experts on development to key USDA positions.
Vilsack has pledged to redouble U.S. efforts to promote the acceptance of genetically engineered seeds, which he see as critical to poor farmers.
He said the summit laid the groundwork for dealing with hunger in more concrete ways down the road.
“There is an opportunity here for a new start,” he said, “a new set of relationships to be developed and formed.”
Philip Brasher is a reporter for The Des Moines (Iowa) Register. E-mail: pbrasher@dmreg.com