Report on the World Food Summit 

Martin McLaughlin

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (UN/FAO) World Food Summit, held June 10-13 in Rome, practically disappeared from the news after brief mention of its lavish opening banquet and its otherwise unimpressive start. The Summit ultimately failed to accomplish much because it did not address the core systemic issue affecting food security—the disproportionate power of transnational agribusiness corporations. Social justice demands we understand and challenge this power structure.

HOW THE MEETING CAME ABOUT

The event was supposed to have been held in November, 2001, the fifth anniversary of the original 1996 World Food Summit, but was postponed by the Italian government mainly for security reasons. Attendance in June, 2002 disappointed nearly everyone: although 82 heads of state or government from the developing countries of the South attended, only two industrialized countries were represented at that level––Italy, the host, by President Carlo Ciampi, Premier Silvio Berlusconi, and European Commission President Romano Brodi; and Spain, which holds the rotating presidency of the European Union, by Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar. Most delegations were headed by Ministers of Agriculture, while the United Kingdom sent only a junior cabinet official.

The 186 national delegations that attended the 1996 Summit had agreed that access to adequate food is a basic human right. They accepted the FAO’s statement that 840 million people (more than one seventh of the human race) lacked food security—that is, they do not have access to an adequate human diet by either growing the food or buying it. The 1996 Summit set out to reduce the number of food-insecure people by half by 2015. This major goal was accepted by all countries and later included in the UN’s Millennium Goals.

The stated purpose of the five-year follow-up Summit this past June was to assess statistical progress toward that goal, which would require a decrease of 22 million people in the food-insecure category per year. The actual annual reduction has only been between 6 and 8 million, nearly 90 percent of which occurred in China. At this rate, it would not be until the second half of the 21st century that the world would even approach the overall goal.

After three days of official speeches and conferences, the 2002 Rome delegations signed off on the Declaration of the World Food Summit: Five Years Later––a preparatory document they had agreed on beforehand to avoid debate, and then had approved unanimously on the first day of the meeting following the customary UN participial prologue, the relatively short, 35 paragraph Declaration added little to the 1996 commitments except exhortations to recommit and to implement the outcome of the WTO Ministerial in Doha with respect to agriculture. There was also a carefully worded endorsement of agricultural biotechnology–– an entirely new topic, despite the FAO’s insistence that no new matters be raised. This addition, pushed mainly by the United States, caused more debate than any other item.

The new Declaration did not mention the $24 billion in additional annual public investment that would be required to meet the 2015 goal of halving hunger, according to the FAO’s proposed Anti-Hunger Program. Some observers, however, contrasted this amount with the estimated $360 billion ($1 billion per day) that the OECD countries spent on subsidies to their own food and agriculture producers in 2001.

A CONTEXT FOR THE FOOD SUMMIT

The participants explicitly connected this Summit with “the outcomes of other global conferences”–– notably the Financing for Development (FFD) Conference in Monterrey, Mexico (March, 2002), the 4th Ministerial Conference of the WTO at Doha, Qatar (November, 2001), and the upcoming World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg (August, 2002). Like these other official events, the Food Summit coincided with a much livelier NGO Forum for Food Sovereignty, which took place at the same time in another part of Rome. NGO participants issued a Call for Action for Food Sovereignty, decrying governments’ failure to fulfill the 1996 Summit’s commitments. They stated that the lack of “political will” demonstrated after the 1996 Summit has “opened the doors to the unbridled monopolization and concentration of resources and productive processes in the hands of a few giant corporations.” There are some indications that these views may command broader support at WSSD.

Many participants in both the Summit and the Forum, however, suggested that a certain amount of “conference fatigue” may be setting in. If so, one reason may be that advocates of food security and poverty eradication are frustrated with the failure of political leaders to acknowledge the fundamental structural problems inherent in globalization–– a process that threatens to complete the marginalization of the relatively powerless.

The basic question in the food and agriculture sector–– why, in a world whose food supply every year is enough to feed everyone an adequate human diet, are one-seventh of these people denied their right to that food?–– was not asked by the organizers of this event. Nor was it asked at the 1996 Summit or earlier relevant UN conferences.

WHY NO PROGRESS?

In the Center’s view, the primary reason for the failure to move vigorously toward the agreed goal continues to be a lack of understanding of how the global food system works. This is part of a general failure to appreciate the power relations that drive the globalizing economy. As in other sectors of that economy, nearly all the elements of both the structure and the dynamics of the food system are dominated by a de facto cartel of corporations of various kinds (in this case agribusiness): seed, machinery, and other input providers; global trading companies; fast food and other consumer food services; grocery chains; and vertically integrated production and processing corporations.

The favorite of the 1996 Summit’s seven commitments was to expand trade in food and agricultural products. This mantra of free trade is constantly put forward as the panacea, in this case for overcoming food insecurity. The thesis is that with more free trade in food and other agricultural products, everybody will be fed, and everybody’s poverty will be relieved. But studies conducted since 1996 clearly show that such trade expansion has hurt small farmers in the developing countries, and retarded any reduction in food insecurity.

In fact, there is no such thing as free trade; food and agricultural trade, for example, is managed by the cartel described above. Few farmers trade and neither do most governments, unless they have a state trading entity. Companies trade, and their purpose is not to compete, but to expand the market and divide it up so that each maximizes profit. These companies, most of them headquartered in the United States, decide what people will eat, and how it will be produced, packaged, marketed, and— above all— priced. And they are accountable to no one; boards, stockholders, and even accountants don’t count.

Until those who want to reform the global food system face the reality of this power structure, no global meetings or lists of remedial actions based on personal commitment or thorough documentation will bring about the necessary changes. People are hungry because they are poor, and they are poor because they lack the power effectively to choose otherwise. Unaccountable power is undemocratic and immoral, and its top-down concentration protects it from citizen participation.

The Director General of the FAO, Mr. Jacques Diouf, was described in the media as bitter about the absence of top-level representatives from industrialized countries at the Rome meeting. During a July visit to the United States, he called attention to the prospective famine that menaces several countries in southern Africa and pleaded once more for the political will as he had in the introduction to the documentation for the Summit’s anniversary. U.S. President John F. Kennedy made that same call in 1963––almost 40 years ago. But where is that political will today? Or, perhaps more pointedly, who has both the will and the power to bring about preventive and remedial changes?

THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE

Action has to take place at the grassroots, where countless well intentioned, useful, and effective programs are already underway— some with strong institutional foundation or with government support. But it is also needed at the policy level, where despite strong rhetoric from several quarters, there is little indication that the public interest will prevail in any of the four agriculture processes under way this year. These four processes are:

--The WFS+5 process, which culminated in June’s Rome meeting, but has generated very little feedback

--The endless agricultural trade negotiations taking place in the World Trade Organization since the 4th WTO Ministerial meeting in Doha, Qatar

--The WSSD, which will deal with sustainable agriculture

--The recently enacted U.S. farm bill, which contains a mixed bag of program and financial  authorizations, including more subsidies for the richest U.S. farmers and agribusinesses.

The relevance of this fourth point is that what the United States does profoundly affects how––and perhaps whether––the rest of the world eats. The U.S. floods developing countries with cheap grain at prices far below the cost of production, pushing down world prices and thus ruining grain markets for smallholders in countries that do not provide subsidies. Local farmers here and abroad lose income, leave the farm, and swell the ranks of the unemployed in overcrowded cities in nearly every country in the world.

In the face of conditions like these there is little to offer except hope, the virtue we are urged not to abandon. Democracy is hopeful, and justice is hopeful, and cooperation is hopeful, and transparency is hopeful. Improvement of the system is possible; corrections can take place. But we will all have to work very hard on both the policy and the grassroots level in order to trigger an authentic, just change of direction (metanoia) that is needed.

Martin McLaughlin, Ph.D., is an Adjunct Associate at the Center of Concern and author of a new book on World Food Security: A Catholic View of Food Policy in the New Millennium, which is available at www.coc.org. This article was originally published in the Center of Concern’s September, 2002 Center Focus Issue which may be accessed at www.coc.org.

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