Our conference on the Confronting the Global Food Challenge is in full swing. I am too tired to do it justice, but wanted to share the thoughts of Olivier de Schutter, the UN's Special Rapporteur on the right to food. For more details, you can read his pre-conference paper, A Human Rights Approach to Trade and Investment Policies. In his talk, he gave a summary of where we are in relation to the food crisis, the right to food and the Doha Round. He sat next to the Director General of the World Trade Organization (WTO), Pascal Lamy, as he spoke. In short, he contrasted the world of economic assumptions—such as perfect competition—with a world he characterized as “the stubborn world of reality.”
He gave five reasons why free trade is not the answer for governments preoccupied with the realization of the right to food: 1) Free trade increases countries' exposure to volatile prices; 2) Free trade exacerbates the duality of the agricultural system in which the (vast) majority of smallholders are made to suffer while the small number of big farmers take all the benefit from public policy outcomes; 3) Free trade increases the power of commodity buyers, processors and food retailers, at the expense of farmers and consumers; 4) Free trade undermines the viability of small-scale agriculture in much of the world. Many of the costs of larger farmers are assumed by the public, while small farmers’ costs make them less competitive; 5) Free trade worsens greenhouse gas emissions by rewarding industrial agriculture methods.
It was a great speech. Set against that of Pascal Lamy, it was all the more impressive. Lamy, among other things, dismissed concerns about speculation by saying that all farmers speculate (as if the worry was farmers, as opposed to the tens of billions in investment funds that have so distorted commodity markets in 2008). The WTO DG made some good points about agriculture’s “special” status, but overall was disappointing in his misunderstanding (whether real or apparent) of the audience’s concerns.
You can listen to a number of the presentations, and read backround papers, at our conference web site.
