Key Food Security Challenges: A Governance Perspective Medrana, D. 2007
Long-standing developing country concerns including large and rapidly growing population, poverty, poor health and education, and depleting natural resources remain the major shapers of the food scenario in each individual country. Today, this scenario is continually shaped by various influences that are global in orientation. Hence, food security is now viewed not only from a local and national perspective but also from a global stance. We see a scenario that is compounded by a number of new occurrences, such as global climate change, rising energy prices, unfair global trade and market distortions, and even issues on food for aid programs. We also see a scenario that is influenced by local, national and global policies on trade, economics, agriculture and other social / support sectors like health, education, science and technology, transport and engineering, and energy among others. Global climate change. Climate change is a ticking time bomb waiting to explode. Since the industrial revolution, human activities have been causing earth’s temperature to rise. Based on the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the concentrations of carbon dioxide (in the atmosphere) have already risen from a pre-industrial level of 280 ppm to around 379 ppm in 2005, while methane concentrations have risen from 715 parts per billion (ppb) to 1,774 in 2005. If atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases double compared to preindustrial levels, this would “likely” cause an average warming of around 3˚C (5.4˚F), with a range of 2-4˚C (3.6-8.13˚F). In the future, this would adversely affect food supply. While technological advances in agriculture have led to increases in food production, the food production system is still highly dependent on climate and weather conditions. Any slight change in climate can have drastic effects on agricultural production. The enormity of the negative effects of climate change has prompted the world to renew efforts on understanding earth’s changing climate and mitigating its effects. Recent interests in environment friendly alternative energy is one of the emergent mitigating strategies. Together with mitigating climate change, rising energy prices are among the major reasons for increased interest in producing alternative energy sources. As energy prices rise, the cost of farmers' inputs, processing, and transportation go up. This could result in increased food prices, with varying effects for different people. (Braun 2005)
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Meanwhile, as countries grow more and more biofuel crops, competition between such crops and food crops for land, water, and other resources become more and more stiff. There are therefore some contentions that biofuels may in fact be more detrimental to food security than it is beneficial to the environment. With this, countries are faced with the challenge of striking a balance between food and energy production. Unfair global trade and market distortions. Due to inequitable global trading policies, which are dominated by rich countries, the gap between the developed and developing countries has become wider. In previous trade negotiation rounds, the developed countries’ defensive interests in the agriculture, textile, and apparel sectors among others have limited liberalizing concessions in these areas. While they are aggressively pushing for liberalization of some important sectors like manufacturing and services in the developed countries, they are not ready to go beyond modest agricultural liberalization measures. Meanwhile, talks have stalled at the Doha Development Round of the WTO due to failure of reaching an agreement over opening up agricultural and industrial markets in various countries and also on cutting farm subsidies in rich nations. Most advanced countries, with their apparently stronger bargaining power in the negotiation tables, have missed every deadline on reducing market distorting mechanisms and barriers to trade. It is therefore a challenge for the developing countries, to strengthen their position in the negotiation tables, similar to how the G20 developing nations posed a strong stance in the Doha round. Food for aid programs. While the explicit intention of food aid programs is to feed the hungry in the recipient country, it is being criticized as rather a self-serving strategy of the donor country. It is accused of creating dependency on the part of recipients, undermining incentives for local agricultural development and distorting international trade. (Raney n.d.) The challenge therefore, for recipient countries is how to ensure that the hungry are not deprived of any assistance they can get while also making sure that such aid programs do not distort trade. National and global policies on trade, economics, agriculture and other social / support sectors. In some countries and regions, hunger and poverty persist due to shortfalls on policies pertaining to trade, economics, agriculture and other support sectors.
Where national governments have not responded appropriately to challenges, hunger has persisted or even worsened. (Paarlberg, 2002). Indeed, the reason why many countries fail in their development efforts is the failure of governance to oversee that policies and initiatives in various areas are mutually reinforcing.
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Hence, developing countries are faced with the daunting challenge of strengthening governance and improving the quality of public administration. Although all these issues influence the food scenario at the national and local levels, there have been some effective national efforts involving R&D, economic reforms, and social support services among others. For example, national governments in many regions of the developing world (particularly East and Southeast Asia) have managed, despite globalization, to act effectively to reduce the hunger and malnutrition problems facing so many of their citizens. They did this by establishing and maintaining internal peace, by providing rule of law, and by making the public investments in rural infrastructure and agricultural research needed to support farm productivity growth and facilitate rural poverty reduction. (Paarlberg, 2002) But again, why do food insecurity and hunger remain? Addressing the aforementioned issues does not necessarily mean fully addressing food insecurity and hunger. Food security is not only about producing more food. More precisely, it is about “providing physical and economic access to balanced diets and safe drinking water to all people at all times." (Swaminathan, n.d.) Widespread hunger exists today in a context of a global oversupply of food. Often, people go hungry because they either have no means to produce their own food or earn enough money to buy it, not because of a global shortage of food. (GRC, 2002). Thus, the other half of the main issue is the inequitable access to food. In fact, the World Food Summit (1996) identified access to food as the major issue in food security rather than the amounts of food being produced. Therefore, the whole issue is more of a governance challenge; in fact, considered by some as among the greatest governance challenges nowadays. Considering the complex connections of food with long-standing and recent developments, addressing food security, requires a strong governance of the food production and policy systems and of related areas (e.g, economics, agriculture, science and technology). Which is why strengthening governance may be among the best responses to the challenges of the food issue. IFPRI (2005) identified “strengthening governance of the food and agriculture system at the global, country and local levels..” as among the key strategies for achieving the MDG agenda of reducing hunger and malnutrition.1 The major challenge therefore for the local, national and supra-national actors is how to make governance work for all. It is no longer a question of under whose responsibility does this governance issue falls. The global issues affecting the food scenario have not necessarily shifted the
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See Braun 2005.
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responsibility of ending hunger from the national governments to supra-national / regional authorities. Rather, these global issues have entailed greater importance and increased roles to regional / supra-governmental governance, thereby altering the old paradigm of food security governance, which used to be of local and national orientation. Specifically, these global issues have added a more encompassing insight toward the interconnections of food with all these other issues. With the increasingly interdependent economies and national policies, for various countries, especially ASEAN members, external influences are as important if not more important as internal considerations in determining policy choices. This is a strong indication that supranational governance and inter-governmental relationships may have an increased influence and roles in the individual country’s governance of food and agricultural systems. ASEAN is showing strong signs of moving towards this paradigm. For example, at the 2003 ASEAN Summit in Bali, ASEAN leaders agreed to further the integration among its member countries by forming the ASEAN Community with three pillars: (1) the ASEAN Economic Community or AEC; (ii) the ASEAN SocioCultural community (ASCC); and (iii) the ASEAN Security Community (ASC). This initiative would allow regional governance (i.e., ASEAN governance) to step in and fill in the gaps left unfilled by national governance of each member country. Given this, the future prospects of food security in each country would also depend on the supra-governance’s ability to persuade existing sovereign governments to deliver the minimal public goods needed at the national level. Consistent with this paradigm is the concept of regional economic integration (REI) or regionalism. For some countries, this makes a lot of sense, which is why ASEAN has been making bolder efforts towards greater regional integration. After all, ASEAN and the ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) were formed under the objective of greater regional integration.2 REI serves as a vehicle for market access, more effective foreign direct investment (FDI) policies, and stronger negotiating power in world trade through regional / bloc trading policies. From an S&T governance perspective, regional integration can also become an effective mechanism for attaining collective efficiency and productivity in agricultural production through joint R&D efforts, and mutually favorable S&T policies in agriculture and food sectors. But like any other option there is, supra-governmental governance (including regionalism) has its own price. There are issues on sovereignty, dominance, and centralization.
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The ASEAN economic cooperation today covers trade, investment, finance, services, industry, agriculture, forestry, energy, transportation and communication, tourism, and intellectual property.
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Under regional integration, member countries may be forced to accept a “pooled” sovereignty; formulate and implement joint policies; accept a common court, accept some centralization, accept an Agency, solely tasked with the “common interest.” (Pelkmans and Tinbergen 2006) The greater challenge to individual countries therefore is how to make this governance paradigm work for the common interest.
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References: Anderson K., B. Hoekman and A. Strutt. 1999. Agriculture and WTO Next Steps. World Bank paper, 2002. Washington DC, USA: The World Bank. Barrios, Erniel B. 2007. Convergence in Agriculture of Some Asian Countries. ADB Institute Discussion Paper No. 71. Tokyo: Asian Development Bank Institute. A discussion paper posted at: http://www.adbi.org/discussionpaper/2007/07/24/2335.agricultural.growth.convergence/ Accessed: July 27, 2007. Braun, Joachim von. 2005. The World Food Situation An Overview. A paper prepared for the CGIAR Annual General Meeting Marrakech, Morocco, December 6, 2005. Washington DC, USA: International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). Globalization Research Center (GRC). 2002.Globalization and Food Security. An Article posted at http://www.hawaii.edu/global/projects_activities/Past/Food_security.pdf. Accessed: July 27, 2007. Paarlberg, Robert L. 2002. Governance and Food Security in an Age of Globalization. Food, Agriculture, and the Environment Discussion Paper 36. Washington DC, USA: International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). Pelkmans Jacques and Jan Tinbergen. 2006. Regionalism: A SWOT analysis for East Asia. A presentation material delivered at the WTO Integrating Seminar, Philippine Global Trade Elearning Program, Manila, Philippines, December 14, 2006. Raney, Terri. Food aid governance for food security. A paper posted at www.foodaid2007.de/documents/participants/foodaid_raney.pdf Accessed: July 27, 2007. Swaminathan, M.S. (n.d.) Building national and global nutrition security systems. Global Aspects of Food Production, eds. M.S. Swaminathan and S.K. Sinha, 417-449. Natural Resources and Environment Series, vol.20.
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