Grains Oilseeds

[Tackler]

Food insecurity in developing countries
Zulfiquer Ahmed Amin

In a world where obesity is epidemic in some countries, 25,000 people die daily of hunger and poverty in others. Some 840 million people in the world don't have enough food for their daily needs. The great majority of them -- 799 million -- live in developing countries in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America.

Food is a constantly threatened commodity in poor countries due to the pressures of population, under-investment in infrastructure, degradation of the environment, manipulation of trade and international market by the rich countries, and the constraints of natural resources. Added to it, natural calamities and trade-off between food and non-food items are worsening the menace.

Never before in human history has our planet been so densely populated as today. The present international consensus is that in the next thirty years the world population will swell to at least 8.2 billion. Already, today's 400 million or so subsistence farmers cannot feed the urban population of 1.5 billion; the 800 million subsistence farmers of the year 2025 will not possibly be able to feed 4 billion city dwellers. In the same period of time, the globe's ecological carrying capacity is expected to shrink.

The World Resources Institute estimates that since World War II, 1.2 billion hectares -- equivalent to about 10.5% of the world's agricultural land, or to the combined areas of China and India -- have been impaired as a consequence of human activity. The greatest damage has occurred in China (450 million hectares), followed by Africa (320 million hectares).

In Asia, ongoing urbanisation and industrialisation will reduce arable land per capita from today's 0.15 hectares to only 0.09 hectares by 2025. In the wake of its drive to industrialise, China alone is losing a million hectares of arable land yearly.

In the case of developing countries, investments in public goods and institutions to promote effective and efficient private markets, rural infrastructure, credit and savings institutions, primary education, primary health care and publicly funded agricultural research to generate knowledge and technology for the smallholder farming community are appallingly neglected.

Policies and institutions are absent to facilitate access by women to land and purchased inputs. The de facto importance of women in agriculture is largely unrecognised, leading to discriminatory policies and practices in land tenure and access to credit, inputs, technology, extension and education, and culminating in lower productivity.

Failure to achieve yield increases on land that is well suited for agricultural cultivation has pushed farmers into less suited areas, causing deforestation, land degradation and the unsustainable exploitation of surface and ground water. On the other hand, efforts to expand yields have frequently been based on the excessive and inappropriate use of fertilisers and pesticides, which in turn has damaged the environment, thus causing lower return.

Trade liberalisation has often been associated with starvation. A flood of cheap grains, in the short term, can destroy local productive capacity and leave poor people vulnerable. Rice production in Ghana collapsed following cheap US and Thai imports. In the mid 1990s, starvation in Haiti followed exposure to a flood of cheap, subsidised US rice. "Dumping" of subsided food is a serious problem for poor countries.

In the end it is not poor farmers that gain access to global markets, but big agribusiness do, and these corporations rely heavily on subsidies from wealthy governments. Developing countries participate in the WTO, looking for export opportunities, but are often bitterly disappointed by the "rigged rules." Trade liberalisation is always a complicated bargaining process, riddled with inequities, which frequently go against the poor.

Recently, there have been major strides in producing and using biofuels worldwide, especially in Brazil, China, India, the United States and South Africa, in response to climate change and rising oil prices. Today, Brazil is the second biggest producer of ethanol in the world (20 billion litres) after the United States (24 billion litres). One ton of sugarcane biogas can produce only 186 litres of ethanol, and is sadly taking away the food of many starved people.

As biofuels becoming increasingly profitable, more land, water and capital are being diverted to produce them, and some parts of the world are likely to face a trade-off between using those resources for the production of calorie and nutrient-rich food crops, or for the cultivation of fuel crops.

Another variety of biofuel, biodiesel is produced from a wide range of feedstock, including fresh soybean oil, mustard seed oil, vegetable oil, palm oil, rapeseed, sunflower, soybean, copra, palm and groundnut, making these grains scarce as food.

The incredible rise of biofuel production is already adversely affecting poor people in developing countries by increasing food prices. Biofuels that use food sources are costly for the poor, and raise prices on the basic foods that already represent a large share of poor people's household spending. With high prices, they will likely spend less on food, exacerbating poor diets and malnutrition.

The Green Revolution of the 1970s and 1980s led to huge increases in output, largely due to the cultivation of high-yielding varieties of rice and wheat, the expansion of land under production and irrigation, greater use of fertilisers and pesticides, and greater availability of credit. In many countries, these gains have reached their limit, and social and environmental issues must now be addressed.

Further increases in food production depend on better integration of traditional knowledge with research; improving farming practices through training and the use of technology to increase outputs from current land without further loss of productive land; land reform to provide secure access to land for more people; and the provision of low-cost finance to help farmers invest in higher quality seeds and fertilisers and small irrigation pumps.

We can realistically expect food security to be improved for an increasing number of people if sustained social and political reforms in the countries with deficits in food security are implemented.

If anything, for food security the principal focus should be on education. With education come new perspectives and a better frame of mind for implementing new techniques and understanding new technologies. It's all about new ideas and adapting to new situations. With education, one can learn a concept and adapt or modify it to work with whatever resources one possesses at any point of time.

Food is the only commodity that cannot be compromised under any circumstances. Despite its sheer importance, in most developing and under developed countries food always remains over-looked in developmental terms. But for humans to survive, food has to flow in incessantly, either by local production or through import.

The present trend of poor countries rapidly transforming from being exporters to net importers of food is clearly alarming. Today, we are prey to the whims of the richer countries for a share of their wealth, and, tomorrow, the need for a share of their food for our survival will cause us to fully surrender what is left our of esteem and freedom. There is no alternative to self-reliance for the existence of poor nations.

Eliminating hunger, food insecurity and malnutrition is humankind's foremost challenge. Failure to meet the challenge will result in continued high levels of unnecessary human suffering, lost economic opportunities and an increasingly unstable world.

Dr Zulfiquer Ahmed Amin is a physician and specialist in Public Health Administration and Health Economics.