13 June 2008
Scholar Calls for Greater Investment in Agriculture
Political scientist says high food prices reveal need for long-term action
Washington -- The surging prices for rice, wheat, corn and other grains on global commodity markets have highlighted the need for greater international action to help the world's most malnourished people increase their food production, according to a scholar on global hunger.
"Seventy-five percent of the world's 800 million to 900 million poor and chronically malnourished people live in the countryside, not cities, primarily in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa," said Robert Paarlberg, a professor of political science at Wellesley College near Boston.
Their food comes from their own production or highly local markets, he said at a recent seminar at the Hudson Institute in Washington. "These people are hungry because the productivity of their farms is low, not because global grain prices are high."
Paarlberg is the author of Starved for Science: How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa, in which he calls for genetically improved seeds, chemical fertilizers and modern irrigation methods to be made available to African farmers. Norman Borlaug, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for developing high-yielding rice strains and thereby relieving hunger, has endorsed Paarlberg's book, as has former President Jimmy Carter.
"It is not the price of food on the world market that should be the first policy focus. Instead, it should be increasing productivity of hundreds of millions of poor small-holder farmers, especially in Africa," Paarlberg said.
South Asia imports only 6 percent of the grain it consumes. In sub-Saharan Africa, Paarlberg added, about 10 percent of total calorie consumption comes from the world market, even when prices are low.
The U.S. share of development assistance that goes to agriculture fell from 25 percent in 1980 to about 1 percent in 2007, Paarlberg said. At the World Bank, as well, agriculture development assistance fell from 30 percent of its total assistance spending in 1980 to 8 percent today.
"In the current environment of high world prices, there is a hope that some of this neglect over the past two or three decades will at last be addressed, but the trick is going to be to sustain these new investments after world prices come down again," Paarlberg said.
The World Bank and the U.S. government are attentive to Paarlberg's concerns. World Bank President Robert Zoellick has called for a "New Deal" in global agricultural policy.
The World Bank plans to increase its lending for agriculture in Africa from $450 million to $800 million, and can help countries and farmers manage systemic risks, including using financial innovations to counter weather variability, Zoellick said. “We can offer access to technology and science to boost yields” as well, he added.
The United States is committed to the goal of global food security through its international food assistance and other foreign-assistance programs. In fiscal year 2007, the United States provided more than $2.1 billion in food aid to 78 developing countries, reaching tens of millions of people worldwide.
President Bush has been pushing U.S. lawmakers to allow the U.S. government to spend food aid money to buy crops in poor countries.
According to Paarlberg, today's food shortages stem from a convergence of factors that appeared three decades ago and caused the prices of foods, oil and other commodities to spike.
"The so-called food crisis of the 1970s is better understood as part of a more generalized commodity-price boom triggered by rapid economic growth and inflationary monetary policy, similar to the present," Paarlberg said.
Then as now, wheat, corn, and rice prices rose steeply, and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization convened a summit to discuss what to do about it. Then as now, the Federal Reserve (the U.S. central bank) slashed interest rates, and many grain-producing countries imposed bans or taxes on grain exports.
Today, 28 countries, primarily Asian rice exporters -- including India, Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia and China -- have imposed grain-export bans.
"Of course, that's going to drive the international price of rice to stratospheric levels, but fortunately, the international rice market satisfies only 7 percent of total world consumption, so it's an extreme distortion of a fairly insignificant international market," Paarlberg said.
