[OPINION] Global food security crisis not merely a ‘logistics’ issue

As the world faces an unprecedented nexus of crises – the COVID 19 pandemic, severe global economic meltdown, and now a looming food security crisis – the G20 agricultural ministers met virtually last April 21, together with host Saudi Arabia and representatives from the World Trade Organization.

In line with the G20 leaders’ statement on the COVID-19 crisis, the joint statement said the WTO and the G20 agricultural ministers commit to “ensure the continued flow of food, products, and imports essential for agricultural and food production across borders” as a measure to “safeguard global food security and nutrition.”

Similarly, the World Bank together with the Rome-based institutions issued a joint appeal for “collective action to ensure that markets are well-functioning.”

The WTO plus G20 agricultural ministers held the meeting after food exporting countries started putting up restrictions to ensure domestic food supply as droughts and increased local demand had threatened supply chains amid the coronavirus pandemic. Already, prices for rice hit a seven-year high and the price of wheat climbed as richer net food importing countries such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt went on a buying spree of stockpile and futures. This is despite the record numbers of global grain output. (READ: [OPINION] Who will produce our food during the coronavirus crisis?)

The “logistics narrative”

While there are clear immediate risks in food export restrictions in today’s fragile globalized food system, the current food crisis in developing countries is far from a “logistics” issue. In fact, the US-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) had earlier commented that there is no risk of a global food crisis as only 1% of the global food supply is affected by these trade restrictions.

This WTO-led opportunist narrative – that the current food crisis is principally a “logistics” problem — serves to gloss over the fact that its decades of neoliberal trade regime has created this fragile, unequal, unjust, unsustainable and shock-prone food system. Through the Agreement on Agriculture, it imposed upon countries from the Global South to abandon the support for local food production and dismantle strategic domestic food reserves, which has demolished domestic food supplies. This narrative is a clear evasion of accountability and only assists in justifying further liberalization of trade food and agriculture.

We’re NOT all in this together

The novel coronavirus, as experts say, does not infect based on race, class, nationality, or social standing, but it is undeniable that the effect of its impacts do.

There are clear winners in this “logistics narrative” of the WTO and now the G20 – agricultural trade monopolies. International financial institutions including the IMF-WB and trade behemoths continue to bankroll the long supply chains of food and agricultural products, financialization of agricultural assets, and monopolies in food and agriculture trade despite strong evidence of their devastating impacts to the environment, food security, and livelihood of rural peoples. (READ: ‘Walang-wala na’: Poor Filipinos fear death from hunger more than coronavirus)

A globalized food system hinged on the profits of a handful of transnational corporations at the expense of developing nations’ capacity to feed themselves is undeniably an unstable one – as shown in today’s food security crisis.

Deafening silence on sanctions

One of the most notable issues missing, if not deliberately omitted, in the joint statement is the ongoing economic sanctions on Syria, Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, and Zimbabwe, to name a few. WFP’s recent report warned that those in acute hunger may double to 265 million by the end of the year because of the measures that governments take to contain the pandemic. A huge portion of these numbers hail from countries with sanctions imposed and are victims of military aggression by some G20 countries, most notably Yemen and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Hilal Elver has already called for the immediate lifting of international sanctions to prevent hunger crises. But clearly, if the joint statement is any indication, it fell on deaf ears. Countless trade and peace activists have called on intergovernmental bodies to lift the sanctions and halt military aggression, especially in West Asia and North Africa. 

Food security and inequality

While richer food importing countries are scrambling to secure food contracts and deals, poor and maldeveloped countries dependent on food imports are at the losing end. Food prices in Africa and parts of Asia are rising as increased demand and trade speculation push them up. In Europe’s bread basket Ukraine, IMF blackmailed the parliament to open up its “agricultural land market” to foreigners.

Even before the pandemic, around two billion people do not have regular access to safe and nutritious food and most of them are from these net food importing countries. Moreover, around 820 million people go hungry at night – 90% of whom are in Asia and Africa. While countries like the Philippines have imposed food price freeze to protect vulnerable consumers, they simply do not have the food stock inventory to back it up.

More importantly, it is the rural food producers that will be hardest hit with food insecurity. IFPRI notes that poor communities will be the most affected by the crisis and its subsequent economic impacts. Agriculture employs up to 75% of the labor force in Africa and up to 45% in Asia. While big exporters and agricultural trade TNCs cry crocodile tears over supply chain slowdowns, farmers and agricultural workers bear the brunt of decades-long prioritization of for-export crops. In Africa alone, only 8% of land bought and leased by foreign landgrabbers are dedicated for local food production.

In the end, it is the impoverished nations of the Global South – in the last analysis, the urban and rural poor – who will feel the full swing of the impending global food crisis.

Radical reforms needed

The G20 joint statement is nothing more than a glorified “Hail Mary” to save its face amid growing criticism of the neoliberal policies it espouses. Its insistence that the current food crisis felt in urban poor areas in lockdown and in rural fields across Latin America, Africa, and Asia as nothing more than a trade problem shows its aversion to meaningful pro-people reforms in food and agriculture.

Moreover, the “logistics narrative” glosses over the fact that this instability and fragility of the global food system stems from decades long imperialist plunder, landgrabbing, deforestation, and neoliberal policies of privatization, deregulation, and liberalization.

The right to food and a nation’s capacity to produce domestic food should not be decided by market forces.

Numerous organizations of farmers, small food producers, fisherfolk, agricultural workers, rural women and youth, indigenous peoples, and marginalized rural peoples have put forth immediate and medium term demands to address the current food crisis. History has shown, most recently in 2008-2009 when food protests in more than 44 countries shook the world, that the right to food is not negotiated in closed doors of the G20 but in streets and fields where the people have power.

Already, rural people are being thrown back into fields to feed the world without any semblance of protection or social insurance. If international leaders are serious in battling the coronavirus and implementing the right to food, radical reforms are needed. – Rappler.com

John Carlo Mercado is currently a policy advocacy writer for Peoples Coalition on Food Sovereignty. He has been a land and food rights activist for 15 years and has worked with grassroots organizations in the Philippines and elsewhere. 

You can catch him on Twitter at @darnitJC.