Hunger in the world is much more related to trade policies, the scarcity of economic resources and the collapse of the State, than to the failure of crops obtained in eminently agricultural regions. Famines are not determined by global scarcity, but by lack of access to food. Macro-economic issues remove problems in local production.
The term Food Safety has been used in different senses over time. In the 1970s, world attention was primarily focused on the supply and storage of food. During the 1974 World Food Conference, the global food supply was considered as an essential factor to respond to the scarce availability of food in some regions of Africa and other countries with famine problems.
In the 1980s, it became clear that supply alone was not enough to ensure the population's access to food. It was demonstrated that famines occur if there is a global food deficit, and that access to food depends on the income and rights that individuals and families may have in the social and institutional environment where they develop.
At the beginning of the nineties, the term Nutritional Security was incorporated, considering that malnutrition conditions are not only due to low food consumption, but also to health conditions in the population. In other words, poor sanitary conditions lead to infections and diarrhea that prevent the intake and use of food, which adds to the inadequate global distribution of the same.
For many years the basic concept of Food Security consisted of controlling food sources within a world vision centered on the war conflict. The immediate concern centered on the food supply during the war. Indeed, agri-food policies during the Cold War were conceived in terms of national self-sufficiency in food, through economic protection for the agricultural sector. The fundamental issue was not to depend on imports to meet food needs. According to this vision, all the food that a given country requires must be produced locally, which does not mean that a national agricultural sector can persist without foreign exchange from other sectors to finance agricultural production.
Un sector agrario exportador puede verse en necesidad de importar alimentos que no produce, pero goza de autosuficiencia económica sectorial cuando el dinero recibido por las exportaciones alcanza para solventar los costos de producción y la importación de alimentos. La promoción de la autosuficiencia alimentaria se basa en la idea subyacente de que depender del exterior es peligroso porque en cualquier momento puede haber problemas en los países exportadores de alimentos, desde un bloqueo en los medios de transporte, hasta un colapso del mercado en caso de guerra, lo cual provocaría escasez de alimentos, e inesperado incremento en el precio de los mismos.
The truth is that a scheme that relies on total food self-sufficiency faces strong problems, since sometimes a part of national production is more expensive than imported, and generally the agricultural sector requires imported machinery, equipment, technology and raw materials, which generates foreign exchange spending, which is accentuated as the domestic market expands. Local production continues to be insecure because it is exposed to droughts, floods and contingencies, while world food production is more stable than any of the agricultural sectors that comprise it.
For some, the very concept of food self-sufficiency ceases to make sense when economies open up and allow international trade. In this way, the exports of one sector could cover the imports of another sector within the open macroeconomic context, which would make emergency situations less likely. The unexpected deficit in national agricultural production in a certain sector can be compensated by increasing food imports in the medium term, but in the long term, a sustained increase in imports must be offset by similar increases in agricultural exports and those of other sectors..
The risk of a national food crisis may arise due to a sharp decline in agricultural production in food-exporting countries. A steady rise in oil prices would make food production and transportation more expensive, limiting availability and access. We would see food shortages if trade policies change in the United States where they keep food stocks for emergency situations.
The Food Security concept is not placed in current circumstances, but in the possibility that future situations may arise and it has been moving away from the notion of self-sufficiency to play an important role in international trade, where the liberalized exchange regime and international financial flows they benefit large companies. Exporters that maintain large surpluses of food to sell in Mexico have their attention focused on the demand that comes from the insufficiency of national production.
According to FAO, the global trend in food production has grown faster than the world population, so that the sector of the population that is directly engaged in agricultural production is becoming smaller. The truth is that the statistics are not entirely accurate, and they mask global imbalances, in some cases extremely serious. Agricultural production is obviously not the same throughout the world. Some agricultural sectors in Mexico, particularly, are paralyzed in the face of food imports, and not because of surpluses in local production. It is well known that every day there are fewer Mexicans dedicated to food production, but not because of an excess in national production, but because of the neglect in which the Mexican countryside has been for decades.
The concept of Food Security finds one of its limits in growing urbanization, because access to food in cities does not depend on being able to produce it, but on its price. The defense of a free international food market is part of the official external discourse made by large players in the area of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), but the approaches are far from being applied in many agricultural sectors of countries that proclaim them. It will be necessary to counteract the double message of the developed countries that, on the one hand, mention the advantages of an open economy, and on the other, their trade policies do not allow the development or the incorporation of developing countries.
New forms of agricultural protection are being applied in rich countries, some of which distort the market and affect developing countries that share the need to create opportunities in the international market for agricultural products. The FAO in its analysis of the year 2002 indicates that the agricultural trade balance of developing countries has been deteriorating, from a record surplus of 17 billion dollars in 1977, to a net deficit of 6 billion dollars in 1996. The The same report indicates that despite the international reforms for agri-food exchange, net imports of cereals in less developed countries increased to 100 million tons between 1997 and 1999, and indicates that this amount could increase to 190 million tons by 2015,and 265 million net tons of cereals by 2030.
This evolution in cereal imports would have a positive connotation if it could reflect an improvement in population income levels, but we know that there is an alarming number of undernourished people in less developed countries, whose basic problem lies in overcoming poverty in order to acquire capacity and stability in access to food. Large-scale food imports from countries with the means to heavily subsidize their agricultural production undermine the possibilities of many developing countries that wish to boost their domestic production to meet part of the growing demand. In addition, there is still uncertainty about the ability of developing countries to continue obtaining sufficient foreign exchange to sustain in the long term,subsidized food imports from developed countries.
Obtaining foreign exchange requires a diversified export base that, on the one hand, depends on domestic policies, and on the other, on the existence of a broad and stable international market. Without an international market, opportunities for developing countries are restricted.
We know that a system of rules is essential for international free trade to function and to be managed, but we have seen that the current set of rules does not avoid the double message to which we alluded previously in relation to protectionism in developed countries. Avoiding the double message seems out of reach on the World Trade Organization (WTO) agenda.
In Mexico, the most optimistic officials saw in the Agreement on Agriculture a process that in the medium term would entail substantial reforms in agrarian policy that would allow linking domestic and international markets. In the Doha Development Agenda, the negotiations were presented as an opportune moment to carry out substantial reforms to the Agreement on Agriculture, but resistance to the reforms by countries that provide greater protection to their agricultural sectors was evident. Even some multilateral trade negotiations acted as a restricting factor in the autonomy of the least developed countries, and the forms of public action left little margin of suitability for the sectors not identified with free trade. Trade liberalization should not appear as an end in itself,but as a result of negotiations guided by the principle of reciprocity.
