Editorial

A.N.M. Nurul Haque, 18 May 2008, The Daily Star

THE United Nations has warned that 82 countries, including China and India, face food emergencies this year as cereal stocks are at an all-time low. Stockpiles of grains such as rice and wheat have dropped to their lowest levels, sufficient to feed the world for only 54 days, after which millions may face starvation.

The World Bank and IMF have sounded a bigger alarm. The WB president, Robert Zoellick, said that 100 million people in low-income countries could be pushed deeper into poverty because of surging food prices caused directly by the imbalance between demand and supply. IMF chief Dominque Strauss-Kahn says: “As we know, learning from the past, these kinds of situations sometimes end in war.”

Food riots have already erupted in many countries, including Egypt, Haiti, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Senegal, Mozambique Yemen, Mexico, Mauritania, Indonesia, Bolivia, the Philippines, India, Ethiopia, Burkino Faso, and Uzbekistan.

From the rice of Asia to the wheat of Australia, the surging prices of foods are breaking the budget of the poor and raising the spectres of hunger and unrest. Ironically, affluent countries of the world, including US, UK, Canada and Brazil, are bringing into force measures to increase the use of bio-fuels, when soaring food prices are threatening famine in at least 37 countries in Asia and Africa.

The industrialised countries have started the bio-fuel boom by fixing ambitious targets for its use. The European Union has set a goal for its member states, who should use at least 5.75 percent bio-fuel as fuel by 2010, and 10 percent by 2020. The US wants 35 billion gallons of bio-fuel a year.

President George W. Bush has blamed the changing food habits of the people of India and China for the crisis, and said that increasing demands for meat in these two countries was behind the crisis. In fact, Mr. Bush has refused to accept the harsh truth that his own doings have played a significant role in fuelling the crisis.

The use of US corn for ethanol is forecasted to increase to 114 million tons in the next year, which is almost a third of the total projected US crops. Cars in the US now burn corn equal to the total import needs of 82 food-deficit countries. The entire corn and soybean harvest of the US would need to be processed into ethanol and bio-diesel.

Hundreds of thousands have already been displaced by the soybean plantations on 50 million hectares of land in southern Brazil, northern Argentina, eastern Bolivia and Paraguay. Farmers are being forced to give up their land to grow fuel crops for export. Converting most of the earth’s arable land for growing fuel crops threatens to divert the world’s grain supply from food to fuel.

UK farmers each year produce 3.5 million tons of grains, which is more than they need. If these surplus grains are sold to bio-fuel industries instead of the hungry world, it would certainly lead to mass starvation in the poor countries. Any foodstuff used for fuel is taken out of the world’s food chain, when millions of people are starving.

The recent UN report on biofuel has raised issues regarding food security and bio-fuel production. Jean Ziegler, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, has described the transforming of wheat and maize crops into biofuel as an absolute catastrophe, and termed the diversion of arable land away from food crops a crime against humanity. Ziegler has called for a five-year moratorium on bio-fuel production.

Bio-fuel champions assure us that because fuel crops are renewable, they are environment friendly, can reduce global warming and will foster rural development. But environmental scientists differ with this statement. According to them, every ton of palm oil, which is used for making bio-fuel, generates 33 tons of carbon dioxide emission — 10 times more than petroleum.

The 2007 study by scientists from Britain, US, Germany and Switzerland, including Professor Paul Crutzen who won a Nobel Prize for his work on ozone, have reported that emissions from the burning of bio-fuels derived from rapeseed and corn have been found to produce more greenhouse gases than they save. Tropical forests cleared for sugarcane ethanol emit 50 percent more greenhouse gases than the production and use of the same amount of gasoline.

According to a UN report, 25,000 people die of hunger or hunger-related causes every day across the world. Even when the price of foodstuff was low, 850 million people had to go hungry only because they could not afford to buy any. Millions of people are now pushed below the breadline with the rapid rise in food prices because of low global food reserves and the soaring demand for bio-fuel.

A study by the European Union shows that the 100 litres of ethanol, which are needed to fill the oil tank of a sports utility car, require some 240 kilograms of corn, enough to feed a person for a year. In fact, bio-fuel industries are snatching food from the mouths of the hungry people to run the cars of the rich.

A bio-fuel frenzy and other misguided policies have led to the global food crisis in which prices have soared and rice consumption has out-paced production, threatening a billion people with starvation. The IMF has taken a stand against bio-fuels, which pose a moral problem, and has also called for a moratorium on the use of foodgrain-powered vehicles.

A bio-fuel backlash has erupted in the major ethanol producer, the US, as lawmakers and experts debate the merits of converting food to fuel to support America’s age-old love for cars.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has formed a top-level task force to tackle the global food crisis. The first meeting of the task force was held on May 13, with an urging to the global leaders for help in tackling the food crisis. The task force has also planned to hold a high level meeting of FAO in Rome from June 3 to 5 to tackle the crisis.

It is almost sure that the affluent countries will brush-off the demands and protests of the poor nations, and continue to pollute the environment and divert corn for bio-fuel. The time is ripe for the leaders of the Third World countries to unite and resist this existential threat.

The World Food Summit in November 1996 reaffirmed the right of everyone to have access to safe and nutritious food, consistent with the right to adequate food and the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger. One of FAO’s main objectives is ensuring humanity’s freedom from hunger, and its Right to Food unit is committed to the realisation of the right to food for the hungry millions across the world. The forthcoming meeting of FAO should also promote the human right to food.

A. N. M. Nurul Haque is a columnist of The Daily Star.

Debapriya Bhattacharya, The Daily Star, 25 May 2008

In our continued efforts for actualisation of human rights across the world, we are transcending an important threshold in discharging the mandate of the Human Rights Council (HRC). For the first time a special session on a thematic issue is being held at the Council. Bangladesh, a co-sponsor of the session, reckons that there could not have been a more worthy subject for this maiden special session, i.e. the state of Right to Food in the face of brewing global food crisis.

Nature of the Problem
Let me dwell briefly on the nature of the crisis we are dealing with. Estimates indicate that about 900 million people throughout the world chronically go hungry and under-nourished, notwithstanding record growth of food production in the last decades. Indeed, nearly 40,000 children die of malnutrition and diseases everyday. And these people are poor, disadvantaged and vulnerable, and they live in both developed and developing countries. However, this situation is most acute in the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) that are overwhelmingly net-food importing countries. Bangladesh happens to be one of these countries.

The precarious hunger, malnutrition and poverty situation in the Net Food Importing Low Income Countries (NFILICs) have become further fragile due to the soaring food prices in the recent months. World food prices by March 2008 were more than two and a half times higher than that in 2002. Between January and March 2008, wheat export prices rose by US$ 65 per ton and rice export price by US$ 197 per ton. Indeed, in last one year global prices of rice shot up by a staggering 222 percent and palm oil by a whooping 91 percent. Countries, like Bangladesh, with their stable exchange rate had to endure highest impacts on domestic prices of foodgrains.

The emerging consensus on the determinants of the emerging global food situations indicates a perverse convergence of a diverse set of factors. These are high oil price and rising energy costs, falling value of US$, crop loss due to droughts in a number of major grain producing countries, enhanced demands for bio-fuels, increased consumer demand in high growth economies, lower stocks and increased price volatility. Panic buying by large importers, export restrictions by key exporters and restrictive business practices have further aggravated the situation.

We also need to underscore the challenges posed by climate change to the food production scenario. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has predicted that over the next 100 years, a one metre rise in sea levels would flood almost a third of the world’s crop-growing land. This is an alarming prospect.

Impacts of the rising food prices are having serious multi-dimensional deleterious impact on the global poor, particularly those living in the NFILICs. Shooting prices are contributing to high food inflation coupled with rising non-food commodity prices. Enhanced food import bills are affecting balance of payment (BOP) of these economies and triggering diversion of funds from priority developmental needs. The 25 Asian NFILICs have to spend an extra US$ 6 billion on food import in 2008, i.e. about 24 percent more.

However, the most disturbing feature of global food price rise happens to be its entrenched and adverse distributional impact across countries and among households. The NFILICs remain the most affected group of countries in this context and they happen to host the largest share of global poor. On average, more than one-third of their population subsist on less than US$1 a day and about two-third on less than US$2 a day. The poor households in the NFILICs are disproportionately affected by this negative global development as they are systematically food deficit households and their wage rates do not proportionately adjust to increase in costs of living. Consequently, rising food prices may not only wash away their hard earned poverty gains, but also deepen poverty syndrome and make attainment of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) elusive.

The other piece of disquieting news is that this upward trend of food price is not expected to reverse in the near future, even when global food supply experiences record growth. It will take time to replenish the depleted stocks and even if the prices come down a bit, they will possibly never be low. According to the forecast of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), world cereal production in 2008 is to increase by 2.6 percent to a record 2164 million tonnes, but such increase will be marginal in the NFILICs.

In this connection, let me point out that, from the perspective of Right to Food, availability of food in the market is irrelevant if the poor cannot buy the surplus. This phenomenon has been described as “entitlement failure” by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen. This implies that we shall have to devise not only short term emergency measures, but also medium term programmes to address this structural imbalance in global food access scenario. Understandably, the major determinant of sustainable Right to Food is effective “Right to (Gainful) Employment”. Inability to do so will not only undermine our development efforts, but may also lead to widespread discontent, social unrest, economic paralysis and political instability. We are already witnessing some of these phenomena in certain NFILICs.

Addressing the Challenge
It is in this backdrop we face the challenge of enforcing Right to Food of our citizens. Providing access to food has been the moral obligation of the rulers from the dawn of civilization. However, it is only in democratic societies, this moral obligation has been transformed to a human right. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights vide Article 25 and numerous international covenants have given a claim to the poor, vulnerable and disadvantaged groups and individuals to enforcement of this right. Along with deepening of global economic integration, the custody of enforcement of right to food has transcended from nation state to global community. Thus, when a global food crisis looms large on us, it becomes imperative for the HRC, along with its international, regional and national interlocutors, to seek policy-based legal and procedural remedies for securing the rights to food of the poor, particularly for those living in the food-deficit income-poor countries.

The immediate priority now should be to feed the hungry. Donors must act swiftly to support the World Food Programmes’ (WFP’s) call for US$ 755 million to meet emergency needs. The global community should be able to afford this. The UNICEF should be supported so that it can ensure basic nutrition for the deprived children. Concurrently, international development partners should help the national governments to strengthen emergency safety nets and other social protection measures. The World Bank, regional development banks and the IMF should provide fast-disbursing balance of payment support to underwrite incremental food import bills. We also need to revive functioning of the international grain market by lifting export bans and releasing stocks on markets. Further, food-competing subsidy-driven bio-fuel production has to stop.

In the meantime, the disaffected countries have abolished import tariffs on cereal import, reduced taxes on fuel for transport and irrigation, increased agriculture input subsidies, enhanced minimum purchase price of foodgrains, disbursed rice at subsidized prices and broadened free feeding of vulnerable groups. However, all these measures are creating unsustainable fiscal pressure on these economies.

In the medium term we shall have to overcome this structural and systematic imbalance impeding effective access to food by way of repositioning agriculture as an overriding development priority in our countries. As the national governments are taking initiatives to review their development expenditure package, the international development partners would have to provide incremental finance to underwrite investment for improving agricultural productivities.

An attendant concern in this connection relates to the prevailing asymmetric power relation among the agri-input suppliers, food producers and food marketing agents. A non-competitive vertical market structure is further distorted by dominance of a handful of corporations protected by an intellectual property right (IPR) regime. There is a strong need for these market intermediaries to act responsibly in support of ensuring human right to adequate food.

Bangladesh has been a humble promoter of establishment of the United Nations Task Force on Global Food Crisis with the UN Secretary General in the chair. We expect the Task Force will come out with a Global Food Crisis Response Programme at the earliest. We are also pinning great hopes on the High Level Conference on World Food Security, the Challenges of Climate Change and Bio-Energy scheduled in Rome in the first week of June 2008. We trust that the Rome Conference will address not only the emergency needs for protecting the poor from hunger and malnutrition, but will also engage in resolving the fundamental problems of food security, i.e. securing Right to Food.

The writer is the ambassador and permanent representative of Bangladesh to the World Trade Organization (WTO), United Nations offices and other international organizations in Geneva and Vienna. This article draws on his statement at the Special Session of the Human Rights Council (HRC) on “Right to Food” held in Geneva on 22 May 2008.