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.

Pti, New Delhi, The Daily Star, 01 September 2007, Saturday

India is sending a strong team to Geneva where talks on the latest proposals on agriculture subsidy and market access will resume September 3, although New Delhi has rejected the World Trade Organisation (WTO) text on the industrial goods.

Officials on Thursday indicated hectic parleys are on between key WTO players, including India, to explore the possibility of holding a ministerial meeting in the middle of October.

Ministerial Meeting, comprising trade ministers of 150 member countries, is the highest policy-making organ of the World Trade Organisation and generally meets once in two years to take stock of the multilateral trade negotiations.

“We expect some progress if WTO Chief Pascal Lamy brings some changes in the NAMA text, as the present text is considered ‘fundamentally flawed and biased’ by 110 members,” an official said.

The Doha Round of negotiations, launched in 2001, had to conclude by the end of 2004 but has missed several deadlines.

After the collapse of the G-4 talks between the US, EU, India and Brazil in June this year, Lamy made renewed efforts to bring the round on the rails. He succeeded in getting prepared the drafts on Agriculture and NAMA (Non Agricultural Market Access).

India has accepted the agriculture text as a “good basis for further negotiations,” but rejected the proposals seeking higher duty cuts on industrial products by developing nations.

-         The Daily Financial Express, 05 September 2007, Wednesday

GENEVA, Sept 4 (AFP): Trading nations yesterday launched a three-week drive to break a long-standing deadlock in key agricultural negotiations at the World Trade Organisation (WTO), officials said.
“They are all in a mood to roll their sleeves up and get to work,” Crawford Falconer, the chief farm trade negotiator told journalists after the first meeting of the 151 WTO members after a summer break.
WTO chief Pascal Lamy warned two weeks ago that time was running short in the deadlocked six-year-old Doha round of talks on reducing barriers to global commerce.
The trading nations have spent the past month mulling over compromise proposals on farm subsidies and import tariffs, a key stumbling block in the talks which also encompass global trade in industrial goods and services.
Falconer, who is also New Zealand’s ambassador to the WTO, warned that the talks would be “in trouble” if member states did not make an effort to overcome their differences this month.
The negotiations scheduled until September 21 are expected to involve a combination of bilateral meetings, gatherings of a group of about 30 countries representing a cross section of WTO members, and plenary sessions of al 151 trading nations, officials said.
Parallel negotiations on industrial goods are also due to take place in Geneva this month. The Doha development round of trade liberalisation talks, launched in the Qatari capital in 2001, is aimed at cutting subsidies and import duties primarily to help developing nations to take advantage of expanding global trade.
WTO members are at odds over the extent of new cuts in barriers to trade in agriculture, industrial goods and services amid cross-cutting disagreements between rich and poor countries over the concessions they need to make.
The fresh WTO proposals have so far met with a lukewarm reaction that echoes past disagreements which have repeatedly brought the Doha round close to collapse.
Industrialised powers like the United States and the European Union signalled in July that they were unhappy with the extent of cuts in subsidies to farmers and in agricultural import duties they might face.
Meanwhile, emerging and developing nations like Brazil, India and Indonesia complained about the concessions they would have to make in lifting barriers to imports of industrial goods, even though the United States said the new proposals did not go far enough.
Industrialised economies have been seeking easier access to industrial markets in developing countries in exchange for cuts in their own agricultural protection.
A first sign of the overall state of play is expected at a meeting of the WTO’s 151 members in Geneva on September 14.

The Daily New Age, 05 September 2007, Wednesday

Agence France-Presse . Geneva

Trading nations on Monday launched a three-week drive to break a long-standing deadlock in key agricultural negotiations at the World Trade Organisation, officials said.
   ‘They are all in a mood to roll their sleeves up and get to work,’ Crawford Falconer, the chief farm trade negotiator told journalists after the first meeting of the 151 WTO members after a summer break.
   WTO chief Pascal Lamy warned two weeks ago that time was running short in the deadlocked six-year old Doha round of talks on reducing barriers to global commerce.
   The trading nations have spent the past month mulling over compromise proposals on farm subsidies and import tariffs, a key stumbling block in the talks which also encompass global trade in industrial goods and services.
   Falconer, who is also New Zealand’s ambassador to the WTO, warned that the talks would be ‘in trouble’ if member states did not make an effort to overcome their differences this month.
   The negotiations scheduled until September 21 are expected to involve a combination of bilateral meetings, gatherings of a group of about 30 countries representing a cross section of WTO members, and plenary sessions of al 151 trading nations, officials said.
   Parallel negotiations on industrial goods are also due to take place in Geneva this month.
   The Doha Development Round of trade liberalisation talks, launched in the Qatari capital in 2001, is aimed at cutting subsidies and import duties primarily to help developing nations to take advantage of expanding global trade.
   WTO members are at odds over the extent of new cuts in barriers to trade in agriculture, industrial goods and services amid cross-cutting disagreements between rich and poor countries over the concessions they need to make.
   The fresh WTO proposals have so far met with a lukewarm reaction that echoes past disagreements which have repeatedly brought the Doha round close to collapse.
   Industrialised powers like the United States and the European Union signalled in July that they were unhappy with the extent of cuts in subsidies to farmers and in agricultural import duties they might face.
   Meanwhile emerging and developing nations like Brazil, India and Indonesia complained about the concessions they would have to make in lifting barriers to imports of industrial goods, even though the United States said the new proposals did not go far enough.
   Industrialised economies have been seeking easier access to industrial markets in developing countries in exchange for cuts in their own agricultural protection.
   A first sign of the overall state of play is expected at a meeting of the WTO’s 151 members in Geneva on September 14.