food crops vs. export crops

The global food crisis is a monetary phenomenon, an unintended consequence of America's attempt to inflate its way out of a market failure. There are long-term reasons for food prices to rise, but the unprecedented spike in grain prices during the past year stems from the weakness of the American dollar. Washington's economic misery now threatens to become a geopolitical catastrophe.

In general, governments ought to liberalise markets, not intervene in them further. Food is riddled with state intervention at every turn, from subsidies to millers for cheap bread to bribes for farmers to leave land fallow. The upshot of such quotas, subsidies and controls is to dump all the imbalances that in another business might be smoothed out through small adjustments onto the one unregulated part of the food chain: the international market. For decades, this produced low world prices and disincentives to poor farmers. Now, the opposite is happening. As a result of yet another government distortion—this time subsidies to biofuels in the rich world—prices have gone through the roof. Governments have further exaggerated the problem by imposing export quotas and trade restrictions, raising prices again. In the past, the main argument for liberalising farming was that it would raise food prices and boost returns to farmers. Now that prices have massively overshot, the argument stands for the opposite reason: liberalisation would reduce prices, while leaving farmers with a decent living.

“In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.”“The day is not far off,” Kennan concluded, “when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts.”

As Kennan recognized, however, the maintenance of such a concentration of wealth often requires violent action. Agriculture is a recent human experiment. For most of human history, we lived by gathering or killing a broad variety of nature's offerings. Why humans might have traded this approach for the complexities of agriculture is an interesting and long-debated question, especially because the skeletal evidence clearly indicates that early farmers were more poorly nourished, more disease-ridden and deformed, than their hunter-gatherer contemporaries. Farming did not improve most lives. The evidence that best points to the answer, I think, lies in the difference between early agricultural villages and their pre-agricultural counterparts—the presence not just of grain but of granaries and, more tellingly, of just a few houses significantly larger and more ornate than all the others attached to those granaries. Agriculture was not so much about food as it was about the accumulation of wealth. It benefited some humans, and those people have been in charge ever since.

the WDR 2008 correctly stresses the need to promote farmer-led technologies and calls for extending the Green Revolution to subsistence farmers in less favorable regions yet avoids grappling with the increasing monopolistic control of biotech firms and agrochemical TNCs over genes, seeds, plant varieties, fertilizers and other associated inputs for their propagation. It acknowledges the importance of improving poor farmers’ access to productive assets but favors market-based land reform and water management which more often than not has resulted in increasing, rather than decreasing, inequities and further marginalization of subsistence farmers. It stresses the state’s role in providing core public goods such as infrastructure and research and development but does not consider how the benefits of such “public goods” are disproportionately captured by richer farmers and agribusiness corporations while the social and environmental costs are disproportionately borne by landless and subsistence farmers, indigenous people and rural women.

Préval was forced to make a statement about the crisis, but his initial comments seemed a calculated slap in the face to the Haitian poor--such as his suggestion that if Haitians could afford cell phones, they should be able to afford to feed their families. Préval also chided protesters for tarnishing the image of Haiti among the international business community.

the market access focus does, as Food First noted in its response to the Oxfam Report, promote the paradigm of export-oriented growth, since it is monopolistic export agricultural interests that will be the main beneficiaries of greater agricultural market access to northern markets. Even in the case of staple foods like rice and corn, it is not small farmers that benefit but big middlemen. A focus on market access for agricultural products from the South in the North will also increase pressures on developing countries to open up their markets as the quid pro quo for the accelerated opening of markets in the North. Thus, this strategy simply undermines the effort of many small-holder-based agrarian movements in the South to reorient production from export agriculture based on big landed and corporate interests to small-farmer based production systems producing principally for the local market and protected by tariffs and quotas from unfair competition by subsidized products dumped by the Northern countries.

The food miles debate is increasing the demand for local foods, which could become a threat to air freighted Fair Trade products.