Aman Sethi
PERCEPTION PROBLEM: Big players in the business of producing, distributing and trading food are looking to glamorise agriculture. Photo: Shiv Kumar Pushpakar
Side notes from a food summit.
Sexy, or more accurately its hapless pursuit, was the focus of the group of dark-suited, middle-aged men and remarkably few women gathered on the lawns of the Sofitel last week at the first edition of the Global Food Security Forum (GFSF) in Rabat, Morocco.
Advocacy, as the best connected among them noted, was essential as investment follows perception and the agri-business, they felt, had a serious perception problem. Governments were not taking food security seriously enough, young people were reluctant to spend their lives tilling fields, women were underrepresented, and the average age of the African farmer was 60 years. “We need to attract the youth and the women; we need to attract young women,” a former minister wryly remarked.
‘A for Agriculture’
Making agriculture “sexier,” delegates believed, would go a long way in redressing this balance. Hence, phrases such as “All that glitters is farming” and “A for Agriculture” were offered as possible slogans for future rebranding campaigns.
The summit was sponsored by Office Chèrifien des Phosphates (OCP), Morocco’s state-owned phosphate company and one of the world’s largest exporters of phosphates and fertilizers, and offered an interesting perspective into how the big players in the business of producing, distributing and trading the world’s food saw the issue of “food security,” and the incredible complexity of global agriculture markets.
The conference and publicity were handled by Richard Attias, whose website describes him as “the world’s top community builder for the thinking elite” and the logistical brain behind events as diverse as the World Economic Forum at Davos and the Middle East Peace Summit in Jordan. Members of the press, including this correspondent, were hosted by OCP and allowed to sit in on the deliberations as long as they played by Chatham House rules and did not quote anyone by name.
Sexy or not, agriculture and the state of global food reserves have garnered a great deal of interest since a spike in prices in 2007-08 lead to demonstrations and riots in 48 countries. The prices rose again in February 2011, leading some to believe that the cost of food could have played a role in the Arab Spring.
Geopolitical issues
In countries such as India where agriculture employs a large percentage of the population, rising prices should logically put more money in the pockets of farmers. Yet a presentation by Agriwatch, an Indian market intelligence firm, pointed out that farmers rarely gain as the “value” is captured elsewhere in the chain; in some instances the difference between farm-gate prices and urban retail prices is as high as 400 per cent. The result is that poor communities without savings or adequate storage facilities are forced to sell their produce at low prices soon after harvest and pay much higher rates when they subsequently purchase from the market.
A paper titled “Markets vs Malthus: Food Security and the Global Economy” by academic and World Food Programme consultant Cullen Hendrix notes that there are no clear answers for this price volatility: since 2000, the world population has increased by 12.7 per cent and real prices of food have risen despite the fact that the world cereal production has increased almost 20 per cent which suggests that there is more at play than simple supply and demand. Further, local markets are increasingly taking price cues from global prices despite the fact that only 15 per cent of the world’s food is traded on international markets. The paper suggests that geopolitical issues, like the crop failure that lead to an export ban in Russia in 2010 or the floods in Thailand last year, could cause international price volatility that is then passed on to local markets.
At the conference, a plenary on “Markets, Volatility and Food Security” concluded that it was incorrect to blame “the market” as “markets were like thermometers and you can’t blame a thermometer.” Instead, delegates were split into working groups and asked to brainstorm for “big ideas” that would transform the debate on food security. Groups comprising of scientists, economists, fertilizer company executives and commodity traders considered issues like micronutrients, farm inputs, infrastructure, farm credit, and the roles of governments, private corporations, public-private partnerships and international agencies, yet yielded little by way of actual solutions or recommendations beyond the need for better research, better governance, more information-efficient markets, better trained farmers.
By the end of the summit, it was felt that the second edition should include some of the politicians and global leaders who could actually put the summit’s recommendations into practice. Delegates agreed that in themselves they had found a community well suited to abolishing global hunger. “If not us, then who is going to do it?” asked one prominent speaker, “All the actors are here.”
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