Food Ethics Council

As the UK and other governments meet in Rome for crisis talks on food prices, the latest edition of Food Ethics magazine  urges governments to tackle the injustice at the heart of the crisis and not to use food concerns as a vehicle to push through other ambitions.

The collection has contributions from global figures including Jacques Diouf (Director General of the Foof and Agriculture Organisation), Josette Sheeran (Chief Executive of the World Food Programme)  and Lester R Brown (President of the Earth Policy Institute).
 
“The crisis is an opportunity to advance all sorts of vested interests, but we mustn’t mistake opportunities for solutions,” says FEC Executive Director Dr Tom MacMillan.

“Solving this crisis is fundamentally about fair shares, not simply about producing more food, cutting costs or freeing up global trade. Even when food prices were lower, and supply and demand seemed in balance, 860 million people went hungry and almost 3 billion malnourished. The Rome talks mustn’t get side-tracked from that fact.”
 
Contributors to the magazine sound the alarm on false solutions including:

• Free trade free-for-all – The World Trade Organisation (WTO) sees higher crop prices as a window to push through global trade reforms and the UK’s Gordon Brown argues this will bring the food crisis under control. But according to Sophia Murphy (Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy), “In the following list of problems causing rapid food inflation – climate change, natural resource depletion, quadrupling oil prices, speculation, rapid expansion of biofuels, hoarding supplies – the WTO has nothing to say or actually worsens the problem.”
• A ‘green revolution’ for Africa – The World Bank President, Robert Zoellick, is among those pushing for new technology to boost farming in Africa. However, Patrick Mulvany (Practical Action) reports on a groundbreaking World Bank-sponsored report which argues the priority should be fairer and more stable prices, crop care and farmer-to-farmer learning rather than a technology jump to double yields.
• Policies to boost productivity – Global grain stocks are low and the UK Food and Drink Federation has argued that GM crops, heavily restricted in Europe, could address this scarcity. As Daryll Ray and Harwood Schaffer (University of Tennessee) argue in the FEC collection, however, a major factor in low grain stocks is that governments have simply downgraded their strategic reserves.
• Lowering standards – As households worry about rising food bills, the pressure is on to lower environmental and animal welfare standards, seen as an extra cost. Jim Sumberg (New Economics Foundation) suggests this is a false economy, since lower standards come at the cost of cleaning up environmental damage. Roland Bonney (Food Animal Initiative) argues that higher production costs may boost animal welfare standards as they force producers and consumers to place a higher value on their food.

Priorities to improve food security and tackle hunger include improving social welfare through well-targeted social protection programmes, focusing agricultural development efforts on marginal producers and rebuilding public stocks.
 
As higher prices put governments under pressure to lower standards, they also need to ensure that their policies are strong enough to prevent the harmful exploitation of workers, farm animals and the environment.

Click here to read free access articles or subscribe for the full magazine.