G8 leaders address food security
In last week’s meeting in Italy, leaders of the G8 pledged $15 billion over the next three years to increase food security in developing countries by investing in food production and distribution infrastructure
Lat week, at their meeting in Italy, leaders of the world’s eight richest nations — the G8 — announced a plan to spend $15 billion over the next three years on food security. The leaders said this program would be different from past endeavors in that it would emphasize investment in farming infrastructure to allow the hungry to grow their own.
Debora MacKenzie, writes that scientists have been advocating this idea for years. Investment in farming infrastructure, including research and development, has been neglected for decades. The poorest farmers need improved seeds and farming technology and pest control, say agriculture experts, but they can not use them without infrastructure — basic things like roads and markets, credit, irrigation, access to fertilizer, and the improved technology that already exists.
MacKenzie writes that she saw that herself in Ethiopia in 1987. The rains came and Ethiopia had a good harvest in many places that year. It was not as much as it might have been because no one was breeding improved grain varieties for their upland fields, and there were few ways to buy fertilizers and pest control. Even worse, there was no countrywide marketing network to allow farmers with gluts to sell to people without. Any farmers who managed to get some credit to buy fertilizer, or better seed to improve their yields slightly saw prices plummet amid the local glut, lost their investment, and didn’t grow as much the next year. The very same story was repeated in 1994 and 2005.
That is the structural problems the G8 said it will fix, and for smallholders: the one-acre farmers who constitute the world’s majority and grow everything from their own subsistence crops to our favorite chocolate. Modern agriculture has rarely worked for them, but to ensure farming improvements benefit the majority — and lead to peace and stability, the G8’s main self-interest here — those are the people who must benefit from the money, especially in Africa.
“But is this G8 pledge all it seems?” MacKenzie asks. Some question how much of it is new money, and how much was “pledged” when the food crisis broke last year. “No matter: it will still be a real victory just to pry that loose from the tight fists of crisis-strapped governments,” she concludes.
