World Trade deals, no easy answers for farmers or governments.

I recently had the privilege of meeting a group of farmers from the developing world who sell their produce through a fair trade company to European Markets. They were not downtrodden, but they were acutely interested in the way that their crops are sold here, and despite the fair trade tag, there is still a massive disparity between what they receive and what we pay. In some cases they are also restricted in how much of their produce they are allowed to send to our supermarket shells by tariffs and trade agreements.

The World Trade Organisation talks which have just collapsed in Geneva were about liberalising markets, removing those tariffs which stopped farmers in the developing world from freely selling their produce in Europe and the USA. Some of those countries also had tariffs of their own which stopped imports from the highly developed, highly technological developed world flooding in and squeezing out low yielding subsistence farmers, or newly established industries.

In the press much of the blame has been laid at the door of the Indian and Chinese delegations, wanting to keep the right to protect their own agricultural industries from competition from the West. However there is some sympathy, amongst anti-poverty campaigners, for the stand taken by countries from the developing world against the deal on the table.

The trouble is that these talks weren’t just about food and farming, they were also about industrial tariffs, and the west wanting fewer restrictions on access to markets, something which according to the charities would be hugely damaging for the fledgling industrial sector which is fuelling the growth of many of these countries. Action Aid laid the blame at the door of the EU and the US for trying to maintain subsidies to their farmers, and resisting the efforts of poorer countries to protect their own workers, saying that in the end it was better to have no agreement than a bad agreement.

Oxfam too was critical of the EU and US saying the lack of a deal was a wasted opportunity, however in a statement the organisation’s International Director Jeremy Hobbs said “At a time when prices are volatile, developing countries were right to fight for the flexibility to defend their smallest farmers and ensure food security.”

In the US cotton farmers will still get their subsidies, and in the EU billions of pounds will still be paid every year to arable farmers who are seeing some of the highest prices for their crops for several years.
The big problem though is that farming isn’t a single entity. Whist the barley barons are doing very well at the moment, many livestock farmers face a desperate struggle to find the cash to buy the feed for their animals. And those barley barons are in turn looking very carefully at the cost of planting next year’s crop. They will want to know in advance that the price they will get will match the increase in the cost of the fuel and the fertilizer needed to grow it.

The level of subsidies in Europe is decreasing, but farmers say that without these payments some of their crops simply aren’t worth growing. The question is whether taking away those payments would actually make a big difference to farmers in developing countries. In some cases, perhaps it would.

Perhaps an increase in the price of wheat on the world market might help farmers in developing countries get a better price for the alternative they could offer. Where the lack of an agreement really hurts is where there is competition, for instance in cotton where US growers receive a subsidy. Action Aid says the continuation of this will be a bitter blow to African cotton farmer who simply can’t compete.

But tariffs and trade restrictions are not always one-sided. As we’ve seen with the market for beef, it isn’t only the developing world that puts tariffs on imports; sometimes countries in South America put their own restrictions on their own exports. Argentina did this out of fear that beef shortages at home, caused by massive exports, could stoke inflation in the fragile Argentine economy.

Maybe at the heart of this would be a better world without any tariffs or subsidies. The trouble is that these measures are often linked, inextricably to somebody, somewhere needing the vote of an elector. Perhaps in the end the world food market is just so volatile that there was never going to be an agreement in this round of the WTO talks.

But maybe perhaps at a time of ever rising food prices and potential shortages some of the tariffs will have to go, just to ensure that the Western World stays fed. The question then will be whether the West sucks out of the developing world, the food that farmers need to feed their families and their fellow citizens.

Food for thought.

The headquarters of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, the FAO, stands proudly overlooking the Circo Massimo, a sort of Roman running track, just around the corner from the Coliseum. Established in 1945 as a specialist agency of the newly formed United Nations, its headquarters moved to Rome in 1951.

The building is white, and marble clad. The kind of utilitarian monolith which was created from the egos of Italian Fascists and would not have looked out of place in the set of Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil.

Last week it hosted a major international summit tussling with the major twenty-first century totems of food security, climate change and bio-energy. To say it was a bun fight is something of an understatement. There was in excess of a thousand journalists, and their technicians from every corner of the world. They were outnumbered by the delegates by about three to one.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon tells delegates the world needs to produce 50% more food by 2030 to avoid starvation. ©FAO/Giulio Napolitano

As a journalist this is a strange type of story to cover. The proceedings of the conference were streamed online, headphones connected to a receiver connected to a radio loop were provided. There were sound feeds, provided to record, and there was an internal picture feed provided by the conference organisers.

What there wasn’t, was any kind of easy access to delegates. There was a red carpeted walkway between two parts of the building along which delegates, and various dignitaries, of varying degrees of importance walked amongst us. The really important ones were shielded from the prying questions of the assembled hacks by a mixture of suits wearing a badge saying `security’ and different Italian police persons, who ushered the fourth estate out of the way with a wave of their arms. It was all rather futile, and achieved very little.

One gaggle of protestors did evade this layer of impermiability. A group of European small farmers held up paper placards drawn with a marker pen, drawing attention to the massive role of big agribusinesses in the demise of the small farmer, and the increase in world hunger…. Although the content of the message wasn’t immediately clear, it looked quite powerful with them standing silently in line holding up about six placards.

Rather conveniently for this hot and bothered hack, several of the suited securitaté chose a moment when the rolling microphones, and the nearby cameras were well within range, to snatch the placards away, and assertively bundle these quite peaceful and innocent looking farmers away. Again little achieved by the organisers, but some good radio and television footage.

And the conference itself. Well it raised a lot of issues, and there was much talk of something being needed to be done, and there was money announced, I think I recall the figure of £1.2 somewhere in the welter of communiqués and press notices, and all the talk of a new approach, and impeding crisis and conference dinner discussion. In short the issue hit the news agenda for all of two days, and nobody could agree on whether bio-fuels were the curse of the starving classes. The message at the end was a call for greater investment in agriculture, and it seems that the penny has dropped that this doesn't mean simply sending lots of bags of grain to Africa, but investing in the technolgy to enable Africa, and lots of other places to grow more food.

Will anybody’s life actually be saved by the deliberations here? I suspect not. What will probably happen is that business opportunities will present themselves, and a sort of equilibrium will emerge in years to come, where the developed world will realise that if it doesn’t do something to help the developing world, the consequent problems will overwhelm those of us who have a nice comfortable life-style untroubled by hunger. If in a decade's time there are still two hundred and eighty five million people living in hunger in the world, and no more that can be judged as a small measure of sucess of a kind.



And the elephant in the living room, is actually a pair of nellies… One of them is genetically modified, and the other is sitting there pointing its big fat trunk at the ever increasing population we have to feed. This summit conference was the opportunity for the enthusiastic supporters of GM technology to advocate it as the magic bullet which will feed the world’s poor, where as most of the European Politician tread the rather more careful line that it is one of the technologies, which in the fullness of time, may possibly be one of the weapons in the armoury. As far as controlling the ever increasing population in the world is concerned, the Vatican Secretary of State, delivering a message from The Holy Father, was strangely silent on that one.

The other rather inconvenient truth which did get some coverage, although it makes much of the farming industry in the developed world feel rather uncomfortable, is that there is actually plenty of food to go around, if we stopped eating meat, and distributed the cereals we grow evenly amongst those who need to eat them.

And did the members of the press, who had trooped out to the eternal city in oppressive temperatures through countless cordons, and checkpoints, actually get to ask any awkward questions of those with the power to make any decisions?

To do that you had to catch the eye of the official controlling a very tightly controlled press conference almost barely audable in a packed room with insufficient time to scrutinise the decision makers. There was little opportunity to actually talk to the delegates. Different coloured ID badges made sure that delegates were untroubled by pesky hacks.

I had a nice pizza in the Trastevere, and I got very hot and bothered in a city which is dysfunctional at the best of times. However under the security closures of roads, metro stations, and tramlines, surrounding a major international conference, it borders on being a complete basket case.

So did the summit conference actually achieve anything, for the people that matter? It’s difficult to see what decisions could have been made in this environment, other than by contact between the different delegates, in non-smoke filled rooms, away from the prying eyes of the press. If there is sufficient food in the places in which it is needed to feed the people who need to eat it in five years time, then the answer is yes…. Breath will be held.