At food crisis talks, menu is rich with politics

At food crisis talks, menu is rich with politics
By Elisabeth Rosenthal and Andrew Martin

Wednesday, June 4, 2008
ROME: It was supposed to be an emergency conference on food shortages, climate change and energy. At the opening ceremony Tuesday, the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki Moon, noted that there were nearly one billion people short of food and called upon countries gathered here to act with "a sense of purpose and mission."

"Only by acting together, in partnership, can we overcome this crisis," he said.

But when the microphone was opened to the powerful politicians who had flown in from all over the world, they spoke mostly about economics and politics.

The U.S. secretary of agriculture, Ed Schafer, talked about the benefits of biofuels and how genetically modified crops could ease world hunger. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil spoke for half an hour about how Brazilian biofuels were superior to the U.S. offerings. The president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, talked about how colonialism had created the food crisis. And President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran spoke of the need to inject religion into food politics.

Everyone complained about protectionism, though not their own.

On Wednesday, food experts as well as many representatives from poor countries wondered whether these divided forces could add up to a solution to a global conundrum: how to feed one billion hungry people.

"What is the common denominator here? It is a food crisis," said President Denis Sassou-Nguesso of the Republic of Congo. "That is the immediate problem for us."

At the three-day conference put on here by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, there was a lot of argument this week about whether the high food prices were caused by the rush to biofuels, protective tariffs, the soaring price of oil or distorting subsidies.

There has been much less talk about donors developing the new kind of aid program that most experts agree is needed: one that invests in developing agriculture in poor countries and spends less to ship food halfway around the world to feed hungry people.

"The era of food aid is over - there is no more sending food from America to Africa," Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary general, said in an interview.

Annan was in Rome to announce his latest project, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, a joint program with several UN agencies to assist small African farmers in increasing their output. Donors, he said, need to do more to improve agricultural practice in Africa and Asia, by providing tools, fertilizers, seeds, silos and knowledge.

"Away from the cameras, I am starting to hear the right things," he said, noting that African agricultural productivity has dropped for the past two decades. "I'm hoping they will go home and adopt policies to ensure global food production, on the ground, in Africa, Africa and Asia. It's much more effective."

Indeed, officials from many major donor countries said they had been rethinking food aid policies, if only because food prices are now so high and transport is impossibly expensive, with oil costing more than $130 a barrel. Also, "there are no more surpluses" for food aid, since crops are also used for fuel, Annan said.

Henrietta Fore, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said that transport costs were now soaking up 50 percent of the agency's food aid money and that rising prices of essential commodities like oil were "eating away at our purchasing power."

In the past, the U.S. program was heavily weighted toward sending food abroad, and required that its aid be purchased in the United States and transported on American vessels.

"This crisis has made people think again," she said. "We have a new landscape for food and food needs."

Fore said that in a bill now before Congress, 25 percent of food in a new $350 million aid package could be purchased overseas. But even that has not been approved yet.

In the meantime, many representatives from poorer countries expressed frustration at the tenor of the meeting.

"We believe the problem is much more political than everything else," said Walter Poveda Ricaurte, the Ecuadorean agriculture minister. "We have to differentiate between the countries who are really affected by the food crisis and those who are seeing it as an economic opportunity."

He said that when food prices were low, in recent decades, Ecuador had stopped producing its own wheat, corn and soy, favoring cheap imports instead. Now that prices of these commodities have doubled in the past year, the country can no longer afford them, he said.

The conference has raised money: The Islamic Development Bank pledged $1.5 billion Wednesday. The UN secretary general estimated that $15 billion to $20 billion was needed.

But there was little sign that the economic and political disputes that often took center stage here had resulted in new compromises.

Lula attacked the "absurdly protectionist farm policies in rich countries," a clear reference to the United States, which protects its own corn ethanol from competition with Brazilian ethanol, made from sugar cane.

U.S. delegates attacked barriers to trade in poorer countries, which they said made it harder to send food aid, as well as in the European Union, which has resisted allowing the sale of U.S.-made genetically modified seeds.

China, which has not invested heavily in biofuels, said that "grain-based biofuel has driven up grain utilization and has the potential to trigger more far-reaching problems."

Officials at the Food and Agriculture Organization were sanguine about the results. "Sometimes I think the discussion is not focused on the need of countries and poor people," said José Maria Sumpsi, assistant director general of the organization. "But you have to take into account that you are hearing the positions of the governments - defending their political views - which is different from whether they will fund immediate action."

The conference will issue its concluding statement Thursday, and delegates said the wording of the section on biofuels had emerged as a point of contention. The United States says that only 2 to 3 percent of the global increase in food prices is attributable to competition from biofuels. But other countries put the figure far higher.

"I doubt there will be a positive agreement on biofuels," said Schafer, the U.S. agriculture secretary, though he indicated that some "acceptable" language would be in the document.