Monday, May 5, 2008

CSD in the Eye of a Storm

With the agriculture cycle amid the global food crisis, CSD-16 has the potential of being the most important CSD to date.

By: Neth Dano, Third World Network

The CSD thematic cycle on Agriculture, Land, Rural Development, Drought, Desertification and Africa could not have happened at a more relevant and urgent point in history. Today, the honourable ladies and gentlemen attending CSD-16 will start reviewing the status of their governments’ commitments to sustainable development in the area of Agriculture at a time when the world is experiencing one of the most daunting food crisis’ in modern history.

Hungry havoc

Food prices have risen phenomenally over the last year, prompting analysts to state that the era of cheap food is gone. Cereal prices have hit record levels, wheat prices are 130 percent higher than last year, soybeans have risen by 83 percent, rice by 73 percent and corn by 31 percent. The food price index has jumped by 47 percent overall, and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) projects that the food crisis is here to stay for the next 5 -10 years, at least.

As CSD-16 starts, the world is already feeling the havoc that hungry stomachs can bring to society. Rioting caused by soaring food prices has broken out recently in Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Ethiopia. Last year, similar riots broke out in Mexico over the price of tortilla as a result of competition with gas-guzzling SUVs in the US. In the Philippines, heavily-armed soldiers stand guard over long queues of urban poor lining up for cheap government-subsidized rice supply. The World Bank warned that 33 countries are at risk of social upheavals because of rising food prices.

Decades of neglect

What the world is experiencing is a product of decades of neglect of the agricultural sector. Public investments in agricultural research, development and infrastructures in general have been declining in the past two decades. According to the FAO, developing countries in general spend less than 1 percent of their agricultural GDP on agricultural research, while developed countries spend more than 5 percent. Overseas development assistance (ODA) for agriculture and rural development has been steadily declining in real times since the 1990s.

The impacts of the food crisis are felt most by the worlds poorest, as usual. Poor households spend as much as 70 percent of their income to buy food, and any increase in food prices means more people dying from hunger. The simplistic belief that higher prices of agricultural commodities will lift the majority of the world’s poor from poverty is not correct. A great mass of small-scale farmers in the developing world do not own the land that they till, do not have access to the most basic agricultural infrastructures and support services, and do not have control over the market of their products. Even the FAO concedes that “high commodity prices cannot substitute for badly needed public goods and services that are essential for agricultural production and productivity gains”.

Time to face reality

We may look at the current food crisis that we are experiencing globally as a dramatic culmination of the highly controversial and divisive issues that have been debated over the years in the halls of the UN, at the CSD and beyond. Delegates should bear in mind the importance of linking the current thematic cluster to the previous cycles on Energy for Sustainable Development, Industrial Development, Air Pollution and Climate Change which ended in a disastrous breakdown of negotiations last year, and the earlier one on Water, Sanitation and Human Settlement. All three clusters involve issues that are closely interlinked and highly interlocking.

There is urgency in honestly facing the challenges and weaknesses of governments and the international community in delivering the most basic human right that every citizen has - the right to affordable food. The reality is undoubtedly ugly, but the cost of not facing that reality is even uglier, in fact, unacceptable. Facing the problems squarely will make it easier for the global community to come up with collective solutions. The recently concluded International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) strongly delivered the message that the world has to change the unsustainable agricultural practices that have brought us into this crisis.

CSD should seize the opportunity

Let this crisis be an opportunity for the world community to work together for solutions for and with the great majority of the population that has suffered from poverty and inequity, rather than an opportunity for some predatory forces to profit from. May this crisis not be an excuse for governments to justify failures in meeting globally-agreed targets such as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), or sacrificing goals for food self-sufficiency and empowering poor farmers to have control over land and productive resources.

Let this crisis be an opportunity for governments to go back to basics and realize the importance of grassroots solutions such as sustainable organic agriculture and appropriate agricultural technologies that are based on the needs and capacities of local communities and their traditional knowledge systems. Let this crisis serve as a turning point for governments to recognize the fundamental rights of the tillers over the land that they nurture. Let this challenge give birth to genuine rural development that promotes cultural diversity and nurtures biological diversity.

Back home, in the Philippines, whenever a strong typhoon passes, people living in areas near the eye of the storm prepare for the worst - reinforce your roofs, stock up enough water and food, stay inside your house, be ready to evacuate when needed.

To governments attending the CSD-16, we say this: Seize the day. Carpe diem.