Plenary session 7. Food security and basic human needs. Ian Johnson

Transcription

1 Plenary session 7 Food security and basic human needs Delhi Sustainable Development Summit February 2002 Ian Johnson Vice President, Environmentally and Socially Sustainable Development, The World Bank, Washington, DC Let me start with a quote from something I saw recently on food security. It is an interesting quote. One thing is sure. The earth is more cultivated and developed now than ever before. There is more farming but fewer forests. Swamps are drying up and cities are springing up on an unprecedented scale. We have become a burden to our planet. Resources are becoming scarce and soon nature will no longer be able to satisfy our needs. This is not a quote from Lester Brown. Also, not even from Malthus. It is actually from Quintus Septimus Tertullia nus, a Roman politician, 2000 years ago, who talked about the constraints on agriculture even then. And of course those dire predictions were never realized. The world has changed. It s a much more interconnected world than in Roman times. He was talking about a very small part of a very large planet with a very small population. Today, the situation is the reverse we are a smaller planet, a larger population, a more interconnected population. And yet the reality that was there 2000 years ago in terms of the far-reaching comments by

2 that politician, in a way one can subscribe to today. Then the world embarked upon human ingenuity, technical change, investment in research and technology, investment in human capacity, and we have staved off the sorts of dire predictions that he and Malthus made. We must not rest on our laurels. We must now turn our attention to what is the package of actions that we must implement to change food security today and ensure that we have food security for tomorrow. Our colleagues talked earlier in this conference about the level of nutrition the 800 million people who are under-nourished, between 5 and 7 million children below the age of five die each year because of malnutrition. And yet today we have a 30 trillion-dollar global economy and plenty of food with historically low prices. Commodity prices are at their lowest for 100 years in real terms. So clearly the issue is not just food availability. And so we have to come to grips with the fact that food security means having enough money to buy food and having enough food that can be bought at a reasonable price. Supply and demand must meet and access is every bit as important as availability. Now let us turn to tomorrow. Let us think about the next 25 or 30 years, when we will have added another 2 billion people to the world. If we have any chance of economic growth, even modest growth, our predictions are that over the next 25 to 40 years, food requirements will double driven partly by the 2 billion additional mouths to be fed and partly by income effects. In India, we are seeing a dramatic lifestyle revolution driven by changing incomes, changing diets, changing eating habits, and changing demand for food. So if we have a problem of access today, as was mentioned by a number of our speakers, tomorrow we will have both the challenges of access and 2

3 availability. It is also clear that if we want to reduce the poverty and meet the millennium development goals that were set two years ago, we will also need income growth. Per capita GDP (gross domestic product) must increase. For many developing countries, the agriculture sector is central to that economic growth. So food security is about food and it is about farmers. But farmers are also about earning income because income in the ru ral areas has a multiplier effect, both on-farm and off-farm. And so we must see agriculture also as an economic asset, an economic sector that must grow. It must grow particularly in those countries where it is more than 20% or so of GDP that means almost all of Africa and many other parts of the world. So we have got to begin thinking today about tomorrow and we have a set of investment and policy choices to make. While we make these choices they must be made with increasing attention to sustainability. We must increase food and agriculture. Agricultural productivity must grow if economic growth is to occur and if food security is to be maintained or enhanced. But we must do so in a way that is both environmentally and socially responsible. We heard fro m a number of speakers about some of the dimensions of both environmental responsibility and social responsibility. Some have called it corporate responsibilities or the triple bottom line. By increasing productivity, we must also ensure that it is done in an environmentally friendly, environmentally sensible, and a socially sensible manner. In agriculture we have only two alternatives or combinations we can extensify or we can intensify. We didn t talk much about the extensification option in large measu re because it has limitations. We are not yet Malthusian in a sense but I think the amount of additional land we have to bring under cultivation is, if not limited, certainly going to have a large environmental 3

4 impact. 20% 30% of the world s forests have already been converted to agriculture. We know that agriculture is becoming a major user of water. About 70% of water is being used in agriculture. We are losing about 2 million hectares of land per year to erosion and salinization and between 5 and 8 million hectares to urbanization and road infrastructure, something that s often not factored in, in our loss of agricultural land. Every 10 minutes, we lose 240 hectares of forests. So we know that in a sense the option of extensification has its limits. It has natural limits but indeed it has limits that are bounded by environmental considerations of biological diversity, forest depletion, and land erosion. So, for the most part, extensification is not an environmentally responsible choice. We then can turn to intensification. The Green Revolution accelerated agricultural intensification and boosted yields dramatically. The CGIAR (Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research) and its centres, including one here in India, ICRISAT (International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics), in Hyderabad, together with National Agricultural Systems, played a vital role. However, it largely left Africa behind and today an African farmer produces only, for the same crop in a similar ecosystem, a third to a quarter of his Asian or Latin American counterpart. We are essentially drawing to the end of the intellectual capital of the Green Revolution and we now need to reinvest in the future of R&D. Today s advances in agricultural sciences have indeed put up a new array of possibilities. We know that we have got crops that can grow in drought conditions, can be resistant to pests and disease, can grow in mineral-deficient soils. And we can integrate nutritional fortification into foods. However we should recognize that these new applications of science and technology are not 4

5 without risks ethical, environmental, and health. Many countries still do not have the capacity to deal with the advancing sciences, much of which is in the private sector, and ancillary investments in physical and human capital are needed. We must apply science for productivity gains. However, it must be done in a way that respects ecological and environmental factors. It must be socially acceptable as well. And the combination of social responsibility and environmental responsibility will indeed define the new science agenda. Let me turn now to some of the actions that are potentially needed. First, we must address the list is in no particular order trade imbalances to allow developing countries to compete. We must invest in developing countries to ensure that they can compete. There is no good in tripling productivity in parts of Africa in a liberalized trade regime and then finding that the rural roads are in such bad condition that you can t get the food half a mile from the farmer, let alone to the port, for export. Today we see the subsidy for agriculture at one billion dollars a day 360 dollars a year. If they were removed, research shows that the supply response in developing countries could add 140 billion dollars worth of exports three times roughly the size of the aid package today. So the issue of trade is a very vital and important issue in any form of new compact that the world seeks to achieve over these coming years. It doesn t mean that the subsidies can be removed overnight that is a political impossibility but at least attention to the issue and the establishment of long term actions is important. Second, we need to initiate an international public conversation on agricultural science and technology that reviews all options and all risks with all stakeholders NGOs (non-governmental organizations), governments, private 5

6 sector, civil society, academia, etc. to find an acceptable way forward that is both environmentally and socially responsible. We must recognize the asymmetry of risk and consequence. It is very easy for any of us sitting here to make choices, given the incomes we have, to make choices in the food we will consume and will not consume and how they will be produced. If you are a kid sitting outside of this room and you have Vitamin A deficiency and you are living on less than a dollar a day, you may have a very different view of the risks and consequences. So we need a debate. We need an inte rnational debate that looks from all angles at the risks and the consequences of the new generation of science and technology. We need to invest in public good research and ensure that its findings are in the public domain and accessible by all, including small farmers. We need to focus on productivity with a green face and address vulnerability, including climate change. Climate change is a genuine threat to farming systems in developing countries. We should recognize it as such. We also need to look at drought tolerance, and link up climate change, water resources, and soil salinization, etc. At this point in time, the CGIAR has about 350 million dollars a year in grants to the 16 centres worldwide, including an excellent centre in India just outside of Hyderabad that works in partnership with national institutions. But this is only one per cent of the agricultural subsidies from OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries. Getting some more balance into a R&D agenda would seem to me to be a priority. Third, we need to invest in rural development to reverse urban bias and to address poverty, the bulk of which currently resides in rural areas. We need to invest in on-farm activities. But as Mr Patnaik said, we also need to invest in 6

7 off-farm activities, creating productive centres in rural areas, whether it s the transformation of foodstuffs or packaging or storage. We need to ensure that employment opportunities are available in rural areas. We need to invest in rural infrastructure, especially roads. I think that India is rather better served by rural roads than Africa where rural infrastructure is really a huge impediment to domestic trade, let alone international trade. We need to ensure in this regard that donors are willing to align their work and their funding with the rural development realities. I come from the World Bank where our rural development lending, our agricultural lending, has slipped from 40% 25 years ago to less than 7% last year. We need to revitalize our lending to rural areas, linking it with both food security concerns, ecological and environmental concerns, social concerns, but also productivity and economic growth concerns. We need to invest in African agriculture, which was largely left behind in the Green Revolution, and currently underperforms relative to Asia and Latin America. But to do so we need to have full recognition of the ecological fragility of that continent. And we need to ensure that it is done in a socially responsible manner. African agriculture remains a high priority for both Africa and the world. In conclusion, we need to raise awareness of the issues that were put on the agenda today, the issues of biotechnology, the issues of risk and consequence, and the issues of both on-farm and off-farm employment. We need to raise the issues of the link between climate change and agriculture. It s not well-understood internationally. And we need to talk much more about the sorts of partnerships between developed and developing countries, between dev eloping countries themselves, and between the public and private sectors. 7

8 For example, the private sector now dominates the science and agricultural research business. We need to raise awareness on a common platform, both for Monterrey, where the Financin g for Development Conference will take place, and for the World Summit on Sustainable Development that will take place in Johannesburg. 8