The summit surfeit continues. After endless G8 and G20 meetings, and prep sessions for December's doomed Copenhagen climate change conference, the United Nations has called a food summit for mid-November. Why now, so soon after the 2008 food summit, and what can it possibly accomplish?
The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the host of the Rome food summit, must have a serious case of summit envy. Summits are any showoff's dream. They attract armies of journalists and allow the hosts to mingle with everyone from President Barack Obama (if they're exceedingly lucky) to lesser dignitaries, dictators and luminaries.
Summits can do some good - the G20 financial crisis summit in London in April was one of them. More often than not they are next to useless, talking shops adorned with the requisite worthy statements demanding "urgent action" on whatever ails the planet at the moment.
The food summit could easily fall into the latter category. But it need not if it breaks from the politically correct agenda of trying to please all the UN donor countries all the time, and suggests some out-of-the-box strategies.
Kanayo Nwanze, president of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), which counts Canada among its top five donors, thinks the summit is a good thing. No surprise there; as one of the UN's three food agencies, IFAD has a vested interest in food summits and conferences. But he does have a point. For 20 years or so, investment in agriculture went into reverse, and look what happened. "We need to keep up the focus on food security," he says. "In the 1980s and 1990s, the world took its eye off the ball and we had the 2008 food crisis."
Indeed, the lack of investment combined with soaring fuel prices and populations produced record prices. The UN recently estimated that the high prices pushed another 100 million people onto the malnourished list, taking the number to more than one billion for the first time.
To be sure, food prices have fallen since last year's peak, but not by much. A new report called "The end of cheap food," by the commodities team at Standard Chartered Bank, says prices are on the march again and are 80 per cent higher than the 2002 trough year.
The bank concludes that rising demand and the new-found taste for protein-rich diets in China, India and other rapidly developing countries will ensure prices keep going up. According to the UN, the world population will reach 9.1 billion by 2050, about 40 per cent higher than today's figure. Feeding that number will require a 43-per-cent rise in cereals production and a 74-per-cent increase in meat production. More expensive food means the poorest people, who already devote 50 per cent of their incomes on food (compared with 10 per cent in high-income countries), will have to spend even more.
So bring on the food summit. Mr. Nwanze hopes the event will be a useful bullying session. Wealthy countries will be pushed into making good on the commitments they made last summer, at the G8 summit in Italy, to spend $20-billion (U.S.) on food development. Money about to flow from the spigot will have to find useful projects, from warehouse and irrigation development to climate change mitigation and providing credit to small farms.
But spending alone has never been enough to avert disaster, as the hundreds of billions of dollars in aid poured into Africa prove. That's why the UN might consider a couple of things it has so far resisted.
The first is to convince the delegate nations to do the sensible thing and vow to clamp down on biofuels. True, some biofuels are better than others, but most, notably North American corn-based ethanol, are bad news for food security and the environment. But the UN treads lightly on the subject, for the simple reason that some of the rich donor countries, the United States and Canada among them, are big biofuel producers.
Biofuels compete for land that might otherwise grow food. Standard Chartered says "the competition for acreage will inevitably lead to higher food prices." As food and energy become interchangeable, the prices for both will rise in tandem - high oil prices will translate into high biofuel prices, which in turn will raise food prices. To defend biofuels when the planet is on the verge of another food crisis is insanity.
The second idea is to expand the debate beyond food development and persuade countries to talk seriously about family planning (such as education about, and access to, contraception). Feeding 9.1 billion people may be possible, but the price may prove punishing to the planet's ecosystems. How much forest land would have to be cleared to boost food production by 50 per cent or so? How many aquifers will have to be drained?
Here's a guess: The UN food summit will issue its standard line about biofuels, something along the lines that they present both "challenges and opportunities." As for family planning, forget it. It's far too contentious an issue for most countries. Perversely, the greatest achievement of the summit may be ensuring that the UN food agencies stay in business for a long, long time.
Eric Reguly