Archives: Reports

How Trade Policy Undermined Africa’s Food Self-Sufficiency

Introductio

The 2008 global food crisis is compromising the survival of 860 million undernourished people and threatens to push a hundred million people into extreme poverty, erasing all of the gains made in eradicating poverty in the last decade. Record high prices have put food out of reach for the poorest people in the developing world, many of whom already spend more than half their income on food. Growing food insecurity is undermining tenuous civil stability in at least 33 countries, about one sixth of United Nations member countries.

Read the full report.

Real food prices are at near-record highs — and are approaching the levels of the food crisis of the early 1970s. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization reports that grain prices jumped 88 percent between March 2007 and March 2008. Currently, high agricultural production costs, tight commodity supplies and increased demand have all contributed to food price escalation. All-time high oil prices increase fuel costs for freighters and farm equipment. Unusually poor weather conditions have undercut rice and grain production in Australia, Northern Europe, Central Asia and America’s wheat belt. The growing diversion of food crops to produce biofuel and increased demand in booming economies have helped drive up commodity prices.

But rising production costs are not the only culprits in the food crisis. The globalization model that prioritizes cash crop exports over food self-sufficiency has helped make Africa and other developing regions vulnerable to volatile global food prices.

In the last dozen years, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization encouraged developing countries to switch from growing food for domestic markets to growing cash crops for export to industrial countries. Traditional African food crops like sorghum, cassava, yams and millet are not traded internationally, so they typically were ignored by international agribusinesses and globalization proponents. Instead, farmers were encouraged to grow crops like coffee, sugar, cocoa beans, tea and cotton and then use the export earnings to purchase food, often low-priced imports from industrial countries. Globalization cheerleaders viewed food self-sufficiency as obsolete. Although imported food benefited consumers in the developing world when prices were low, local farmers were often displaced by low-priced imports. Now that imported food prices are rising, consumers cannot afford sustenance and there is too little local production to provide food for local markets in many countries.

While the WTO ostensibly offered “carrots” to entice countries to transition to export-oriented agriculture, the World Bank used its power as a stick. The WTO promised increased access to markets in rich countries, encouraging farmers in the developing world to shift to tradeable agricultural commodities instead of local food staples. At the same time, the World Bank invested in cash-crop enterprises in the developing world while it pressed developing countries to eliminate government programs supporting domestic agriculture, ultimately reducing the productivity of the food staple sector.

The shift to export-oriented agriculture has contributed to developing country dependence on imports of staple crops like corn, wheat and rice. Africa is at ground zero in the global food crisis in no small part because resources were diverted from food crop production to cash crop investments. About half (40 of 82) of the countries designated low-income food deficit countries by the FAO are in Africa. Africa is now more reliant on food imports than before the WTO went into effect, and food imports are more expensive than ever.

Excerpt from the executive summary: (Learn more and get the Food & Water Watch Report)

After a series of safety scares about imported seafood in 2006 and 2007, U.S. consumers are recognizing that more than 80 percent, about 10.7 billion pounds of the seafood they eat, comes from outside the United States. Much of it is imported from Asia and Latin America, regions that have potentially unsafe production practices. Claiming to have discovered the solution to U.S. reliance on imported seafood, the Bush administration is promoting legislation that would allow federal ocean waters to be leased out for industrial fish farming, also known as offshore aquaculture, open water aquaculture, or open ocean aquaculture.¹

Offshore aquaculture involves cramming thousands of potentially high,value fish, such as cobia and cod, into large cages in U.S. federal waters — between three¹ and 200 miles from shore. These ocean equivalents of land,based factory farms that jam together thousands of pigs, chickens, and cows could threaten the marine environment, human health, wild fish populations, and local fishermen and coastal communities.

Such operations can pollute the surrounding marine environment with fish waste, excess fish feed, and chemicals. Cramped conditions that cause higher stress than in the wild can make farmed fish prone to diseases and parasites, which would likely be treated with antibiotics, pesticides, and other chemicals. Both the diseases and chemicals can be transmitted to wild fish through the open net pens. Wild fish populations can also be harmed when farmed fish escape from their pens and compete with wild fish for resources or interbreed and weaken the wild genetic stock.

Not only is the push for offshore aquaculture reckless, its purported benefits are highly questionable. The administration‚ campaign for ocean fish farming is blind to the current trends in the global seafood trade. The United States exports more than 70 percent of its high,quality wild-caught and farmed seafood, while importing cheaper seafood from countries such as China and Thailand, which have spotty food safety records. Meanwhile, Japan and Europe have high seafood safety standards and receive nearly half of U.S. exports. Following this pattern, if commercial offshore aquaculture were permitted here, producers would most likely export the majority of their fish for high,dollar returns, and U.S. consumption of imported seafood would remain largely unaffected.

Compounding this trend are U.S. companies that export a significant amount of wild-caught seafood to China, have it processed under more lax food safety and labor laws, and shipped back the United States. The equivalent of 15 percent of U.S. wild-caught salmon and 12 percent of cod is exported to China unprocessed and then imported back from China, in processed form. With predictions that this practice will increase and expand to South Korea, the development of offshore aquaculture could end up benefiting processors in Asia, not the United States.

The federal government has created a false sense of urgency in its campaign for offshore aquaculture legislation. Consumers in the United States would be better served through: (1) a program to keep U.S. seafood in the United States, and (2) seafood safety legislation, including an increase in imported seafood inspections, as well as U.S. inspection of foreign seafood production and processing facilities.

Excerpt from the introduction:

DOWNLOAD PDF

Isaac Ouma Oloo remembers Kenya‚ Lake Naivasha as pristine, its waters sustaining an abundance of fish, lions, antelope, leopards, hippopotamuses, and birds. But the overuse of water and environmental destruction caused by international flower farms have fouled his memories of the lake. “Kenya is a begging country,” he says. “We’re among the top on the list of the World Food Programme for food donations, even though in Naivasha we have a freshwater lake that would allow us to grow food to feed ourselves. Yet we take this water to grow flowers and then ship them 5,000 miles to Europe so that people can say I love you, darling and then throw them away three days later. To me that is an immoral act.” ¹

Related Documents
Read the report online Read the press release

Since the 1980s, industrial horticulture and floriculture farms in Kenya, centered for the most part in the Lake Naivasha region, have grown into the largest supplier of flowers to the European market. They ship more than 88 million tons of cut flowers a year, worth some $264 million.²

The more than 30 flower farms in the Lake Naivasha region pose a number of serious ecological problems for Kenya‚ rivers and for the lake, including loss of water, an unsustainable increase in the population because of the laborers they have attracted, and the overuse of pesticides and fertilizers.

In 2007, while researching The Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water, Maude Barlow, National Chairperson of the Council of Canadians and President of the Food & Water Watch Board of Directors, learned of the crisis at Lake Naivasha and committed herself to visiting the lake during the World Social Forum in Nairobi during the winter of that year. Barlow, Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director of Food & Water Watch, and documentary filmmaker Sam Bozzo bribed their way into one of the local flower farm facilities.³

“We saw pipes pumping water from the lake to the flower greenhouses and a ditch where waste water drained back into the lake,” Bar-low says. “Pesticides and fungicides were plainly visible in a storage facility on the property. If action isn’t taken immediately, the lake will not only be polluted, it will be drained.” ⁴

Excerpt from the introduction: (Read about the report in Spanish.)

Beef from Brazil may taste fine and have an attractive price, but the reasons to ban it from being imported into the European Union are beginning to mount. Despite the EU‚ 176 percent tariff on Brazilian beef, cattle farmers in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Italy and elsewhere say the imported meat is still so cheap that it threatens to put them out of business.

Brazilian beef also poses numerous risks to European consumers — from the use of EU-banned hormones to traceability problems to bio, security lapses. Even though it has not eradicated foot, and, mouth disease, Brazil can still ship beef to Europe. European farmers whose cattle have been hit with the disease, however, face costly bans that have deprived them of millions of Euro in lost beef sales.

Environmental protection and human rights are also at stake. To make way for huge, factory, style cattle operations, rainforests in Brazil are being slashed, and, burned by slave labourers, who live in shacks and reportedly have been chained to trees and shot.

The dilemma has created a stand,off between members of the European Parliament who want Brazilian beef banned from the EU, and the European Commission, which has acknowledged serious problems with Brazil‚ meat production system but says a ban is premature and unjustified.