Part Two in a three-part series; read Part One here. 

“Without… a fundamental reassessment, we will remain wedded to food systems where the most efficient producers with the biggest economies of scale are relied upon to feed food-deficit regions… This may look like food security on paper, but it is an approach that has failed spectacularly. The reality on the ground is that vulnerable populations are consigned to endemic hunger and poverty.”

So said the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier de Schutter, in 2011 in his report assessing the compatibility between the World Trade Organisation and efforts to protect the human right to adequate food.

Food security on paper

Foremost among the numerous definitions of food security is the one provided by the Committee of Food Security. The Committee of Food Security, established in 1974 as a permanent intergovernmental United Nations forum on food security policies, is the most inclusive international and intergovernmental platform for ensuring food security and nutrition for all.

Its definition of food security is “when all people at all times have physical, social and economic access to food, which is safe and consumed in sufficient quantity and quality to meet their dietary needs and food preferences, and is supported by an environment of adequate water and sanitation, health services and care, allowing for a healthy and active life.” Significantly, the Southern African Development Community has used this definition since 2012.

Indicative of the Committee of Food Security’s importance, its 51st session in 2023 (the 2024 session is due to take place later this year) was attended by delegates from 130 members of the committee, ten non-member states of the committee, and representatives from 19 United Nations agencies and bodies; 226 civil society organisations; 37 international agricultural research organisations; three international and regional financial institutions; 141 private sector associations and private philanthropic foundations; and 41 observers. Vice presidents, ministers, vice ministers and three state secretaries also attended.

Food security in practice – the crisis of hunger amid food ‘surpluses’

According to the latest reliable information:

• Global hunger: Around 733 million people faced hunger in 2023, equivalent to one in 11 people globally and one in five in Africa.
• Food insecurity: In 2023, about 2.33 billion people faced moderate or severe food insecurity. Among those, more than 864 million people experienced severe food insecurity, going without food for an entire day or more at times.
• Economic access: The lack of economic access to healthy diets remains a critical issue, affecting more than one-third of the global population. More than 2.8 billion people were unable to afford a healthy diet in 2022. This disparity is most pronounced in low-income countries, where 71.5% of the population cannot afford a healthy diet, compared with 6.3% in high-income countries.
• Exclusive breastfeeding: Only 48% of infants benefit from exclusive breastfeeding.
• Low birthweight: Affects 15% of newborn babies, with 22.3% of children under five being stunted. Additionally, the prevalence of wasting among children remains alarming, while anaemia in women aged 15 to 49 years has increased.
• Adult obesity: New estimates of global adult obesity show a steady increase over the past decade, from 12.1% (2012) to 15.8% (2022). Projections indicate that by 2030, the world will have more than 1.2 billion obese adults. Junk food – attributed to poverty and advertising – is the primary cause of this obesity. A review of 35,550 products manufactured by the global top 20 food and beverage companies (representing 22% of worldwide sales in the sector) in a few key countries, including Brazil, China, India and South Africa, found that the overwhelming majority were unhealthy.

Moreover, world leaders, their advisers and other food specialists cannot claim ignorance about this manufactured pandemic. This is because these statistics come from the latest “State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World” report. The report is published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef), the UN World Food Programme, and the World Health Organization.

Two numbers stand out from this State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report regarding South Africa:

• 61% of our population are unable to afford a healthy diet.
• Food insecurity is the lived experience of 36.6 million of us.

Not part of this report are the ones on filicide, of mothers murdering their children and then killing themselves because of poverty and hunger (see here and here).

The report often uses the financial crisis of 2008 as a benchmark. What it didn’t say was that more than one billion people went hungry as food prices soared due to hoarding by the food trading corporations, hedge fund speculation and the criminal activities of the financial institutions. This led to people dying of starvation and consequent food riots and social unrest in both poor and advanced nations. These events brought down the then Haitian government and sparked the 2011 Arab Spring.

The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report warns that if current trends continue, about 582 million people will be chronically undernourished in 2030, half of these in Africa.

These figures, as Professor Jean Shaoul of Manchester University notes, put paid to any notion of achieving the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2, zero hunger, by 2030. The zero hunger goal, established in 2015, was supposed to “end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture”.

Standing behind these figures, which ought to be unthinkable in 2024, is the UN’s World Trade Organization (WTO).

It remains a safe bet that few people know much more about the WTO than its name. This makes necessary the fewest possible words about the WTO. According to its founding Agreement of 1995, the WTO and its 195 current member countries are, in the grandiose words made familiar in Part 1, committed to: “raising standards of living, ensuring full employment and a large and steadily growing volume of real income… while allowing for the optimal use of the world’s resources in accordance with the objective of sustainable development, seeking both to protect and preserve the environment and to enhance the means for doing so”.

It further recognises the “need for positive efforts designed to ensure that developing countries, and especially the least developed among them, secure a share in the growth in international trade”.

The diplomatic double-speak immediately brings us to the double standards richly embedded in the WTO’s founding document – as well as those of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund before they handed these functions over to the WTO.

Thus, as David Moberg, him of the “Let Them Eat Free Markets” quoted in Part 1 reminds us, in the 1980s the World Bank and International Monetary Fund loans as well as structural adjustment programmes required that countries not only reduce tariffs and other trade barriers, but also dismantle grain reserves, marketing boards and other government institutions designed to stabilise food prices.

Space allows for only two examples of what then became WTO rules.

Agricultural subsidies

In the short elaboration that follows, I draw heavily, unless otherwise stated, on the 2015 “Investing in Agriculture in Developing Countries: the Whole World Says Yes, but the WTO Says No” by Deborah James, the long-serving Director of International Programs at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC, and facilitator of the campaign, Our World Is Not for Sale (OWINFS), a global civil society network (of which the Alternative Information and Development Centre, for whom I work, is part).

The 1994 Agreement on Agriculture, a foundational part of the WTO, included the provisions that agricultural subsidies would both be capped at their then-current level, and be subject to gradual reduction.

This protects the already rich countries that were already subsidising agricultural production. Indeed, even before the Agreement on Agriculture, the US, from roughly 1950 to 1972, opened markets and created dependency on global grain purchases by providing subsidised, low-cost surplus grain. Governments could pay with their local currencies rather than dollars.

The governments of developing countries willingly accepted the aid, hoping to pacify their urban poor while keeping wages low for new industries. The restrictions subsequently introduced by the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank against agricultural subsidies left the developing countries powerless to object to the brazen might-is-right morality of the WTO since its inception.

The WTO’s argument was that countries would be better off producing cash crops for export and then buying food in the global market far cheaper than they could produce at home. Many countries producing the same commodity heeded this “advice”. This led to a drop in world prices due to the oversupplied market. “WTO rules,” Deborah James notes with good reason, “are explicitly designed to increase trade in food rather than facilitate global food security”.

Despite the global consensus on supposedly allowing developing countries to invest in domestic production, WTO rules do not allow developing countries that were not subsidising in 1994 to subsidise beyond the de minimis (Latin for “so small it’s not worth tracking”) amount allowed to all WTO members.

Meanwhile, the US and Europe are allowed tens of billions a year in overtly trade-distorting subsidies for exported products and have yet to implement the abolition of those subsidies to which they agreed in 1994.

Moreover, when calculating the subsidies, countries must figure the difference not between the Managed Service Provider – the middle men – and current prices; they have to use the WTO “reference price”, which is still the average world price from 1986-1988. As James exasperatedly noted in 2015: “As if the price of rice or wheat more than 25 years ago had any bearing on today’s markets.”

Further, while this reference price must be used by developing countries to calculate the subsidies for the type of public stockholding recommended by most experts, the same is not required of developed countries, primarily the US, when reporting its Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

US cotton merits a brief mention. US cotton subsidies alone – which enrich a few thousand producers in politically important congressional districts – have so depressed global cotton prices that Brazil has twice won WTO cases against the US.

But rather than change the subsidies, the US pays off Brazil to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Unfortunately, this arrangement leaves less politically powerful small farmers in Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad and Mali — known as the C4 — who have been suffering for years, trapped in this one-sided arrangement.

The much-touted cotton deal struck in the WTO’s Nairobi meeting in 2015 does not touch domestic subsidies in the US, by far the greatest source of trade distortion. So, as two food specialists point out in 2015, the C4 can expect to see continued US cotton subsidies estimated at $1.5-billion per year, which will increase US exports by 29% and suppress cotton prices by 7%.

This will cost the C4 an estimated $80-million per year in lost cotton revenues. That is more than 300 times the (2014) gains from market access under the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which totalled just $264,000 (the act is covered in some detail in Part One).

This brings us to the prohibition on stockpiling food – the second of the WTO’s inequities I undertook to cover.

Stockpiling of food for emergencies is for rich countries only

Martin Khor (1951-2020), the longtime executive director of the South Centre, an intergovernmental organisation of developing countries based in Geneva, called in 2013 for the adoption of a clear statement on the legitimacy of public stockholding for food security. This, he said, was in keeping with international law commitments to reducing poverty and ensuring food security.

What could then be more appropriate than allowing them to hold food stocks, thus enabling them to deal with food shortages and fluctuations in global market prices?  UN Special Rapporteurs on the Right to Food had made similar calls before. All were ignored. The global grain trade was supposed to take the place of governments with their once-held reserves stored for hard times.

The last words on this subject belong to the indefatigable Olivier de Schutter: “We must ensure that the debate starts from the correct premise. This premise must acknowledge the dangers for poor countries in relying excessively on trade. We must also assess the compatibility of WTO disciplines and the Doha agenda with the food security agenda. Without such a fundamental reassessment, we will remain wedded to food systems where the most efficient producers with the biggest economies of scale are relied upon to feed food-deficit regions and where the divide only gets bigger.”

What’s this about Doha?

The WTO’s ministerial meeting (known as rounds) in Doha in 2001 had on its development agenda the recognition of nothing more outrageous than:

• Reforming agricultural subsidies.
• Ensuring that new liberalisation in the global economy respects the need for sustainable economic growth in developing countries.
• Improving developing countries’ access to global markets for their exports.

But nothing happened until WTO members in Geneva began efforts to put the negotiations back on track. The date for finally reaching an agreement was 30 July 2004. The deadline was ignored. Many promises to relaunch Doha followed, the last being scheduled for the Ministerial Conference in Nairobi in 2015. It, too, was a failure. This led to the Financial Times declaring the death of Doha. The death also heralded the demise of the WTO as the UN’s multi-national trade organisation.

But that is a story for another time.

For now, and to complete this section on what the WTO means by food security, a few words must be spent on India’s groundbreaking law guaranteeing food for all its people.

India’s National Food Security Act 2013, also known as the Right to Food Act, aimed to provide subsidised food grains to approximately two-thirds of the country’s 1.4 billion people (unless otherwise stated, I’m drawing on Deborah James’s 2015 article “Investing in Agriculture in Developing Countries: the Whole World Says Yes, but the WTO Says No”.)

When the National Food Security Act was promulgated in 2013, over half of the population depended on agriculture, with most farms being no larger than a few acres. Hundreds of millions suffered from hunger and a lack of access to adequate food; half of children under five years old in the country were chronically malnourished.

The Right to Food Act is intended to reduce poverty among both producers and consumers by what was called a public stockholding, or food reserves, programme. And it is because of this that it runs afoul of the WTO, headed by the US.

In an article from October 2013 headed “US Farm Subsidies Are Unquestionable, While India’s Hungry Are Being Conveniently Traded at The WTO”, an outraged Hindustan Times journalist noted: “The double standards are clear.”

In 2012, the US provided $100-billion for domestic food aid, up from the $95-billion it spent on feeding its 47 million undernourished population in 2010, including spending on food coupons and other supplementary nutrition programmes.

In India, by contrast, the Food Act was expected to cost $20-billion and feed an estimated 850 million people. Against an average supply of 358kg/person of subsidised food aid (including cereals) in the US every year, India promised to make available 60kg/person in food entitlement.

Yet, while the WTO is quiet on the US subsidy for feeding its poor, the US has launched an attack on India for attempting to “roll back commitments” for “creating a massive new loophole for potentially unlimited trade-distorting subsidies”.

These claims, in James’s view, are “egregiously hypocritical” because the US is the world’s largest agriculture subsidiser. The US filed domestic support of more than $139-billion in 2011 – which is double the amount of those subsidies in 1995. Most of this is for food stamps for the poor.

But the US is still allowed around $15-billion in overtly trade-distorting support. And while the European Union’s domestic support of $79-billion is still high, at least it has been reduced since the WTO’s inception. In fact, members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development spent a total of $258-billion subsidising agriculture in 2013, according to the organisation.

India kept pressing for progress on the legitimacy of its Food Security Act until WTO members resolved to “make all concerted efforts to agree and adopt a permanent solution on the issue of public stockholding for food security purposes by 31 December 2015”, moving up the date by two years. This meant that a decision would be taken at the ministerial meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, in December 2015.

Despite the spin put on the Nairobi outcome, the two previously quoted food specialists concluded it would be “hard to imagine US negotiators even discussing reductions in its domestic farm subsidies”. Nairobi provided no reaffirmation of the Doha Development Agenda. Nor was there any permanent solution on the public stockholding issue; there was just a promise to negotiate an unspecified safeguard mechanism for developing countries.

An article, “Hunger and Malnutrition in India after a Decade of the National Food Security Act, 2013”, published by the National Law School of India University, brings us to 2023. Noting that the act is a milestone in the history of food security legislation in India, it found that despite ten years of food security being a legal right and the availability of sufficient quantities of food grains, India has at least 189 million people — 14% of its population — suffering from serious hunger.

The Global Hunger Index, released on 14 October 2022, placed India in its “serious” category for the 22nd consecutive year.

“The fundamental and unanswered question,” asked the authors, is “why do so many people in the country face persistent hunger and vulnerability for generations”? Astonishingly, the WTO escapes even a single mention in the long article!

The African Union is complicit in allowing the WTO to keep starving its own people. Although this cannot be developed here, African leaders reproduce the WTO’s goals and language. A clear example of this is its Malabo Declaration of 2014.

It is clear from Part Two that trade reflects global power with all its imbalances, inequities, and hypocrisies. Trade, in other words, is an international dimension of unequal power relations. This was well captured by our then finance minister, Trevor Manuel, as early as 2005: “The problem is not that international trade is inherently opposed to the needs and interests of the poor, but that the rules that govern it are rigged in favour of the rich.” (Mail & Guardian, 21 January 2005).

Part Three will suggest a different “reform agenda” from the much spoken about one by the GNU. It will show how the “rules rigged in favour of the rich” can be reduced. Easily, with the appropriate political will.

Jeff Rudin works at the Alternative Information and Development Centre and is a member of the Amandla! Collective. This article is published jointly with the Daily Maverick.