Urban consumers need to be more concerned about where their food is coming from and how it is produced, and become more aware of the social and environmental costs of large-scale agriculture.
Consider this: we now produce enough food for the largest global population, and yet estimated 800 million people mostly living in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa do not have access to sufficient food. For those of us living in urban cities in the West (but also in the south) eating has become feast of diversity and pleasure that it is difficult to really understand hunger. We are saturated with images of what we should eat, how we should eat it, and even why we should eat it.
Cooking shows, magazines, and books all vie to make us gourmet cooks even though it is claimed that lifestyles have become so busy that most people do not have time to cook anymore. Prepared food has also gotten tastier and better for us, or so the advertisements claim. Supermarkets are stocked with products that many cannot even pronounce let alone know how to prepare. What to do with those chirimoyas? But before we can discern it all, the supermarket delivers a whole new batch of foreign fruit and vegetables. In the course of a week, we can travel the globe, delighting our taste buds with Italian, Portuguese, Peruvian, Indian, and Ethiopian cuisine. The world comes to our table. On a recent trip to Mumbai, I read in one of the local papers over the increasing number of "fusion restaurants" in the city drawing the citys fashionites and foodites to salivate over Indian-Italian blends or Californian tikka massalas.
Yet, along with the pleasure there is greater anxiety and apprehension over what we eat. There is concern over safety, including concern over BSE and the safety of genetically engineered crops. Can we trust what governments and the scientists are telling us? Worry over the safety of the food has prompted the surge in demand for organic foods. In 2001, the Organic Monitor the international market for organic reached more than US $26 billion. Ironically, the U.S., the nation where multinationals are the most eager to export genetically engineered crops, has the highest growth rate.
Living in urban centres and saturated with images and news about food and eating, it is all too easy to forget the farmers for whom agriculture is a source of livelihood that provides food, income and cultural meaning. In 2000, more than half (55 percent) of workers in developing countries labored in agriculture. Most farmers are women. FAO estimates that rural women are responsible for half of the worlds food production and produce between 60 and 80 percent of the food in most developing countries. Agriculture accounts for an average 14 percent of developing country Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
It has long been recognised the importance of agricultural development for food and income security. The U.N. International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) states rural and agricultural development is key to increasing poor peoples access to both food and income. However, in practice support for it has been progressively under attack in most developing countries. Neo-liberal economic reform introduced through structural adjustment programs in the 80s pushed for greater integration of developing countries and their agriculture with the global market. The trading rules pushed by the World Trade Organisation in the 1990s rapidly liberalized agriculture which traditionally had been a protected sector in these countries.
The Agreement on Agricultural took effect in 1995 under the World Trade Organisation. The WTOs Agreement on Agriculture includes specific commitments by member governments to improve market access and reduce trade distorting subsidies in agriculture. Under WTOs trading rules, measures and regulations that were intended to protect and support agricultural production in developing countries were dismantled as they were considered barriers to trade. However, rich countries can dump their subsidy-driven surplus on world markets, depressing prices to levels at which producers in developing countries cannot compete. In other words, the rich-countries that are members of the WTO subsidise their own domestic producers and yet force developing countries to open their markets and slash tariffs that are intended to protect their farmers.
In addition to the barriers against agriculture from developing countries in international trade, Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) to agriculture has declined. Indeed, although total bilateral expenditure has increased during 1990s, expenditure on agriculture as a proportion of total ODA has fallen sharply from a peak of more than 10% in the early 1990s to below 5% in the early 2000s. With the exception of the United States, other donor expenditure on agriculture has also remained relatively constant or fallen over the period. As a proportion of total expenditure, expenditure on agriculture has also fallen sharply in most donor programmes (e.g. Germany, The Netherlands), with the exception of Japan where the proportion has recently risen as high as 9%. USAID has cut its agricultural investments to sub-Saharan Africa by 57 percent over the past 20 years, to about $80 million. By 2000, African agriculture received less U.S. development assistance than any other sector. Similarly, World Bank expenditure on agriculture as a proportion of total spend has fallen significantly since the early 1990s. World Bank lending for agriculture slumped from about 31 percent of its total lending in 1979-81 to less than 10 percent in 1999-2000.
Finally, developing country governments also have curtailed their spending on the agriculture sector. During the 1990s, developing regions themselves spent only an average of slightly more than 4 percent of total expenditure on agriculture.
Clearly, the picture of agriculture in developing countries is a gloomy one. And yet attacking poverty and reducing hunger requires drastically changing this one. This needs to begin with a re-thinking the role of agriculture for livelihood security, environmental sustainability, and social and cultural cohesion. In this respect, the call that some social movement and farmers organisations are making for food sovereignty might provide important insights this reconceptualisation. The call for food sovereignty was put by Via Campesina - an international movement that coordinates farmer organisations from Asia, Africa, America and Europe - into the public debates on occasion of the World Food Summit in 1996, with the aim of providing an alternative to neo-liberal policies. Indeed, one can see this demand as a call to rein in agriculture decisions and policy making into its own national borders. In other words, countries need to plan and control what they produce for the food and income security of their populations, as well as environmental sustainability. This requires greater attention to local demands and concerns. Farmers organisations see the WTO as totally inappropriate to deal with food and agriculture related issues and have thus demanded that such issues be taken out of its remit.
Reconceptualising agriculture entails accepting the limits and therefore the unsustainability of current large-scale agricultural practices. The Green Revolution did raise agricultural production; however, the social and environmental costs have been high. Massive environmental deterioration has been created by an agriculture largely conceived in terms of maximising production through maximising chemical inputs needs to be reversed. Two-thirds of the agro-ecosystems which cover about 25 percent of the worlds total land area (excluding Greenland and Antarctica); have been degraded (World Resources Institute 2000). In these areas, capacity for agricultural production has been greatly diminished. To reverse this, more concern must be placed in enhancing the productivity of soils and their water holding capacity. Governments, multilateral organisations, donors, and public research institutions can no longer ignore the research being generated which illustrates the productivity and multiple benefits of small scale organic and or low external input farming. Along with more sound environmental practices, credit and agriculture extension support are required. There is nothing new in this. The call for agrarian reform, including land redistribution needs to be made. However, this time it needs to include the gender dimension. In most countries, land titles continue to be emitted in the name of the household head naturally assumed to be men. Women continue to be discriminated in accessing credit, information, and new farming practices.
These are just some ingredients that are required to help make agriculture a laudable and esteemed profession which young people want to do. In most countries, young people do not aspire to be farmers. They head out to urban centres. At a recent conference I attended, I shared lunch with a leader of a Panama agricultural organic cooperative. What do young people in the communities that you work think of your work, I asked? He stopped and sighed. Thats a challenge, he admitted. He confided that for the last three years, his cooperative has been unable to give out a scholarship to the children of its members. The scholarship can only be used to study agriculture. Young people, he admitted, did not want to study agriculture. This situation is quite common as most farmers in developing countries dream of getting out of farming and doing something else. The work is back-breaking gives you tough leathery skin and calluses. It is also work where mother nature has the upper hand. And this is just one aspect of the chain, never mind the challenges of marketing! Farmers dream of office jobs for their children and not toiling the soil. The Panamanian leader noted that children want to study computers and not agriculture!
This is where the urban consumer foodite and the rural producer meet. Urban consumers need to be more concerned about where their food is coming and how it is produced. They must join the farmer in her fight. The pleasure of eating should not be limited to our taste buds, but it should also include a tribute to the custodians of the land who through their hard work are taking care of the land. In the meantime, I hope my Panamanian friend and his colleagues remain steadfast in their conviction to refuse to convert their scholarship.
Urban consumers need to be more concerned about where their food is coming from and how it is produced, and become more aware of the social and environmental costs of large-scale agriculture. 