UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Professor Olivier De Schutter, held a lecture on Food Security at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in The Hague, on May 3rd. His lecture was a summary of his most recent report ‘Agroecology and the Right to Food’.

Food security, according to De Schutter, is such an urgent issue, because of three crises having emerged simultaneously:

1. The poverty crisis, due to the global economic recession
2. The ecological crisis, due to climate change and increasing land pressure and population growth
3. The nutritional crisis, due to a less varied diet and replacement of fresh locally produced food by imported processed food.

To counter theses crises a double transition is necessary, stated De Schutter.

First, local food systems should be reinstalled as the primary source for feeding the masses. Because of the tremendous increase in productivity in large-scale agriculture, mainly in the developed world, low food prices have undermined local production systems in developing countries. This has resulted in massive migration to the cities. Government policies were rather directed towards feeding the urban masses with subsidised and cheap imported food, than towards creating a sustainable local food system. If we want to change this, then government policies should address urban poverty and create support programmes to enable them to buy food at higher prices. Support of local production systems implies better support for small farmers, to keep them in the rural areas, producing food instead of flocking together in the slums without employment. De Schutter claims that a successful strategy to achieve this has three pillars:

1. Supporting local value chains by creating facilities like roads, storage, market outlets and availability of inputs, finance and services
2. Better organisation of farmers, creating bargaining power versus consumers as well as suppliers of inputs and creating linkages between local producers and urban consumers.
3. Legal frameworks which allow small producers, men and women, to own land and to participate in policy making and hold the government accountable for its policies.

The second transition is towards sustainable farming systems, mimicking nature rather than industrial production processes. De Schutter pointed at the actual dependency of agricultural production on the availability of abundant cheap fossile energy. Prices of fossile energy are highly volatile and will increase all the time, with undesirable effects on food prices. Lately an enormous amount of knowledge has been developed on ecological sound production systems like intercropping and push-pull pest control. Much more attention should be given to dissemination of cutting- edge knowledge of sound ecological low-input farming.

De Schutter pleaded for national food security strategies which are important to map the issue and draw up a calendar of measures to be taken by each ministry before a certain date. “We need such multi-annual strategies” De Schutter stated “as this permits civil society to monitor the process and keep a government away from their addiction to cheap food dumped on international markets.”

During the Q&A session De Schutter was challenged on his plea for small- scale, low- input agriculture as small- scale producers will never produce enough surpluses to feed the urban masses. De Schutter replied that large-scale farming has an enormous high productivity of labour, hence creating enormous surpluses to be sold on the market. With land becoming increasingly scarce, however, productivity of land (yield per acre) becomes more important. Small-scale, mixed cropping wins here from large-scale monoculture. Besides, there are important secondary multiplier effects of small-scale farming on employment and the local economy in general.

In regard to linking small farmers to the larger economy, De Schutter pointed at a study on best practices in contract farming and outgrowers’ schemes he is presently working on.

Asked about his vision on the future of the Millennium Development Goals, De Schutter pointed at a structural weakness of the present agreement: although a lot of work has been done, it has clearly not been enough to achieve the MDGs and no-one can be held accountable. The political costs for failure are nil. If we ever want to achieve the MDGs, then we should change this arrangement and create an agreement where governments will be held accountable for achieving results.

To the last question which also popped up in my mind: “Basically, your story reminds me of a combination of Schumacher’s ‘Small is beautiful’ and the Club of Rome Report, both dating from the seventies of the last century. What is new?“, De Schutter replied: “What is new, are the circumstances. The pressure on resources, the financial crisis, climate change, it all comes together. The sense of urgency is there. Governments are now willing to listen and to learn. We have to act now.”

Jan Willem Eggink

Agri-ProFocus network facilitator