Overseas development institute seminar

The senior scientist was quite emotional. He believed in the ways that solved the global food crisis in the postwar period: airlifts, green revolutions, mass feeding programmes with US agricultural surpluses supported by grain state senators like Bob Dole and George McGovern. It was in the spirit of grand collective action of the second world war. And, he asked, where are the great figures of today who can fight world undernutrition whose numbers, to one’s chagrin, have stagnated at around 800m people in recent years? Where are the new Churchills in the wars against hunger, the new Marshall plan for food distribution?
The occasion was an Overseas Development Institute seminar in London, and the man was the former chief of the policy affairs service of the World Food Programme, John Shaw; he’s served the organisation for 30 years. It was World Food Day, and he was launching a book.
There was a sense of disagreement from the audience. Collective action was of its time.. But today’s solution could not be about identifying a problem and throwing all global resources at it, not least because there is no collective political will to do so. It was noted that George McGovern came a cropper when he relaunched his programme in the late 1990s.
For things were simpler then: today, there are no massive food surpluses, jus transient ones. While hundreds of millions of people don’t get enough food, obesity is he fastest growing problem in the west. Tim Lang, an audience member who is a well-known professor of food policy, spoke about the distortions of the food industry – the trade patterns, the food miles, the advertising of sugars and sweets, the consignment of at least the next two generations in the rich world to the consequences of poor nutrition. The west is increasingly exporting its bad nutritional habits to Africa: biscuit and pasta and other cheap confectionery products replacing manioc. In fact, five percent of black Africans are obese. So it’s not just about maldistribution of food, but malconsumption.
There was a feeling that democracy is a solution, quoting Amartya Sen’s argument that India had not had any famine since it became one. And that supermarkets with their just-in-time distribution systems which shut out a lot of exporters were part of the problem. The poor agriculturalists who make up much of the world remain under monetised, hey cannot sell their way into wealth. Tim Lang’s presence was a reminder of the dangers of scientific farming – he has written much on he subject.
“productionism” that was about efficiency, state support, intensification, appeal to consumers, cheap prices and the equalling of quantity with well being.
If today’s intensive agri-industry does neither the west nor the developing world any favours, what is the solution? Nutrition is a subject that is very hard to interest ministers in, said the head of the ODI, Simon Maxwell. Part of the complexity is that so many areas of policy impinge on food production, and it’s a global, hard-to-get your head around issue. And there are time pressures too: climate change, said a panellist, will lower agricultural yields, farmland will increasingly be set aside for bio-fuel production, and agriculture, dependent on oil for transport and production, could be crippled by energy shortages.
There have been recent food riots in India and Mexico. In the end, there was audience and panellist consensus that the institutions of the post-war era – the Food and Agricultural Organisation, the World Bank, the UN – were not up to the task of the persistent challenges of hunger coexisting with obesity within a modern global agri-0business structure. What should come instead, no one knows.