MOVEMENTS

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World Food Summit Fails to Reassure Our Oldest Fear

By David Bacon

<dbacon@igc.apc.org>

Date: 12-05-96

As inevitable as trouble are conferences about trouble -- international or global or hemispheric meetings or summits or congresses on particular problems, in Rome or Geneva or Brussels, filling hotels and reporters' notebooks. Unfortunately, most do no more than describe how much troubles have grown since the last conference and set the stage for the next one, as PNS associate editor David Bacon reports on this roundup of the recent World Food Summit in Rome. Bacon is a freelance writer specializing in immigration and labor issues.

ROME -- At the very least, international conferences on food should reassure us against our oldest fear -- running out of food. Not surprisingly, pieties resound -- as when the first World Food Conference declared an "inalienable right to be free from hunger."

This fall, 22 years later, delegates to the World Food Summit here called for much more modest gains -- cutting the number of hungry people in the world by half over the next twenty years. Today few believe even this is a realistic goal.

The basic problem is that international conferences do not set the rules for global food production and distribution. The real power lies elsewhere -- with transnational corporations, banks and the governments which protect them, backed by trade agreements, including the World Trade Organization, trading blocs like NAFTA and the European Union.

While some countries suffering as a result of these arrangements criticized them at the Summit, they do not have the power to change the rules. Those countries with such power have no intention of using it to do so.

At the Summit, as expected, governments of countries from the economically developing South came to attack the unequal distribution of the world's wealth -- and governments of the industrially developed North, led by the United States, came to claim that open economies and free trade programs will lead to greater food production, and therefore less hunger.

But new actors -- barely heard here -- are entering the debate on food.

One such voice is that of environmental organizations like the World Watch Institute. They warn that growing populations in developing countries mean that more people are eating meat, which requires more grain for feed, and this will lead to an unbearable strain on food resources.

Opposition to these arguments comes from developing countries and, recently, from another emerging element comprised of the Vatican and the World Bank. This unusual alliance argues that the problem isn't how many people there are but the fact that some have the money to buy food while others do not.

In Rome this year the Pope called hunger a consequence of economic inequality between rich and poor, of refugees fleeing their homelands and the "sometimes insupportable burden of foreign debt."

A third element are the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with close links to rural communities and food producers. These groups criticized the entire proceedings, saying the globalization of food production -- in terms of both trade and the agro-technology centered "green revolution" -- have increased hunger and poverty instead of alleviating it.

A fourth voice missing from the formal talk of summit delegations -- but heard on the streets of Rome -- was that of the people who produce the food, the world's rural populations.

Among those who made their own way to Rome in the hope of being heard were Isabel Cruz of Via Campesina (Rural Way), a coalition of farmers organizations and rural workers' unions from 60 countries. "In Mexico policies relating to food production aren't made in the Agricultural Secretariat but in the Finance Ministry," she says. Austerity policies mandated by the IMF and adopted by the Mexican government have cut rural credit, she points out, so that rural communities are shrinking and the uprooted head for the cities or for the United States.

Small Mexican farmers are also being driven off the land because they cannot compete with free-market imports from high-tech farms run by huge agro-industrial companies, Cruz says. This is why one basic demand of Via Campesina is the right to produce.

Gilberto Bermudez, who represents Costa Rica's Union of Farm and Plantation Workers, came to Rome looking for international solidarity with his banana plantation workers. He remembers "when we used to be a country which not only grew enough rice and beans to feed ourselves but export them. Now our standard of living has gone down."

None of the new participants in the world food debate had any simple solutions to offer. But they made it clear that pieties are no longer enough. Guyana president Cheddi Jagan, once the target of CIA destabilization efforts, offered the most eloquent testimony for the countries of the South when he called the idea that privatization, free markets and foreign investment would lead to food security "a myth."

Jagan may not have turned heads at the Summit. But he may well have defined the agenda for the next international conference on food.

Photos copyright 1996 by David Bacon. Young European anti-hunger activists and third-world farmers joined forces to protest the World Food Summit at Rome's Colisseum in mid-November. They wore black gags over their mouths to protest the exclusion of rural people and non-governmental organizations from the summit's formal discussions. They also objected to the increasing domination of free-market, pro-corporate policies over the world's food production and distribution.