An agriculture revolution, the answer:

Combating the food crisis

by Lionel WIJESIRI

Today is World Food Day. “Food prices – from crisis to stability” has been chosen as this year’s theme for the event to shed light on this crisis and what can be done to mitigate its impact on the most vulnerable sections of society.

It is appropriate for us to look seriously at what causes swings in food prices, and do what needs to be done to reduce their impact on the weakest members of our society. Price swings, upswings in particular, represent a major threat to global food security. The hardest-hit are developing countries such as Sri Lanka.

According to the World Bank, in 2010-2011, rising food prices pushed nearly 70 million people into extreme poverty.

Compared to other countries in Asia, Sri Lanka is fortunate not to have experienced a food crisis yet. In fact, reports indicated we would export rice this year. The island has also taken steps to sustain and expand the rice “revolution”. Additional measures suggested included providing a nutrient-based subsidy to promote balanced fertilisation, introducing mobile soil health monitoring vans that can issue soil health passbooks to farmers and high-yielding hybrid rice strains, coupled with sustainable rice intensification agronomic procedures.

Indian Food Security Bill

Sri Lanka has understood the gravity of the global food crisis. President Mahinda Rajapaksa recently said that the draft Indian Food Security Bill could provide valuable inputs to a similar Sri Lankan initiative. The Indian Bill is designed to ensure that every citizen has a legal right to food.

Under the Indian Food Security Bill, it is suggested that a seven-member National Food Commission will be created, headed by a current or former Supreme Court judge, in addition to State Commissions presided by a High Court judge.

Their purpose is to deal with any complaints about food distribution, and they have the authority to issue fines on any public servant that they find guilty of misdistribution.

The Bill also outlines changes to the public distribution system (PDS), and has delegated the distribution to be handled by “Fair Price Shops.” These shops will be managed and operated by women and women’s groups, further empowering women in rural Indian communities.

Food insecurity is one element of a composite global crisis prompted by extreme inequality and the proximity of environmental limits. Solutions to hunger can, therefore, succeed only if they reinforce broader strategies for sustainable development.

The World Bank estimates that growth of rural economies accelerates poverty reduction four times faster than other sectors. Small farmers have modest carbon footprints and are relatively successful custodians of biodiversity. Peasant farms do therefore have the potential to be part of the solution.

To smooth over the volatility of world food prices, developing countries are more actively creating national food reserves, perhaps coordinated with neighbours in a regional strategy. This trend for stronger state intervention in food policy is sometimes described as “food sovereignty”.

Cheap fixes

I was recently reading a book titled 'Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Poverty' by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. The book has received much attention and acclaim from economists and development communities alike - precisely for its work in better defining household decision making and behaviour. In particular, the authors ask: if so many easy, cheap fixes exist, why don’t the poor take advantage of them?

It turns out the answer is: Because they’re eating tastier foods; or because they’re buying TVs; or because they’d rather spend money on a wedding.

Banerjee and Duflo explains: “In Udaipur, India, for example, we find that the typical poor household could spend up to 30 percent more on food, if it completely cut expenditure on alcohol, tobacco, and festivals. The poor seem to have many choices, and they don't choose to spend as much as they can on food.”

In one anecdote, the authors recount: “We were starting to feel very bad for him and his family when we noticed a television and a parabolic antenna. Why had he bought all this if he didn’t have enough money for food? He laughed and said, ‘Oh, but television is more important than food.’”

“Equally remarkable,” the two report, “is that even the money that people do spend on food is not spent to maximise the intake of calories or micronutrients. Studies have shown that when very poor people get a chance to spend a little bit more on food, they don't put everything into getting more calories. Instead, they buy better-tasting, more expensive calories.”

Two main lessons emerge from Banerjee’s and Duflo’s enlightening work: Development and anti-poverty programs fail when they do not take into account the preferences and decision-making patterns of the poor. Food security is not just about producing enough calories to feed the world; it’s about nourishing them.

Food security has too often been defined based on producing more or enough food. In some cases, development agencies have also sought to improve access to food, via physical infrastructure, market chain links, or food subsidies. Yet, as the Indian case demonstrates, food security requires not just production and access, but nourishing utilisation - in other words, nutrition.

Nutrition

There has been ample evidence on the importance of nutrition for economic, physical, and educational development. Yet often food policy fails to link up to work on nutrition. Subsidies often explicitly favour cereal farmers to maximise calories rather than nutrients. Poor agrarian households still dedicate their food budgets to expensive grains, sugar, and processed foods, rather than on more nutritional leafy vegetables or coarse grains.

The solution must come in varied forms. Research and field extension to develop and promote bio-fortified food crops, raising the profile of traditional nutritious foods (and keeping them affordable), and educating and giving grants or subsidies to women (who are the primary carers of infants and small children, for whom nutrition is most important) are some good options. But for development and agricultural agencies, innovative “nudging” may need to play its part too.

The global food price spikes since 2006 are thought to be part of a long-term trend of higher and more volatile food prices, driven by an imbalance between food demand and supply, exacerbated by more erratic and extreme weather and by poorly functioning agricultural markets. The strengthening of the link between food and energy prices is also a factor.

The projected growth in Sri Lanka's population to 23 million by 2030 adds an extra challenge for food security. Burgeoning populations mean more demand for food, water and land at a time when the natural resource base for agriculture is being degraded, large areas of farmland are being diverted from food crop production, and climate change threatens to further reduce agriculturally viable land.

To address these challenges, robust and carefully targeted investment is needed, along with comprehensive policy frameworks at global, regional and national levels.

In Sri Lanka, the majority of farming population is small and family-run, and they produce most of the food consumed locally. Smallholders are also by far the main investors in agriculture.

Smallholder farmers

Smallholder farmers can significantly contribute to economic growth, as well as to reducing poverty and ensuring food and nutrition security. For example, Vietnam went from being a food-deficient country to the second largest rice exporter in the world, largely by developing its smallholder farming sector.

However, smallholder farmers need more secure access to land and water, and better access to financial services to pay for seed, tools and fertiliser.

They need better functioning markets that provide incentives to invest in improving production, with less risk; roads and transportation to get their products to market; and access to technology for up-to-date and reliable market information. They need agricultural research and technology to raise productivity and improve their resilience to natural resource degradation and climate change.

And they need stronger organisations to pool their resources, better manage risk, have greater bargaining power in the market place, and influence agricultural policies and public investments.

Above all, they need a long-term commitment from the Government to developing the potential of smallholder agriculture.