World Food Day on Tuesday:

Cooperatives – the key to feeding the world

By Pramod DE SILVA

The world population passed the seven billion mark one year ago and by 2050, it will top nine billion. Feeding nine billion people will be one of the biggest challenges faced by the world, since our land resources are finite.

It will be a costly but essential exercise – net investments of US$ 83 billion a year must be made in agriculture in developing countries if there is to be enough food for the 9.1 billion people in 2050. This equates to a 70 percent rise in food production over current levels.

It is not difficult to comprehend the task ahead of us, since one out of every eight people in the world is chronically undernourished already. Food prices are rising and the economic crisis still affects many parts of the world, compounding the food crisis.

This grim statistic was revealed by United Nations’ food agencies ahead of the World Food Day which falls on Tuesday (October 16) in the State of Food Insecurity in the World 2012 (SOFI) report. It defined hunger as “food intake that is insufficient to meet dietary energy requirements continuously”.

Undernourishment figures

The report by three UN agencies (Food and Agriculture Organization, World Food Programme and the International Fund for Agricultural Development) said 868 million people or about 12.5 percent of the world population were hungry in 2010-2012, down more sharply than previously estimated from about one billion or 18.6 percent in 1990-92. The vast majority of people suffering from hunger, 852 million, live in developing countries, where the prevalence of undernourishment is estimated at 14.9 percent, the report found.

The new figures, based on a revised calculation method and more up-to-date data, are fortunately lower than the last estimates for recent years that pegged the number of hungry people at 925 million in 2010 and 1.02 billion in 2009. However, hunger still kills more people than TB, malaria and AIDS combined.

As Director General of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Jose Graziano da Silva explains, “This is better news than we have had in the past, but it still means that one person in every eight goes hungry. That is unacceptable, especially when we live in a world of plenty. More people than the population of the US, Europe and Canada being hungry, in a world which produces enough for everyone to eat, is the biggest scandal of our time”.

Da Silva is optimistic that the world can still achieve the Millennium Development Goal to halve the prevalence of undernourishment in the developing world by 2015. The report notes that economic recovery, especially in the agriculture sector, will be crucial for sustained hunger reduction coupled with agricultural growth involving smallholders, especially women. In fact, hunger has been described as the “world’s greatest solvable problem”.

It is clear that new and traditional demand for agricultural produce will put growing pressure on the already scarce agricultural resources. Agriculture will be forced to compete for land and water with sprawling urban settlements and will also be required to contribute to the mitigation of climate change, help preserve natural habitats, protect endangered species and maintain a high level of biodiversity. Moreover, in most regions, fewer people will live in rural areas and even fewer will be farmers. They will need new technologies to grow more from less land, with fewer people involved.

There are many other factors that affect food production. Rising biofuel demand diverts food products to power cars, financial speculation in food commodity markets leads to volatility in food supplies and inefficiencies in food supply and distribution lead to almost a third of total production being wasted. Minimising this post-harvest loss is vital to ensure food security.

These issues will be discussed during the meeting of the Committee on World Food Security, an inter-governmental body, in Rome on World Food Day (WFD) on October 16.

This year’s WFD is considered a very significant event in the light of these developments and challenges. The theme selected for this year reflects the need for a collective approach at community level to address food security concerns. ‘Agricultural cooperatives - the key to feeding the world’ is the theme of World Food Day 2012. It has been chosen to highlight the role of cooperatives in improving food security and contributing to the eradication of hunger. This nexus is also reflected in the decision of the UN General Assembly to designate 2012 as ‘International Year of Cooperatives’.

Producer organisations

This theme highlights the many ways in which agricultural cooperatives and producer organisations help provide food security, generate employment and alleviate poverty. Agricultural cooperatives are natural allies in the fight against hunger and extreme poverty. Here in Sri Lanka, they have remained a potent weapon in the war against hunger at village level and also proved their ability to distribute food swiftly in an emergency situation such as the 2004 tsunami.

Being a grassroots initiative, the cooperatives movement is ideally placed to solve the food crisis since it is, and can be, intimately involved in all aspects of agriculture from sowing the seeds to transporting and selling the produce. Small-time farmers working in a cooperative alliance hold the key to improving harvests and ending hunger.

According to the UN, small producers around the world continue to face constraints that keep them from reaping the benefits of their labour and contributing to food security, not only for themselves, but for all through active participation in markets. However, poor infrastructure and limited access to services and information, productive assets and markets, as well as poor representation in the decision-making process, mean that this potential is not often realised. This is where cooperatives can come in. Strong cooperatives and producer organisations can overcome these constraints through a collective community approach.

This is why it is essential to revive the cooperatives, which have served Sri Lanka and many other countries for well over a century. Sri Lanka has undertaken a massive renaissance program for cooperatives including agricultural (Govi/Krushi) cooperatives. In this backdrop, the WFD theme is a step in the right direction to spur local agriculture and food production to new heights through a stronger cooperatives movement.