Global Policy Forum

By Edgard Pisani

The world's worsening hunger challenges the current economic model only interested in promoting trade. We need urgent action with suitable technologies, the involvement of farmers and a different framework for international commerce.

Should we treat agriculture as an economic sector like any other, or should there be an "agricultural exception"? What are farming policies intended to achieve? Should the World Trade Organisation (WTO) apply the same rules to agriculture as it does to other sectors, or should it develop a specific system of intervention?

The difficulty in trying to answer these questions is to find anyone prepared to engage in realistic discussion, since those involved are either committed to current institutions or too busy tweaking the existing rules to contemplate drawing up new ones. Professionals, researchers, experts and politicians are all slaves to the present system and dominant way of thinking. Any new approach requires consideration of the human needs that agricultural policy is supposed to satisfy. Which presupposes that we know what those needs are and where to begin.

The issues are complex and contradictory. We may seek to address them at global, European and national level, but our concerns must range from the interests of individual farmers to the entire mass of humanity, encompassing production, rural life, regional development and the environment. We must consider the world not only as a whole but also as a collection of diverse elements; we must take account of the immediate and the long-term, of politicians and policy-making. Starting from our present situation, we must recognise that society creates problems for farmers; and that when farmers seek solutions that will allow them to respond to society's demands, that constitutes a social contract.

There are three areas of priority. We must guarantee food supplies and, in the longer term, seek an end to hunger. We must respect nature and rigorously examine the present and future impact upon people and the environment of new practices and products. And we must ensure the preservation of rural communities whose dispersal might threaten the demographic balance.

The dynamics of science and the market are capable of increasing agricultural production and enabling farmers to live on their investments and labour. But since these dynamics cannot in themselves guarantee food supplies and the present and future welfare of mankind and nature, a regulatory framework is essential. Opt-outs from the rules of competition may be legitimate, but they must be justified - although interventionists will have to prove this - and agreed by objective arbitration.

Once we have determined our needs, politicians will have to produce a forward-looking, comprehensive vision. Such a programme may only be hypothetical and provisional, but it should lead to a dialogue between a fully-understood present and a consciously-chosen future. We cannot afford to sacrifice the future to the present.

It is not true to say that agricultural policies are designed only to win rural voters; on the contrary, they are inspired by common interests and strategies. The decisions of what was then the European Community were a response to the food shortages of the period immediately after the second world war and to a later fear of agricultural domination by the United States. France insisted that the 1957 Treaty of Rome should create the European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) to compensate for its industrial weaknesses. The consequent modernisation caused a rural exodus that in turn encouraged rapid industrial development.

The US, meanwhile, pursued research and agricultural investment. On both sides of the Atlantic, the major beneficiary of this has been the food-processing industry, rather than agriculture.

Social and climactic factors, as well as patterns of land ownership, have given Europe and the US a comparative edge that will soon allow them to control world trade and prices. The Cairns group of countries (1) has attacked the assistance provided to European and US farmers; these subsidies and guarantees have helped preserve valuable agricultural practices and contributed to stability in both balance of payments and regional development. But they are part of a framework that treats farmers as units of production, the land as a resource to be exploited, the environment as an inexhaustible source of wealth and a secure food supply as a natural right. This can only be changed by devising far-reaching alternatives. We can sketch out some of the options.

It is not certain that we can feed an anticipated world population of nine billion. Production will increase as uncultivated land is developed, research and training methods improve and technical and scientific advances come into effect. But some of the world's most fertile land is threatened by rising sea levels and desertification.

Other threats include urbanisation, large-scale development projects, over-exploitation, pollution and the shrinking of the forests that regulate our climate. Water is in decreasing supply and becoming a source of conflict between the needs of irrigation and urban populations. If agriculture is to develop it needs huge injections of investment capital, which is not inexhaustible.

Universal self-sufficiency is achievable. But first the world needs to find the political will to reconcile a series of contradictions. The right of people to feed themselves conflicts with the right of commerce to abolish frontiers. Three hundred industrial mega-corporations and a billion family farms compete to exploit the planet. The determinedly black-and-white ideology of commerce contrasts with a more nuanced understanding of the natural, social and political complexities of our world. International security depends upon a balanced development process that cherishes nature, that does not turn the planet into a wasteland with vast urban sprawls and major conglomerates linked by motorways, and that allows the most disadvantaged to escape utter destitution and at least live in endurable poverty.

There is no guarantee of success. So far we have seen the globalisation only of trade. Soon we will experience globalisation on such a scale that the greater part of the planet and the overwhelming majority of human beings will be unable to adapt. We are being corralled not merely into unity, but into a uniformity that insults human diversity. Cultural difference is a natural phenomenon. Uniformity reduces the variety of productive options available to us. It dooms four or five billion farmers and country-dwellers to despair. And despair is a bad counsellor.

The world is setting agriculture a challenge: to feed nine billion people without destroying nature and rural society. In accepting these responsibilities, agriculture challenges the world community to give it the means to carry them out. It challenges the enlarged European Union to constitute itself as an autonomous power, capable of drawing up and negotiating European farm, food, rural and environmental policies that guarantee its own security and contribute to global stability. It challenges the WTO to devise rules that recognise agriculture's specific characteristics and infinite diversity. And it challenges the modern world to make immediate decisions that will have enduring effects. This is all attainable.

So let us outline how such a world might be governed and what sort of policies Europe should pursue.

If it is our ambition and our duty to end hunger, we have to face the fact that the world's food needs will be three times greater in 25 years than they are today. With four billion people living in the countryside, any attempt to increase food production must take into account the enormous problems that would be created by a mass rural exodus to towns, industries and services that might not open their arms to the new arrivals.

Despite all the advances we are making, agricultural development is threatened by the scarcity of certain productive factors. The hasty implementation of new discoveries and the continuation of practices that threaten the environment will do nothing to help. Freedom from hunger is a fundamental human and political right, so we must recognise people's right to feed themselves and we must outlaw export subsidies.

We need to reconcile the ambitions of science and the market with the fragility of society and the environment; the natural and cultural diversity of specific regions with the potential unity of a peaceful world.

These must be our aims as we consider how our world should be governed and as Europe develops its farming, food, rural and environmental policies. The work that needs to be done represents a challenge to a WTO whose sole present purpose is to promote trade, and to an EU that must make itself into a new kind of world power. Such demands meet the needs and threats that I have outlined, so it would be morally unacceptable, objectively absurd and politically dangerous not to respond to them.

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