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Prepared by
World Resources Institute for From Agenda to Action March 13-19, 1997
Overview
Despite continued gains in food
production, many people in many parts of the world remain hungry and
malnourished. With global population growing by 90 million a year, demand
for food will only intensify. Meanwhile, unsustainable agricultural
practices are compromising the natural resource base upon which all food
production depends. In many regions, land productivity has begun to
stagnate or even decline.
Released in October 1995, a report from
the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) presents a
consensus reached over the previous two years by hundreds of agricultural
experts from government, non-governmental organizations, academic
institutions, and national and international research centers. Among the
report's conclusions:
- In 1995, about 800 million people (20
percent of the developing world's population) could get access to and
afford enough food to lead healthy and productive lives.
- About 185 million children younger
than six are seriously underweight for their age.
- Both malnutrition and food insecurity
are concentrated in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa; in Sub-Saharan
Africa, the number of malnourished children may increase by 50 percent
between 1990 and 2020.
- In the 1980s and early 1990s,
increases in food production did not keep pace with population growth
in more than 50 developing countries.
- Over the past half century, about 2
billion hectares of agricultural land, permanent pastures, and forest
and woodlands have been degraded. Each year, about 5 to 10 million
additional hectares become too degraded to use.
Resource degradation takes many forms.
Poor agricultural practices cause soil erosion, salinization, water
logging, and depletion of the soil nutrients needed for plant growth.
Misuse of chemical fertilizers and pesticides pollutes surface and
underground waters. And modern large-scale farming practices have promoted
crop and livestock uniformity, leading to loss of the genetic diversity
that is key to agricultural security and crop improvement.
As in the past, science and technology
offer some solutions to the world's agricultural problems. But without
significant policy changes and initiatives, scientists can have only a
limited impact. Even their ability to do quality work depends largely on
the national and international policies that set funding levels and
priorities for agricultural research.
Although the 1992 United Nations
Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) produced no
international agreements on agriculture specifically, participants did
agree that a high priority for all nations should be increasing food
production without further harming the natural resource base. One of two
treaties opened for signature at UNCED, the Convention on Biological
Diversity, provided an important new mechanism for funding projects to
study and conserve genetic resources--in the wild, on the farm, and in
genebanks. As of July 1996, more than 140 countries had ratified the
biodiversity convention, and $415 million dollars had been dispensed by
the Global Environment Facility (the Convention's interim funding
mechanism) for biodiversity-related projects, including those involving
agriculture.
In November 1996, world leaders met in
Rome to formally address global hunger for the first time in more than 20
years. Organized by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization,
the World Food Summit's objective was to "renew the commitment of
world leaders at the highest level to the eradication of hunger and
malnutrition and the achievement of food security for all." Although
no binding agreements or new financial mechanisms were established,
participants pledged to halve the number of people suffering from
hunger--currently, an estimated 840 million worldwide--by 2015. In the
months preceding the event, organizers met with NGO representatives from
around the world to draft a summit policy statement and proposed plan of
action.
Two years earlier, 117 nations signed an
agreement produced by the Uruguay Round of global trade negotiations
conducted under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The
product of seven years of intense negotiation, the historic
agreement--which created the World Trade Organization (WTO)--helps open
global agricultural markets by reducing such constricting practices as
high tariffs and other trade barriers, production subsidies that encourage
inefficient production, and unfair competition from subsidized exports. In
many countries--particularly developing nations--the agricultural sector
has already benefited enormously from trade liberalization. By reducing
the incidence of "beggar thy neighbor" trade wars and
encouraging expanded market access, this agreement will create important
new export opportunities for developing countries. At the same time, WTO
is also monitoring the potential environmental issues that trade
liberalization raises. To continue the momentum the agreement began, WTO's
members have agreed to reconvene for further negotiations after five
years.
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Policy Opportunities
- The Uruguay Round of GATT has forced
signatory countries to recognize some of the policies that make
today's agriculture unsustainable. Yet, individual nations can--and
must--do far more on their own. In particular, the following four
changes would contribute significantly to agricultural
sustainability--as well as to the economic development needed to
provide all people access to food.
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- I. Eliminate all subsidies that
encourage natural resource degradation or depletion.
- Throughout the world, government
policies providing subsidies for agricultural inputs have led to their
inefficient use--and ultimately to the degradation of important
natural resources. Whether for water, electricity, fertilizers, or
pesticides, input subsidies artificially lower prices, thus inviting
widespread overexploitation and waste.
- Instead of getting rewarded for waste
and careless use, agricultural producers should abide by the
"polluter pays" principle, already well accepted in the
mining, construction, and energy-generation industries. If farm-owners
had to pay for the off-site damages caused by overusing pesticides,
for example, they would use these chemicals sparingly.
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- II. Eliminate agricultural support
programs that create commodity surpluses and lower global commodity
prices.
- In many industrialized countries,
agriculture and trade policies have institutionalized powerful support
programs that artificially raise commodity prices--distorting economic
signals to farmers-- and, in turn, create wasteful surplusses with
high financial and environmental costs. By lowering global commodity
prices and restricting market access, these policies hamper economic
development throughout the world, particularly within poor developing
countries.
- While international agreements are
beginning to discourage trade barriers and unreasonable
commodity-support programs, national governments could expedite the
process. Specifically, governments should base all farm-support
programs on need and support for conservation practices--and not on
commodity production. Production practices that damage natural
resources should receive no public support while those that rely on
the biological management of soil and pests--thereby conserving
agriculture's resource base--should be particularly targeted for
funding.
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- III. Reform national economic
indicators of the agricultural sector to reflect depletion and
degradation of natural resources.
- Current methods for determining
national and sectoral income are often grossly misleading indicators
of sustainable economic development. By design, these national income
accounts ignore natural assets, assuming that their productivity has
no link to economic health. Yet, nothing could be farther from the
truth, particularly for such sectors as agriculture that depend on
natural resources.
- When conventional national income
accounts are carefully scrutinized, it can turn out that what was
counted as income actually amounts to loss in the form of natural
resource degradation and depletion. Not until the depreciation of
natural assets is treated with the same seriousness as the
depreciation of man-made assets will policy-makers get a true
indication of progress toward sustainable development.
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- IV. Increase public funding for
research on sustainable agriculture.
- Even if fully utilized, today's
knowledge and technology alone can't ensure adequate and sustainable
food production for the world's rapidly growing population. Over the
past few decades, new scientific and technological developments have
helped boost global food production, and they will continue to do so.
But funding for agricultural research has begun to stagnate and, in
some countries, to plummet.
- Increased funding for agricultural
research is particularly critical in low-income developing countries.
Despite these nations' heavy dependence on agriculture, IFPRI reports
that public expenditures on research generally total less than 0.5
percent of their agricultural gross domestic product. By comparison,
higher-income developing countries spend about 1 percent, and
industrialized countries spend 2 to 5 percent. In Africa, where hunger
and malnutrition are worst, agricultural research expenditures per
scientist have fallen by about 2.6 percent per year since 1961.
- The following four priorities warrant
higher funding:
- Research on how to protect
germplasm stocks;
- Research on how to measure the
impacts of natural resource use and agricultural production on
each other;
- Research on new agricultural
techniques that boost production while protecting the natural
resource base; and
- Research on economic and policy
options to enhance agriculture's sustainability
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- V. Examples of Success
- Working with the International
Potato Center (part of the Consultative Group for International
Agricultural Research), Peruvian farmers on small plots are using
traps baited with nontoxic pheromones and a native herb to control
post-harvest losses of potatoes from the Andean potato weevil.
- In the Philippines and Bangladesh,
rice farmers are learning about the life cycle of both pests and
beneficial insects in farmer field schools designed to promote
chemical-free problem-solving.
- In Senegal, women farmers have
banded together to increase their income and their families'
nutritional status by boosting their vegetable production while
cutting the costs of inputs. The solution is a solution -- a liquid
made from the ground seeds of local Neem trees to repel insects.
- Through the BIOS Program
(Biologically Integrated Orchard Systems) in Northern California,
walnut and almond growers in California's Central Valley are
developing and disseminating alternatives to conventional
chemical-intensive approaches to orchard agriculture. Researchers
and extensionists from the University of California, the state and
federal government, and growers' associations all provide support.
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