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Source: The Global Crop Diversity Turst

As Mae West, the wickedly funny siren of Hollywood movies in the 1930s, put it: “one figure can sometimes add up to a lot.” In the case of the hastily called and recently concluded Food Summit in Rome, many figures may not add up to much at all. We’re talking about the sums pledged by governments, and the purposes to which they might be put, to address the current world food crisis.

Writing from Rome, the Economist magazine gave voice to what many of us on the inside feared from the outset. Although there are certainly some notable exceptions, such as the Saudi Arabian pledge of $500 million for emergency food aid, most of the new pledges will, in its words, “turn out to be old promises repackaged.”

Food aid is certainly needed. In just two months the price of rice in the global marketplace has risen 75%. Wheat is up 120% in the last year. Maize has doubled since the beginning of 2006. More than 100 million people have been added to the ranks of the poor and hungry globally as a result – 30 million in Africa. As Table 1 shows, rising food costs are the major component of overall consumer price inflation in many countries.

Table 1. Food and Inflation

Source: Goldman Sachs

Real pain is hard to block. In streets the world over there have been protests and even food riots, some violent. People have been killed - in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Mauritania, Haiti and other countries. The World Bank says that high food prices are creating a risk of serious civil unrest in 33 countries. In fact, substantial new funding for food aid is needed.

But, ultimately, food aid is a palliative, not a solution. We can’t keep on addressing food crises by ordering “take-out.” Indeed, there is something maddeningly shortsighted, though familiar, about our being obsessed with the effect, and oblivious to its cause. To be clear, high food prices are the effect. The cause is a supply-demand imbalance that threatens to become entrenched. Chief among the many causes of this imbalance is that “we forgot to invest in agriculture,” as the Danish Agriculture Minister put it at the food summit.

Some were precocious in their forgetfulness. As the food crisis unfolded earlier this year, they were announcing both big cuts in funding for agricultural research and even larger increases in funding for food aid - as if the world could buy its way out of a global supply shortfall, instead of producing its way out of it.

Since at least the 1980s, crop yield improvements have been the single greatest contributor to increased production. But the rate of increase has been dropping steadily as shown in Figure 1 from the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute. Wheat and rice are not even within sight of their peak growth rates of 10% and 4% in the early 1960s.

Figure 1. Annual growth in cereal yields, 1967–82, 1982–94, and 1995–2020

Source: IFPRI, 1999.

Not coincidentally, since 1980 the share of overseas development assistance earmarked for agriculture has plummeted from more than 16% to less than 4% as shown in Figure 2.  Similarly, developing countries have reduced the percentage of their national budgets going to agriculture.

Figure 2. The Decline in Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) to Agriculture

Source: OECD, FAOSTAT

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called for a 50% increase in food production by 2030. If current trends in yields persist, he’ll get less than half of that. Even half may be optimistic. Current yields are situated in current conditions. The future, with changes to climate and shortages of water, will be far more challenging.

Little wonder supply problems have ignited a global food crisis!

Hype Detector

The indicator of the international community’s resolve to face the underlying causes of the food crisis is not its willingness to hold summit meetings. It is not the language of declarations issued by the attendees. It’s not even the sums of money pledged. Instead, it is whether the resources we do muster are used properly, carefully, deliberately, and with real effect.

If these resources neither secure crop diversity, the foundation of agriculture, nor restore vitality to breeding programs, then the food summit commitments will have been rendered infertile, or worse yet, shown to be insincere.

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