Spotlight G-20: G-20 and Food Security: Keep the Focus on Economic Policy Reform

Jennifer Clapp

Part of the Triple Crisis Spotlight G-20 series.

When the G20 put food security on its agenda for the 2011 Cannes summit, many analysts were initially optimistic. As the world’s leading economies, the G20 has the potential to make important economic policy changes that could help improve access to food for the world’s poorest people.

In 2012, optimism about the G20’s ability to deliver on this front has begun to fade. There has not been much action since the Cannes summit and, in the run-up to the Los Cabos summit, the discussion has shifted toward a narrower focus on productivity growth and away from broader economic policy reforms that can contribute to food security. Both are important and should remain on the agenda.

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Spotlight G-20: Mexico’s Surreal Leadership on Food Security

Timothy A. Wise

Part of the Triple Crisis Spotlight G-20 series.

Leave it to Mexico to put surrealism on the agenda at the G-20 summit that opens today in Los Cabos, Mexico. Actually, the Mexican government seems not have put much of anything on the agenda, at least when it comes to food security, one of its stated priorities as G-20 president this year. What’s surreal is listening to Mexico’s Agriculture Minister, Francisco Mayorga, speaking last Wednesday to an international conference on “New Paradigms for Agriculture,” describe without a hint of irony or self-reflection his government’s “model program” for sustainable smallholder agriculture.

This from the country that is the world’s poster child for the failures of neoliberal agriculture policy. Surreal. Where’s Frida Kahlo when we need her?

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The 2012 Food Assistance Convention: Is a Promise Still a Promise?

Jennifer Clapp and C. Stuart Clark, guest blogger

In late April 2012, the long-anticipated new Food Assistance Convention (FAC) text was finally agreed upon. The Food Assistance Convention replaces the 1999 Food Aid Convention, which expired in 2002 and has been limping along for a decade on year-long extensions.

First negotiated in 1967, the FAC defines global rules for food assistance by major donors. As an international treaty, it is both unique and significant. It is the only international legal agreement that requires members to provide a minimum amount of food assistance, demonstrating an important commitment among donor states to address world hunger.
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G-8 punts on food security … to the private sector

Sophia Murphy, guest blogger, and Timothy A. Wise
(also available in Portuguese at INESC)

The G-8 met this past the weekend in the United States. Three years earlier the group of the most powerful industrialized nations met in L’Aquila, Italy, just as food-price spikes were sending millions into poverty. They stepped up to the challenge, with a three-year, $22 billion pledge of aid for agricultural development to address the food crisis.

Well, three years is done and, apparently, so is the G-8 commitment to address the food crisis. How else to interpret the sad excuse of an aid program that is “The New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition.”

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Spotlight G20: Will Mexico Lead Action on Biofuels, Food Crisis?

Timothy A. Wise

How much have U.S. ethanol policies pushed up corn prices? And how much have these higher prices cost developing countries dependent on imports for their staple foods? And if one of those countries is the chair of the G20, will it use its considerable influence over the agenda to demand policy changes?

The answers to the first two questions are clear from my new study, “The Cost to Mexico of U.S. Corn Ethanol Expansion” U.S. ethanol expansion has pushed prices up 20% or more in recent years, and that cost Mexico, which imports one-third of its corn, an extra $1.5-$3.2 billion from 2006-11.

The answer to the last question is less clear. Mexico is indeed the chair of the G20, whose vice ministers of agriculture meet tomorrow in Mexico City to set the G20’s food-security agenda in advance of the June 18-19 G20 summit. The Mexican government issued a report that suggests little ambition on food security, but hopefully our biofuels report will bring home why Mexico should lead and not follow on biofuels in the G20.

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Timmer Defends Food Reserves, Lipton on Smallholder Development

Timothy A. Wise

I had the pleasure of sitting down with C. Peter Timmer and Michael Lipton in early April for short interviews based on their provocative and well-received lectures at Tufts University, where my institute awarded them the 2012 Leontief Prizes for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. Timmer offers an interesting defense of food reserves as necessary to the functioning of international markets. Lipton’s talk on “Income from Work” through smallholder development in Africa provided the backdrop to an interview on the centrality of smallholders to early development even in the age of global markets. See the short interviews below, and for more: read a summary of the event; read the lectures by Timmer and Lipton; read more about the Global Development and Environment Institute’s Leontief Prize, including past winners.

May 7, 2012 | Posted in: Videos | Comments Closed

Spotlight G20: The Food Security Agenda – Making positive change or passing the buck?

Jennifer Clapp

When it comes to food security and agriculture, the G20 seems to be all too willing to take the credit while passing the buck. It wants to set the agenda on world food security. But it has been reluctant to require the G20 governments themselves to coordinate regulatory changes to address high and rising food prices or put the kind of money needed into agricultural investment in the world’s poorest countries. Rather, it seems to be passing on responsibility for establishing rules and governance mechanisms to address food security onto others, while at the same time blocking others from discussing measures that might request changes to the G20’s policies.

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Defending UNCTAD's Role in Agriculture and Food Security

Sophia Murphy, guest blogger

UNCTAD—the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development—is holding its 13th quadrennial conference in Doha, Qatar this week (April 21–26). As South Centre Director, Martin Khor, underscored in his Triple Crisis blog last Friday, the meeting has generated considerably controversy, the first time UNCTAD has created such waves in more than a decade. Created in the 1960s as a forum for developing countries to explore global and regional macro-economic issues independently of the Western country-dominated Bretton Woods institutions, UNCTAD has never had an easy ride from the U.S., UK and other major powers. But for the first 20 or so years of its existence, UNCTAD received the resources and respect it needed to make a big contribution to supporting initiatives that supported development, from preferential trading schemes, to commodity agreements, to what were called “rules to control restrictive business practices” (today more commonly referred to as competition policy).

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Defending UNCTAD’s Role in Agriculture and Food Security

Sophia Murphy, guest blogger

UNCTAD—the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development—is holding its 13th quadrennial conference in Doha, Qatar this week (April 21–26). As South Centre Director, Martin Khor, underscored in his Triple Crisis blog last Friday, the meeting has generated considerably controversy, the first time UNCTAD has created such waves in more than a decade. Created in the 1960s as a forum for developing countries to explore global and regional macro-economic issues independently of the Western country-dominated Bretton Woods institutions, UNCTAD has never had an easy ride from the U.S., UK and other major powers. But for the first 20 or so years of its existence, UNCTAD received the resources and respect it needed to make a big contribution to supporting initiatives that supported development, from preferential trading schemes, to commodity agreements, to what were called “rules to control restrictive business practices” (today more commonly referred to as competition policy).

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Responding to the Food Crisis: A network to train young scholars in macro and institutional development

C. Peter Timmer, guest blogger

We are at a critical juncture with respect to the worldwide need for scholars who understand the broad forces shaping economic development and its impact on poverty reduction. These forces are driven from the macro economy, with critical sectoral and political dimensions that are virtually impossible to navigate without broad-based and policy-oriented training.

Since the development failures of the 1970s, and especially since the failures of post-Soviet privatizations to produce the predicted rapid growth in the Eastern bloc, mainstream economists have understandably been increasingly reluctant to claim that they have answers to big problems.  By contrast, when economic development first came of age as an academic topic in the 1960s, economists were trained to conduct research on the big problems of world poverty. Crucially, this research was valued by the profession itself, in the form of academic appointments and international recognition.

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