Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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right or wrong?
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Behind the food riots: A debate on how best to farm
By Associated Press
Sunday, May 11, 2008
http://www.azdailysun.com/articles/2008/05/11/news/world/20080511_world_76.txt


MEXICO CITY (AP) -- Sitting in a Mexico City office, dressed in a pressed 
white shirt, Gerardo Sanchez seems a world away from his herds of goats and 
fields of beans.

But he's no poster boy for the new world agricultural order, in which 
peasants are supposed to leave their unproductive farms and strive for 
middle-class prosperity while food production is left to agribusiness in the 
countries that farm most cheaply and efficiently. Sanchez works for the 
National Campesino Federation, a lobbying group for small farmers that has 
been active lately in protests against the rising price of food, notably a 
doubling of the price of tortillas. Here, NAFTA and globalization are dirty 
words.

Around the world, governments are trying every play in their books to stave 
off food riots -- sending troops to hand out food in slums, ordering sweeping 
wage increases, banning grain exports and suspending futures trading. The 
United States is promising millions in emergency food aid.

But many experts call these Band-Aid solutions, saying what's needed is a 
radical rethink of how the world gets its food.

However, they're deeply divided about which way to go.

Some would in effect reverse the fundamentals by investing massively in small 
farmers, instead of letting them sink in a free-trade world. That would be 
very different from what the U.S. has long been evangelizing -- take 
uncompetitive food producers off the land and put them in new jobs with 
paychecks that would buy them cheap food, efficiently farmed.

Others argue that the problem is not that trade is too free, but that it 
should be freer. U.S. and European farm subsidies are bad enough, they say, 
and things will only worsen if the present crisis triggers more restrictions.

Those at the sharp end of rising prices feel like victims of a 
bait-and-switch maneuver -- when they quit the land, they were promised food 
would get cheaper, and now it's costlier.

"Not only are farmers not growing food, but we are going hungry because we 
can't afford the foreign food that drove us off our farms," said Mario 
Aguila, 48, who left his farm in Oaxaca state because he could no longer 
support his family.

Aguila now sweeps floors in a Mexico City mall and marched in last year's 
protests against tortilla price rises.

The pain inflicted on Mexican farmers by NAFTA, the North American Free Trade 
Agreement, was supposed to be offset by cheap grains for consumers, said Jeff 
Faux of the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute. "But when the U.S. 
Congress realized the potential of ethanol, corn was diverted there and 
Mexico was left high and dry," Faux said. "The corn turned out to be not that 
cheap."

The campesino federation estimates 200,000 Mexicans a year have fled the 
countryside for the city or the United States since NAFTA was launched in 
1994.

World Bank chief Robert Zoellick, a former U.S. trade representative, 
defended trade pacts and said they serve to lower world food prices, not 
cause them to increase.

"NAFTA is one of the reasons prices are not higher," Zoellick said Wednesday 
at a Mexico City news conference.

There are those who say it's not free trade that's to blame but the sudden 
seismic shift in the global economy -- ballooning oil prices, a biofuel boom 
that is gobbling up farmland, and a voracious Chinese market for food. Get 
used to it, they say -- the era of cheap food is over.

But Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University, recalls 
that the last big food price increase, in the 1970s, was followed by 
agricultural advances known as the "green revolution" that hugely increased 
the supply and brought down costs, and "If we don't mess this up we can 
expect the same today."

However, he worries that U.S. and European Union farm subsidies and tariffs, 
plus grain export bans and taxes triggered by the latest crisis, will make 
things worse.

Meanwhile, however, rice alone has more than tripled in price since January. 
Corn, wheat and other staples also have soared beyond the ability of millions 
to pay for a healthy diet.

Some blame price inflation on speculative trading of futures -- contracts to 
buy or sell grains, metals, oil and other commodities at a set price on a 
future date.

India on Thursday suspended futures trading in four major commodities, 
including soybean oil, chick peas and potatoes, in a bid to tame rising 
inflation driven largely by the soaring cost of food.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates 820 million people go 
hungry in the developing world, and Zoellick says the crisis could force as 
many as 100 million people deeper into poverty.

Despite calls for investment in farming, many governments seem stuck in 
crisis mode.

Deadly riots have broken out from Bangladesh to Egypt to Burkina Faso. In 
Haiti, they cost the prime minister his job. At least 34 countries have seen 
protests in recent months, according to the U.N.'s World Food Program.

"Rice fever" has led nations in Asia to restrict exports and subsidize 
locally grown rice. Some leaders in Latin America are subsidizing food or 
placing punitive export taxes on food commodities to control inflation.

So how does the world get out of this mess?

U.N. agencies recommend truly leveling the playing field by cutting subsidies 
to huge agricultural companies, ending export bans, lowering tariffs and 
increasing investment in small-scale agriculture, one farm at a time.

"This could be a window of opportunity for governments to relaunch the 
small-farming sector and traditional farming," said Fernando Soto, the FAO's 
policy chief for Latin America and the Caribbean.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon says a "green revolution" in Africa, 
fueled by new techniques and agricultural investment, could double African 
food production in just a few years for "a relatively modest" $8 billion to 
$10 billion a year.

The U.S. is already the world's largest provider of food aid -- $2.1 billion 
last year -- and Bush has asked Congress to approve an extra $770 million in 
response to the crisis.

But the world can't donate itself out of this crisis, said Paul Polak, 
founder of International Development Enterprises, an aid organization that 
says it has helped 17 million small farmers escape poverty by selling them 
low-cost technology such as water-saving drip irrigation systems and 
foot-powered water pumps.

Polak says of the world's 525 million farms, 450 million are less than five 
acres, with the poorest working a single acre or less. Modern methods -- 
especially in irrigation and crop rotation -- won't work well there, he said.

"We need a revolution in small-plot agriculture to allow farmers to grow the 
food they need to eat and to grow high-value crops they can sell on the 
market to lift themselves out of poverty," Polak said.

Cowen says the idea is good, but points to Brazil, which has made great 
strides in strengthening its food security by allowing its farms to get 
larger and more corporate.

"Small farms," he says, "are a sign that your agriculture is very 
inefficient."

Associated Press writers contributing to this report included Katherine 
Corcoran in Mexico City; Parveen Ahmed in Dhaka, Bangladesh; Leslie Josephs 
in Lima, Peru; Ben Fox in San Juan, Puerto Rico; Paul Alexander in Manila, 
Philippines; Marjorie Olster in Cairo, Egypt, and Matthew Rosenberg in New 
Dehli, India.