The theme for each World Food Day teleconference has been, from one perspective or another, food security. And, each teleconference is a study and discussion of food security in the context of current events. The teleconferences in 1984 and 1985 occurred when the most recent African famine was at its height. The focus then was on the causes of famines and how the world, particularly the U.S., Should respond. By 1986 the worst of the famine had subsided, and the teleconference began to examine hunger as a chronic condition, as a frantic daily struggle for almost one billion people to secure the food they need to sustain life.
The first three teleconferences demonstrated clearly that the problem is not the lack of food. The world is awash in food commodities. Science and technology have given us an agricultural system in which grain yields per acre can continue to increase far into the future, and food output, even allowing for upgrading the diet from grains to meat, should more than keep up with population growth. But food surplus doesn't seem to slow the rise in hungry people.
There appears to be a widespread feeling that existing systems and institutions aren't working. There is little interest in massive, globally organized food aid, even though the food required to end hunger everywhere is available. Development assistance to mega-projects in poor countries is also under attack as repayment of debts becomes impossible and dangers to the environment become more apparent. There is also the feeling that — despite global lip-service to the contrary — development planning is deaf to the voice and blind to the real needs of the poor and hungry.
The poor of the world lack the resources to meet their own needs and the political strength to force change. Two examples of how they are disadvantaged — and how institutional changes can change perspectives — come from South Asia and Latin America.
A prime example of a lack of access to resources is found in the sad old joke that rich people who don't need money are "creditworthy" and poor people who need money desperately can't get a loan. In other words, credit doesn't reach the people who need it the most. In Bangladesh the Grameen Bank, launched by Prof. Muhammad Yunus, a 1986 teleconference panelist, has demonstrated convincingly that a well-managed credit system can be used by the very poorest man or woman to create his or her own job and to earn the income needed to obtain adequate food. The Grameen, which is largely owned by the depositors who started first as borrowers, makes very small loans — almost ridiculously small by American standards. The borrowers own and run their own credit institution based on the concept that credit is an entitlement.
(Not surprisingly, the majority of the Grameen's loans go to women, who easily qualify as the least advantaged even among the poor. In almost every national culture, it should be noted; questions of food security and justice inevitably include a special relevance for women as farm family workers, as hourly wage laborers, as mothers of children. One of this year's teleconference panelists, Ms. Torild Skard of Norway, is an expert and spokesperson for women-in-development issues.)
Halfway around the world, in Lima, Peru, studies of the workings of the "informal sector" of poverty-based self-help initiative show that the poor are often better at organizing their affairs than the governments trying to help them. In 1980, Peruvian Hernando de Soto established the Institute for Liberty and Democracy to study the "informal economy" that is springing up in the urban slums of his country to bypass the bureaucratic barriers to economic growth.
A Peruvian novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa, writes in the New York Times magazine in 1986;
"After their study of Peru's black market, Hernando de Soto and his institute conclude that Peru — as well as other Latin American countries and probably the majority of third-world nations — never had a market economy. The economic freedom guaranteed by our constitution is as much a fiction as political freedom. It is only now, with the proliferation of black markets, that Peru is beginning to get a market economy: a savage market economy, but a market economy nonetheless.
"In Lima, 439,000 people are dependent on the commercial black market. The black market has invested more than $1 billion in vehicles and vehicle maintenance. Half the population of Lima lives in houses built by the informal sector. Between 1960 and 1984, the state constructed low-income housing at a cost of $173.6 million. During the same period, black-market entrepreneurs managed to construct housing valued at $8.3 billion, 48 times what the state spent.
"In an effort to create a legal framework that will protect and stimulate what is presently the informal sector, De Soto's institute has organized a private ombudsman system. Under this system, any alternative to existing legislation is proposed to the Government and only after comments from the general public have been received and public hearings held."
From two different continents come two major initiatives for institutional reforms that could help resolve the current dilemma: credit systems within reach of the poor, and an infusion of democracy in the implementation of government through more public participation.
Perceptions will differ from region to region, and the worldview from Peru's informal sector will not be the same as one from Africa or the heartland of America, and none of the three may meet the needs of a single world overview. As the teleconference will show, interdependence does not mean common problems or identical solutions. Certainly there is a marked contrast between too little food and declining per capita production in Africa and too much production and the farm crisis it has caused in the U.S. grain belt.
Apart from the crisis of the 1983-85 famine, sub-Saharan agriculture over decades is generally agreed to have suffered from a lack of priority in government planning, antiquated and static technology, and degradation of the environment and unfavorable international terms of trade for primary crops. However, many experts would add to these difficulties other problems that bear a relation to those of Bangladesh and Peru — either government interference or indifference.
However, there is no doubt that changes are in the making, both in national agricultural policies and international lending priorities. The problem of international commodity prices and trade barriers mitigating against African exports is in itself an access and justice issue, because the constraints on African trade weaken the impact of the reforms which are now being made to strengthen producer incentives and also the ability of governments to meet their most critical import needs.
Again half-way around the world, the farmers and farm states of the American grain belt share African concern about protectionism, commodity ^ prices and loss of markets. FAO estimates that for a basket of the world s main farm commodities in international trade, prices are lowest in real terms in more than a half century (i.e., the 1930s era of world depression). The World Bank estimates that agricultural protectionism, practiced .by virtually all countries to a greater or lesser extent, is costing the most efficient producers up to $64 billion a year.
Problems in rich country and poor and new approaches to solutions are also reflected in the report this year of the World Commission on Environment and Development. Entitled Our Common Future, it is more often called the Brundtland report after the name of its chairperson, Norway Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland.
The Brundtland report proposes that a concept of sustainable development be adopted to guide planning and economic development and that steps be taken to evolve new, more equitable economic structures to narrow the gap between developed and developing countries. Sustainable development is defined as meeting "the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."
Sustainable development is based on two concepts that should guide the sustainable management of the earth's resources, the report said, including:
The basic needs of humanity —.food, clothing, shelter and jobs —must- be met. This involves, first-of all, paying attention to the largely unmet needs of the world's poor, which should be given overriding priority.
The limits to development are not absolute but are imposed by present states of technology and social organization and by their impacts upon environmental resources-and upon the biosphere's ability to absorb the effect of human activities.
The 1987 World Food Day Teleconference will not find the magic solution to all these issues, but it will contribute to the process of education and discovery — and perhaps represent one small step toward a world secure in its ability to provide each individual with enough food to sustain good health..."'