Countries facing an impending food crisis need a major shift in perspective, whereby food is first considered the fundamental right of all the citizens and thereafter as a profitable commodity
Given current population trends, it is vital that our part of the world boosts its agricultural yields despite the increasingly adverse impacts of climate on crop production and on water availability.
Massive hunger poses a threat to the stability of governments, societies and borders. There have been food riots in over 60 countries since 2007. Moreover, hunger is identified as the gravest single threat to public health in the world by the World Health Organisation. Widespread malnourishment among the rural and urban poor across South Asia, including Pakistan, glaringly illustrates the reality of this threat.
The need for a greater investment in agriculture within countries like our own can hardly be doubted. Even the controversial Kerry-Lugar Bill is said to have allocated a substantial amount of funds to enhancing agricultural productivity in Pakistan, which resonates with recently unveiled broader US emphasis to address world hunger.
However, even if increased funds become available for agriculture in general, this does not automatically imply that greater food security will be achieved. Overcoming vested interests of politically powerful feudal elements is a major hurdle that can prevent realisation of this goal.
It is also high time that policy makers realise that agricultural policies cannot be determined with the help of economists alone. The spike in farmer suicides in India provides ample testimony for this assertion. Nobel laureate Amartya Sen argued in his book Development as Freedom that authoritarian states are more prone to famines than representative forms of governments. Yet, even in India, which is the largest democracy in the world, governmental action during times of crisis to ensure food security for all citizens is yet not adequate.
Evidently, democratically elected governments also need to commit themselves more explicitly to long- and short-term food security policies. Resulting policy actions would thus include not only allocating adequate funds to increase agricultural yield through scientific research and technological intervention, but also ensuring the availability of safe and healthy seeds to all farmers, and finding a right balance between production of cash and food crops. Law-enforcement agencies and legislative mechanisms must also be deployed, whenever required, to ensure that profiteers and food cartels do not monopolise the food supply.
In the case of Pakistan however, the overt commodification of food this is now leading the government to begin leasing millions of acres of cultivable land to Gulf-based multinationals for corporate farming. This is despite the fact that the Food and Agriculture Organisation has warned against the controversial rise in land deals of millions of acres by rich governments and corporations in developing and underdeveloped countries in an effort to secure their own long-term food supplies could create a form of neo-colonialism, with poor states producing food for the rich at the expense of their own hungry people.
It is quite probable that financial clout and lack of local guidelines for land acquisition will enable big corporations to take over prime land. With huge funds at their disposal, corporations will also find it easier to monopolise the water supply and other resources, thus depriving neighbouring farms of their rightful share.
Although the exact contours of the renewed US aid commitment to Pakistan in the agriculture sector have not been made explicit, there is talk of the need for prompting use of virus-free hybrid cotton varieties and helping secure patents for Pakistani intellectual properties, which are both measures in tune with agricultural reforms that World Trade Organisation endorses for developing countries.
Other measures for helping improve the livelihoods and boost food security in rural areas of Pakistan include boosting dairy development, yet this will have to be done carefully or else the hurried distribution of cattle will be subjected to typical elite capture, or poor people will be provided cattle which they are unable to adequately look after to ensure greater milk production.
Similarly, the idea of helping create a strategic food reserve for Pakistan needs to be rethought, especially how this reserve will interact with the Food Bank created at the SAARC level, so that the two entities do not overlap in function, and the latter can learn from the problems facing activation of the regional initiative.
While focusing on the agricultural sector, donors like USAID must look at other ongoing initiatives in the region, including its own efforts to join hands with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to support the Cereals Systems Initiative for South Asia. This initiative aims to help more than six million small farmers in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal achieve significant cereal yield increases over the next ten years by developing and disseminating high-yield, stress tolerant cereal varieties, and encouraging better information technology and improved resource management practices.
These interventions hope to help poor farmers grow more food in the face of climate change impacts while using less energy, water and fertiliser. Such efforts can be scaled up in view of the emerging best practices from across the region. The introduction of the Kerry-Lugar Bill in Pakistan will provide USAID the additional funds to begin the required scaling up in Pakistan, which can perhaps be replicated in other South Asian countries later on.
Some other specific options that have already been identified, tested and documented for sustainable agriculture, such as environment-friendly land and forest management practices, the innovations of changing varieties in view of ecological suitability, or altering the timing or location of cropping activities, also need to be widely adopted across the region. It would also be useful if some particular donor steps forward to identify integrated adaptation and mitigation options for a range of common agro-ecosystems across the region and then encourages the implementation of these options on ground.
While NGOs do focus on micro-interventions such as rainwater harvesting or encouraging poor people to grow fruits or vegetables using micro-gardening principles, bigger donors must also begin to think more seriously about supporting these initiatives.
Countries facing an impending food crisis need a major shift in perspective, whereby food is first considered the fundamental right of all the citizens and thereafter as a profitable commodity. Unless this happens, hoarding, shortages and exorbitant prices of basic commodities like wheat will continue to cause suffering in the lives of common citizens.
The writer is a researcher. He can be contacted at ali@policy.hu
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