“Poor countries must go back to investing in agriculture”

Which are the causes of this dramatic increase in the price of staple products in developing countries?
“There is more than one reason and all of them impact the market price of staple products. For example, the reduction of stocks in countries which traditionally keep a lot of stock, unfavourable climatic conditions in Australia and Canada which have diminished world production, the increasing demand for biofuels such as corn-based ethanol, the sharp rise in oil prices (which has always influenced agricultural prices) and the increasing demand for foodstuff in the emerging countries, China and India above all”.

And which are or will be the consequences of the current food crisis in countries that are struggling against poverty?
“Those who get the worst from it are the people who live in the cities, the so-called ‘urban consumers’, and the agricultural workers of the rural areas, the so-called ‘farmers without a land’; the social divide could become wider, to the benefit of a few large producers. Currently the countries which suffer most due to the crisis are 21 in Africa (especially Somalia, Swaziland and Zimbabwe), 10 in Asia (North Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq and Bangladesh), 5 in Latin America (Haiti, Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua) and one in Europe: Moldova. But we shouldn’t mix up the real crisis with the fears of a predicted crisis, otherwise we spread panic and cause panic-buying. Some governments adopt controversial solutions like creating food stocks or bans on exports. In the medium term this may lead to a contraction of the international market and contribute to making prices grow further”.

Which measures are the international organizations and local governments adopting to respond to the food crisis?
“The FAO has asked both donors and local governments to try to strengthen the social solidarity network to support the populations. But in the medium term the developing countries should go back to investing in agriculture trying to make the market of productive factors work better (labour, technical equipment, irrigation systems). In the past, when agricultural product prices were decreasing, many poor countries found it hard to compete with the agricultural productivity of developed countries like the USA, the EU or Australia; this has ended up discouraging investments in agriculture and contributed to the abandonment of certain traditional crops, like for example cereals, thus increasing dependence from imported food products even more”.

Do the Economic Partnership Agreements between the European Union on the one hand and African, Caribbean and Pacific countries on the other play an important role?
“The EPAs do not impact the food crisis directly, nor do they seem to influence the situation of the states that are currently conducting the negotiations. What is important is to diversify the agriculture of these countries, which were too much specialized in those few products that benefited from preferential access to the European market, like sugar and bananas, until recently”.