Robert L. Paarlberg
Betty Freyhof Johnson Class of 1944 Professor of Political Science, Wellesley College; Associate, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University Bio
Rome has always been the wrong place to hold “Food Summits.” The world’s most urgent food problems are not visible in the Eternal City, where you cannot get a bad meal. These problems also cannot be corrected through un-funded, consensus-based resolutions, which are the leading product of United Nations conferences. At the current World Summit on Food Security, the delegates negotiated a compromise and approved a watered-down “final declaration” in the opening hours of the first day, hoping to send a reassuring message of global harmony.
The world’s must urgent food problems will not be helped by this ineffectual consensus reached at yet another UN meeting. What is required instead are specific actions by national governments, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and Washington. The sooner the African and American delegates at the food summit return home and confront their own lack of success in this policy area, the better.
Hunger in Africa is closely linked to low productivity in farming. More than 60 percent of all Africans are smallholder farmers, working in the countryside growing crops and herding animals. Because so little has been done to improve their farming systems, they earn only about $1 a day and are vulnerable to hunger. Most farmers in Africa are women, and they lack nearly all the resources necessary to be productive. Two-thirds do not have access to modern seeds of any kind. They use only 1/10th as much fertilizer as farmers in developed countries, so their cereal crop yields are only about 1/10th as bountiful. Only four percent of African farms use irrigation, so when the rains fail, the farmer’s crops also fail, forcing them to sell-off animals and household possessions to survive until the next season. Almost none of these farmers have access to electricity or powered machinery, so they work the fields with hand hoes or wooden plows. Few have access to veterinary medicine for their animals. Most live in physical isolation from markets, with roughly 70 percent of African farmers living more than a half-hour walk from the nearest all-weather road.
Because of such deficits, agricultural production in Africa has lagged behind population growth for most of the past three decades. Per capita production of maize, Africa’s most important food staple, has actually declined fourteen percent since 1980. The number of people living in absolute poverty (less than $1 a day) has now doubled, up to 300 million, and under a business-as-usual scenario this number will increase by another 30 percent by 2020.
The unimproved conditions facing smallholder farmers reflect decades of neglect by Africa’s own government leaders. Because these leaders face no political threat from impoverished farmers living in the remote countryside, they typically spend only about five percent of their budgets on any kind of agricultural improvement. They know this is unwise, and at an African Union summit meeting among heads of government in Mozambique in 2003, they pledged to increase the agricultural share of spending up to 10 percent, but four years later only seven (out of 47) governments in the region had met the modest 10 percent target.
Political leaders in United States have also neglected Africa’s farm productivity problems. America’s official development assistance to agriculture in Africa, in real 2008 dollars, declined from a level of $400 million annually in the 1980s to just $60 million by 2006, a drop of approximately 85 percent. U.S. government support for agricultural research in Africa declined by 77 percent over the same time period. This American withdrawal of support for farming in Africa inspired parallel cuts in aid from Europe and Japan. It took an interlude of high international food prices in 2007-08 to remind donors that food problems in Africa would only worsen if the status quo continued.
The Obama Administration, with key allies in Congress, is now trying to reverse this history of neglect from the donor community, and also amongst government leaders in Africa. Several months after taking office, President Obama said he would ask Congress to double U.S. agricultural development assistance up to more than $1 billion by 2010, and at a summit meeting of the G8 countries in L’Aquila, Italy in July, he convinced those present to make a collective pledge of $20 billion over three years to promote food security and agricultural development in poor countries. Concurrently, a bipartisan bill sponsored by Senators Richard Lugar and Robert Casey, the Global Food Security Act of 2009, began making its way through Congress. This effort to revive American support for agricultural development in developing countries has been unanimously approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and has received strong backing from America’s land grant colleges, as well as a number of leading humanitarian organizations including CARE, Oxfam, Bread for the World, and ONE.
Once the food summit ends, the delegates from both Africa and the United States should say “arividerchi” to Roma for a good long while. They have more important policy work waiting for them on their office desks back home.
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