COMMENTARY: "Profit for Few or Food for All"

Shameful and scandalous as it was the U.S. position at the recent World Food Summit in Rome went largely unreported and considerably unnoticed by its own citizenry.

Despite the overwhelming expression from the governmental delegates representing most all nations of the world; despite the impassioned plea of the 1200 Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) from 80 countries attending the conference that the issue of hunger in the context of human rights be addressed in the framework of the economic, social and cultural rights guaranteed under the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Covenant of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, this consensus position was in the end missing from the Summit's final official document.

One nation and one nation alone --- the United States of America --- refused to accept the concept of food security as a human right. Melinda Kimball, from the U.S. State Department, even ventured the argument that the recently enacted Welfare Reform Law, which President Clinton supported and signed into law, would not support the idea of food security as a human right.

In addition to opposing the concept on grounds that it would subject the U.S. to human rights violation scrutiny Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman lent his voice to the American opposition.

"The United States believes that the attainment of any `right to adequate food' or `fundamental right to be free from hunger' is a goal or aspiration to be realized progressively that does not give rise to any international obligation nor diminish the responsibilities of national governments toward their citizens." Anyone reading Brewster Kneen's fine book Invisible Giant: Cargill and Its Transnational Strategies will soon learn the genesis of such policy thinking.

All of this, however, has received scant attention in our nation's press.

Thus, the rest of the world has been left with the challenge of how to advance an agenda of directing global energies aimed at implementing the right to food, while defying U.S. opposition which seeks to release so-called market forces which it argues will give rise to such large increases in agricultural output that human hunger will like magic disappear.

As Mark Ritchie, executive director of the International Agricultural and Trade Policy group in Minneapolis, Minn. notes: "There is a near-religious fervor to U.S. government pronouncements about the need to unleash the corporations and technology, while most of the NGO's and other governments believe that this can only make matters worse."

Even entreaties by the Vatican have fallen on deaf ears in the U.S. It was almost a year before the recent Rome conference that Pope John Paul II, speaking before the 50th anniversary celebration of the U.N.'s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) in that same city addressed the fundamental issue relative to the causes of hunger throughout the world.

"FAO's action in recent years has shown that the provision of emergency help for refugees is not enough; this kind of assistance does not bring a satisfactory solution as long as conditions of extreme poverty are allowed to continue and become even more acute, conditions which lead to increased deaths due to malnutrition and hunger. "The underlying causes of such situation have to be addressed. Sufficient food can be produced. Why then are so many people threatened by starvation? "

The Pope went on to answer in part his own question. "The social and economic situation of the contemporary world makes us all aware of the extent to which hunger and malnutrition of millions of people are the result of evil mechanisms within economic structures, or are the consequence of unjust criteria in the distribution of resources and production, policies formulated in order to safeguard special interest groups or different forms of protectionism."

Despite such counsel, however, the essence of the U.S. position can be found in what is being called a "new international food regime" which is designed on a global scale to dismember the national self-sufficiency food systems established after World War II and which the U.S. has been systematically undermining through its so-called Food for Peace program.

This new "international food regime has three basic features:

a) the removal of national agricultural subsidies and protective tariffs in accordance with such regional agreements as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Uruguay round of the General Agreement on Trades and Tariffs (GATT);

b) under the guise of free trade and the accelerated flow of unrestricted foreign capital transnational capital is assuming a greater role in the globalized industrialization of agriculture and food production; and

c) through so-called "structural adjustment or stabilization programs" Third World economies and former Soviet bloc nations are being forcibly restructured. Such policies have and will continue to contribute and underscore export-oriented policies in agriculture creating ever more serious degrees of domestic and international economic inequality.

Researchers at the Institute for Policy Studies have calculated that the combined wealth of the world's 447 billionaires is greater than the income of the poorest half of the world's people. Their calculations also show that at least two-thirds of the world's people are left out, hurt or marginalized by globalization.

As a matter of fact, according to a 1992 U.N. report and economist David Korten, the increase of free trade and foreign investment in the past several decades has significantly increased inequality in the distribution of wealth. In 1950 the wealthiest 20 percent of the world's population had an average income that was 30 times higher than that of the poorest 20 percent. By 1989 this ratio had increased to 60, leaving the richest fifth of the population with 82.7 percent of the world's income while the poorest fifth received only 1.4 percent. Between 1980 and 1990, for example, the number of people living in poverty in Latin America increased by 42 percent, while the population grew by only 22 percent.As an IATP Summit document points out, "the power over agricultural policy is shifting to the World Trade organization (WTO) . . . Farmer, consumer and environmental organizations, as well as national governments, have lost many of the policy tools they once could employ to defend food security."

While the governments of the world and the NGOs expressed solidarity on the principal of "the human right to food" there were obvious disagreements at the Rome Food Summit between the NGO's and the government representatives.

As NGO critics pointed out most governments still think of hunger as a production shortfall problem, and thus their final recommendations dealt mainly with how to increase production shortfall problems. The U.S. and the Clinton Administration, as one might expect from a government which favors the interests of corporate agribusiness over the interests of the common good, pushed for more biotechnology, chemical poisons, irrigation, factory farms, etc., greater "freedom" for transnational food corporations, and faster de-regulation of the food trade.

The NGO's, by way of contrast, correctly showed that it is those very same elements which are "the evil mechanisms" which are causing so many of the world's food and agricultural problems. In a brief four-minute "Profit for Few or Food for All" statement they were allowed to make at the conclusion of the Rome Summit the NGOs pointed out that "the globalization of the world economy, along with the lack of accountability of transnational corporations and spreading patterns of over-consumption, have increased world poverty" and that "today's global economy is characterized by unemployment, low wages, destruction of rural economies and bankruptcies of family farmers."

As an alternative they presented a multi-point program as a "new model for achieving food security."

1) a call for strengthening family farms;

2) the recognition of the central role women play in food production;

3) the importance of information and communications systems for small producers to be competitive;

4) the need for agro-ecological principles tied to national and international research, and

5) the opening up of international institutions like the WTO, the World Bank and the FAO "to the participation of peoples' organizations and NGOs."

As colleagues Roger Burbach and David Bacon writing in the January 6, 1997 issue of In These Times, one of the only U.S. publications to offer any serious evaluation of the World Food Summit, conclude in their essay "Let Them Eat Trade."

"The World Food Summit makes clear that the issue of food security is too important to be left to the politicians, national governments or the marketplace. International, rather than merely national, policies that involve NGOs and small and medium-sized producers are needed to help coordinate the production and flow of agricultural products.

"A globalist perspective --- as opposed to globalization tied to markets and private gain --- is required to eradicate hunger. Hunger, like slavery in the last century and violations of basic political rights today, must be recognized as a human rights abuse that cannot be tolerated."

In short, "Think Globally, Act Loco!"