Hunger in a world of plenty:
An ethical challenge in a globalising world

Maura Leen

Issue 361, vol.91, Spring 2002

It must be remembered that 50% of people in developing countries live off the land, while the proportion in developing countries is 8%. So if, for instance, a man in Tanzania is struck down by AIDS, his wife will have 40% less time for work on the land (and, of course, money that should have gone on agricultural inputs will soon go on health and funeral expenses).

We hear much about a global alliance against terrorism - but little about a global alliance against hunger. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson has called for ethical globalisation - noting that the imbalance between power and powerlessness will be at the heart of the challenge. The total UN budget for tackling hunger, for instance, amounts to only 5% of the sum spent by one developed country on slimming tablets.

Greater equity would even be in the developed countries’ own interest. If, for instance, in sub-Sahara Africa malnutrition were eliminated, Gross Domestic Product there could double or even quadruple.

The developed countries should make a concerted effort to reach the UN target-figure for overseas aid: 0.7% of Gross National Product - and should ear-mark a higher proportion of this for agricultural development. As regards debt cancellation for developing countries, debt sustainability should be calculated on development needs rather than on narrow and flawed debt-to-export ratios.

A developed-country Government like Ireland’s should, in consultation with civil society, formulate policy principles on food security - and be ready to refer to these at meetings of the European Commission and of the World Trade Organisation. (More important still, help should be afforded developing countries to do this; many lack the resources and negotiating capacities for presenting their case - such as a permanent mission at WT0 headquarters in Geneva). Then trade-security policy can focus on the two main issues - patenting of seeds, and subsidies.

Nowhere in the world are power imbalances more stark than in relation to food. Four trans-national corporations account for 90% of the world’s exports of corn, wheat, coffee, tea, pineapples; and five agro-chemical corporations control almost the whole global market for genetically-modified seeds (for crops like wheat, rice and maize - which alone feed over half the world’s population). The UN sub-committee for the protection and promotion of Human Rights has passed resolutions in 2000 and again in 2001 noting that patents on genetic resources undermine basic rights such as that to food (on which so many other rights are contingent). Patenting is allowed under the WTO’s Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement - but no value is put on any genetic discoveries by indigenous peoples (which, according to the Oxfam estimate, would have brought in over $5 billion in royalties). Furthermore, mono-cropping of those seeds amenable to patenting has the effect of shrinking a region’s biodiversity - and undermining agriculture’s ultimate research-base.

The figure for subsidies disbursed to agriculture in developed countries, is more than double the total figure for developing countries’ exports. Such subsidies (sanctioned by the WTO Agreement on Agriculture) lower export prices, and so undercut the competitiveness of exports from developing countries. The WTO Doha Meeting resolved to aim at phasing out subsidies. In the meantime, however, a group of developing countries has judged it more realistic to lobby for the introduction of a “development box” into the Agreement on Agriculture. This would allow for the retention of tariffs and supports on strictly delimited conditions, i.e., applying only to (a) particular developing countries (b) subsistence-farmers (rather than local agri-business) (c) staple foodstuff-crops.

Maura Leen is a Political Analyst at Trocaire (the Catholic Agency for World Development), Dublin.