International Trade: Answer to Food Crisis?

The World Trade Organization believes the answer to the global food crisis is international trade, as stated on Sunday. WTO director General Pascal Lamy believes that “global integration representation by trade enabled food to be transported from where it could be produced efficiently to where there was demand.” (Jonathan Lynn, Reuters)

Due to geography, certain countries, like Egypt, could never be self-sufficient in the food marker, according to the International Food and Agriculture Trade Policy Council conference in Salzburg, Austria. “International trade was not the source of last year’s food crisis,” Lamy claims. “If anything, international trade has reduced the price of food over the years through greater competition, and enhanced consumer purchasing power.”

Many people suspected trade as the reason for rising food costs in 2007 and 2008. Prices have slowly come down since then but many experts argue that agricultural trade made the problem worse and wasn’t interested in the needs of poor farmers or consumers in third world countries.

Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food, has condemned an ‘excessive’ reliance on trade in the pursuit of food security, while some farmers’ groups had also called for greater self-sufficiency.” (Reuters) Agriculture currently accounts for less than 10 percent of world trade, and only 25 percent of world farm output is traded globally, compared with 50 percent industrial goods, compared with 50 percent of industrial goods, according to Lamy.

“To suggest that less trade, and greater self-sufficiency, are the solutions to food security, would be to argue that trade was itself to blame for the crisis,” he told the press.

Farm trade is becoming more competitive amongst developing countries, with agricultural exports from developing to developed countries rising 11 percent a year between 2000 and 2007, “faster than the 9 percent growth in trade in the other direction.”