India – One Billion Hungry: Can We Feed the World?

Chapter four of One Billion Hungry describes the Uruguay and, later, Doha rounds of international trade negotiations. At the time of publishing little headway had been made in reducing tariffs, trade barriers and protectionist measures in the agricultural sector (tariffs for agricultural products are an average 62% compared to 4% for industrial goods) and since the Doha round began in 2001, there has been a stubborn stalemate between developed and developing countries. Reducing the number of proposals to agree in 2011, including measures on intellectual property and trade in services, (and spurring the moniker “Doha Lite”), the World Trade Organisation were seeking agreement between the 159 member countries at a recent meeting in Bali, the success of which looked likely to determine the continuance of Doha altogether, and the value of the WTO itself as this would be the first ever deal agreed under the WTO since its inception 1995.

On the 3^rd to the 7^th December ministers of trade met in Bali and despite several disagreements and standoffs, which threatened to derail the process, an agreement was met. So what was agreed exactly?

Central to the agreement is “trade facilitation”, which commits members to implement binding rules that reduce the amount of customs paperwork needed and set maximum time limits for goods crossing borders, a proposal that is estimated to add over $1 trillion to the global economy. For regions where goods crossing borders are subject to lengthy delays and difficulties, resulting in high transaction costs, an agreement such as this could lower the cost of imports. Reducing these transaction costs associated with trade by just 1% could boost the global economy by $40 billion, according to a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. And the bulk of this increase in economic wealth is expected to benefit developing countries such as Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and the Central African Republic, which, according to the World Bank’s Doing Business Index, have the worst scores for the ease with which goods can be traded across their borders.

A further agreement was around increases in farm subsidies, which are currently limited under the WTO Agreement on Agriculture. India insisted it should be allowed to subsidise grain as part of its effort to tackle food insecurity, paying farmers higher than market prices for grains for its government domestic stores. As an interim measure, WTO members agreed not to bring disputes against countries breaching the farm subsidies limits as part of food security measures while a longer term solution is found but there remains concern that this gives India the power to distort global trade and undercut producers in other countries. Despite the negative impacts of subsidies, an alternative is yet to be found, and without this compromise India would have backed out of the agreement altogether, although they did agree not to ”distort trade or adversely affect the food security of other [WTO] members”. Development agencies are concerned that the agreement only last four years and only relates to currently held public food stock holding programmes. [Read more…]

Filed Under: 4 - The Political Economy of Food Security Tagged With: Bali, Doha Round, EU-US, Farm subsidies, India, multilateralism, OECD, Trade facilitation, WTO

Where are we on climate change?

May 10, 2013 by canwefeedtheworld Leave a Comment

Professor Sir Brian Hoskins, Director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and advisor to the UK government through the Committee on Climate Change, recently gave a talk at Imperial College London on the latest research and actions around climate change.

Global CO₂ levels are currently at 397ppm (parts per million), a level not seen for 4.5 million years. We have increased CO₂ levels in the atmosphere by 40% since the Industrial Revolution. While there has been a clear and significant increase in global temperatures since 1850, we have seen a hiatus on temperature rises in the last decade. While sceptics may use this as evidence to support their claims, a decade of cooler temperatures is not outside the range of predictions from climate models.

Global sea levels are rising 3mm per year. While the melting of the Western Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets is contributing around 1mm of this increase, it is unknown how likely this is to accelerate if we reach a threshold point of destabilisation. In the Arctic, recent pictures of the ice cap in mid-September (when it is at its minimum size) show it is half the average size it was in the last century. By 2050-2060 we would expect the arctic ice cap to have vanished come September.

We have seen some significant heat extremes in the past decade: the 2003 European heatwave, 2010 Russian heatwave and more recently the 2012 US drought. Work by NASA scientists Dr James Hansen and colleagues indicates a shift to more frequent and severe bouts of high temperatures. But it is not just heat extremes, as the climate changes we are also seeing cold extremes in certain locations despite remarkable warmth elsewhere. This indicates our ability to predict regional trends is much more limited than our ability to predict global averages and while we may, in the past have viewed climate change as a warming of the planet, now we are trying to understand it as a disruption of our climate systems, one that will have severe and varied results. [Read more…]