Posted by Jorge Chavez-Tafur
Even though I do not always agree with their ideas, once again I congratulated myself this week for being subscribed to The Economist. Looking at "How to feed the world", it was a pleasure to see that, instead of reporting on the recent FAO meeting and its promises and discourses, they chose to show and describe the "unprecedented pack of policies" being implemented in practically all developing countries. The Philippines have set up a bank to improve the quality of seeds, Lesotho and Uganda have "seed fairs", Brazil has a successful cash-transfer scheme, Burkina Faso and Gambia are implementing grain reserves. This is certainly positive, and thus interesting to read. (click here)

Their editorial starts by reminding us of a speech given by Henry Kissinger in 1974, during the first world food conference in Rome, when he said that no child would go to bed hungry within ten years. The fact that so many years after Kissinger's nice words, and in spite of the much-praised Green Revolution, still more than one billion people go to bed hungry, shows that there is something wrong with the way we are trying to feed the world. Not surprisingly, the editorial is headed "How to feed the world: Business as usual will not do it".
This, however, does not seem to follow their arguments, nor those of the people they quote. One of them suggests setting up a new international agency, on top of FAO, IFAD, the WFP or the CGIAR. How different would this be to "business as usual"? In much more detail, they go against the "growing distrust of markets and trade". I am sure that many people would agree with me if I say that asking countries not to strive for self-sufficiency, and instead expect world trade (with European subsidies and American donations) to solve food deficiencies, could precisely be defined as "business as usual". And a few pages on in the same issue, they have a detailed briefing on Monsanto. We may agree or disagree with Monsanto - but hoping that one particular technique will do the job, as this briefing implies, is exactly what has been tried during the past 40 years. "Business as usual will not do it"??
Business as usual has not been able to feed the world. If "farming is the single most important economic activity in most poor places", as the authors recognise, they could have built their argument on the basis of what millions of farmers have been doing, can do, and are doing right now.