posted by Mireille
Can Africa feed the world? That was the question at a debate on food and agriculture last Tuesday in De Rode Hoed in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Olivier de Schutter, UN special reporter on the Right to Food and emiritus professor Niels Roling from Wageningen University, responded with 'Yes they can'! Or was it 'Yes, they could if...' ?
De Schutter started by making the picture clear: there are 1 billion people going hungry, not because of an insufficient quantity of food but because of social inequalities and poverty. The cause is not technical but political. De Schutter was therefore highly surprised to see the outcomes of the expert meeting on food security in Rome last month: increase agricultural production by 70 percent and produce 470 million tons of meat instead of 250 million now and the problem is solved. But production for and by whom? Eighty percent of the hungry people are food producers, yet they are still hungry!
Of course, the reinvestment in agriculture in recent years is remarkable and promising. It could help agricultural development in Africa, but the dark side is also visible: the gold rush for arable lands (needed for food security elsewhere, agro-fuels, carbon credits and ordinary speculation) has started already. And again, de Schutter questions this focus on production: why do we think the world population can only be fed in future by boosting yields? There is an alternative: the 2.5 billion small-scale farmers who are extremely productive on their small plots of land. They should be taken more seriously.
So here entered the 'yes, if...' part of the answer to the question of whether Africa can feed the world. Niels Roling was very clear: if institutional development takes place in Africa (property rights) and if Africa gets a chance to overcome the comparative advantage that Europe and America have enjoyed for decades, only then... For how can a market system in which some parties are excluded because of unfair rules be called a free market system? No discussion needed, the two speakers and the audience agreed on the fact that states have an important role to play in the production and trade of food. Still it was an interesting dicussion...The next question should perhaps be 'What must we do, if we want small-scale farmers to feed the world?'