Reflections Sparked by the Food Crisis: How Can Food Security Be Guaranteed?

When did agriculture once again become a hot topic in international debate? We can only roughly judge it to be between 2007 and 2009. During this period, the US financial crisis and the European debt crisis broke out in succession, and the world's energy, resource and environmental crises reappeared. People also discovered that poverty, food crises and food safety were bringing political and social pressure to many countries and regions around the world. Even supporters of the existing international trade order were somewhat astonished to see that food trade no longer seemed to reliably ease food crises and the resulting social crises, and that sharply fluctuating food prices and the grain consumed by the rise of biofuels were both declaring that the era of relying solely on free trade to solve hunger had passed.

Will the world face a long-term food crisis and agricultural crisis? Will climate and other ecological crises emerge, causing an avalanche-like decline in global grain output? Will energy prices keep rising again and again, ultimately making long-distance food trade no longer economical and pushing the energy cost beyond the environment's carrying capacity? Will biofuels really devour the grain that could otherwise solve the hunger problem of poor countries? Are public investments by governments to improve food and agricultural production capacity really necessary? To what extent will the development of the food crisis lead governments to intervene more, and if such intervention occurs, will there still be profitable investment space for private capital and venture capital in agriculture, or will it cause large amounts of capital to withdraw? In recent years, price fluctuations in the international food market have stimulated some grain-producing countries to increase grain production and exports, but as an important grain-importing economy, the European Union has begun to establish so-called ecological barriers for various imported goods, including food, shutting out imported goods that do not meet fair trade and environmental protection standards. Will this dampen the production enthusiasm of grain-producing countries, or can it truly drive grain-producing countries to improve the quality of their exports?

The direction of the above issues is closely tied to the interests of food consumers, workers across the food production and processing industry chain, representatives of capital invested in agricultural operations, the public sector and many other institutions and people. Of course, more importantly, the prospects for resolving the food crisis will also affect whether every person can escape hunger.

Since 2007, the French Development Agency and Sciences Po have jointly launched the annual publication "Regards sur la Terre" (Looking at the Earth), choosing a theme each year and conducting in-depth analysis from multiple perspectives, lines of thinking and disciplines, from the height of global governance, supplemented by concise summary information and detailed chart data, offering a panoramic review of the year's sustainable development topics. The 2012 report of "Regards sur la Terre" focuses on the global food issue and brings together the wisdom of the world's most authoritative experts on agriculture and food issues from many countries. The 2012 report of "Regards sur la Terre" is titled "The Opportunity for Agricultural Transformation: Development, Environment and Food." The editors of this book are Pierre·Jacquet, Strategic Director and Chief Economist of the French Development Agency and Director of the Department of Humanities, Economics, Management and Finance at the Ecole des Ponts ParisTech, Rajendra·K. Pachauri, Chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and 2007 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and Laurence·Tubiana, Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Sciences Po.

This book responds to global public concerns about agriculture and food issues and systematically answers the many questions above. In the introduction, it points out that sustainable agricultural development has become a top priority in global development. It involves not only turning the production stage of food and other agricultural products toward green and harmless practices and improving the efficiency of agricultural production and operations, but also reducing waste in trade and consumption. The book also meaningfully notes that to achieve sustainable agricultural development, the agricultural policies of all countries need to shift from a crisis-management model of "treating the head when the head aches, treating the foot when the foot hurts" to a risk-management model.

The book directly confronts the food crisis. Chapter 2 of the book points out that the tight food supply in recent years is related to reduced inventories caused by adjustments in national food policies, declining output caused by abnormal climate, biofuels consuming grain stocks and triggering sharp fluctuations in food prices, and speculation in agricultural derivatives markets, as well as some grain-producing countries beginning to adopt restrictive measures on grain exports. Clearly, responding to and resolving the food crisis involves more stakeholders than ever before. The game of interests will also be more complex, including "upstream agricultural seed companies, fertilizer and pesticide suppliers, midstream agri-food processors, and downstream large retailers," as well as speculators in derivative markets.

The book discusses sub-Saharan African countries under the shadow of the food crisis. This region is still undergoing demographic and social transition, agricultural growth faces structural constraints, many international aid and support development policies have been declared failures, and land leasing open to foreign individuals and companies has also proven difficult to use in addressing water resource crises. The book then discusses the potential of China and India, the world's two most populous countries, to improve agricultural development, as well as the practical difficulties they face. In Chapter 6 of the book, Swedish scholar Uno·Svedin warns people to pay attention to the high pressure already facing social-ecological systems beyond agriculture, reminding readers that agricultural transformation "must take into account the combination of agriculture, agri-food and the new ecological economy... must implement a method based on knowledge of biology, chemistry, physics, geology and geography," and must also integrate the results of technological innovation as well as social and institutional innovation.

In this book, several scholars offer profound reflections on the agricultural development model that spread from the United States to countries around the world after World War II. After World War II, Indonesia and Brazil both began to introduce American-style agricultural intensification experience. The result was not the reduction of deforestation and environmental damage predicted by economists. On the contrary, it also caused the agricultural varieties on many intensively farmed farms to become monocultural, the ecological balance to be broken, and operators to use more pesticides and chemical fertilizers, ultimately making the ecological environment more fragile.

According to research findings by several scholars studying agriculture in Latin America, Asia, Africa, Europe and the United States, to escape and better respond to agricultural and food crises, it is indeed necessary to appropriately adjust the previous path of economic liberalization, restore the role of government, improve the quality of public policy, strengthen policy coordination between countries, reduce pollution and strengthen regulation. But the scholars also point out that government intervention and regulation in agriculture, especially grain production, usually has greatly diminished effectiveness and can easily slide toward inefficiency or even corruption. Therefore, moving toward sustainable agriculture requires achieving some kind of balance between effective government monitoring and regulation and industry regulation at the international and national levels.