This week, the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) held a “Special Meeting on the global food crisis” at the UN headquarters in New York. The meeting's goal was to help move the international community towards action in addressing the causes of the food crisis.
Speakers included Malawi President Bingu wa Mutharika, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, experts Joachim Von Braun and Jeffrey Sachs as well as DuPont Vice President James Borel, among others. UN Member States then had a chance to react, and many did. All the interventions are available on Ecosoc’s dedicated webpage.
Some may, with reason, consider this as only one among too many meetings to discuss the food crisis. International farm leader John Wilkinson recently wrote “it’s time to act instead of talk, it’s time to plant fields instead of having conferences.”
However, the meeting did feature some interesting debates.
Let us focus on Gordon Brown’s intervention. A short one: around four minutes. But an efficient one: in this limited amount of time, he outlined a dozen of measures the world should take to address the food crisis. They included efforts to: encourage sound policies on land tenure and property rights; set up input subsidies; implement price controls on commodity markets; tax regimes for the agriculture sector; build a regulatory environment around agribusiness; invest in research and infrastructure; and stop dumping.
IATP supports many of these same measures as well (we would have added other steps, including the central need to involve farmer organizations). It is encouraging to hear a powerful world leader support efforts to invest in agriculture and address agribusiness' market power, measures that have too often been downplayed over the past decades.
Of course, the details of implementation matter, and there is no guarantee that we would agree with Brown’s plan there. But most puzzling to us, really, is why the conclusion of Gordon Brown’s speech focused on how a rushed Doha Deal will provide a solution to the crisis. In fact, such a rush would make it more difficult to implement the measures he recommends. M. Brown, why don’t you take a look at IATP’s analysis?
