Government chooses food poverty for the many amid exports enriching the few 

Government chooses food poverty for the many amid exports enriching the few 

by Jeff Rudin Sep 10, 2024

Part One in a three-part series.

Panic was the order of the day a few months ago. Agriculture was at the heart of the fear affecting the government, the DA and business in equal measure.

But a threat to our constitutionally guaranteed right to food for everyone had nothing to do with the panic. The alarm bells were for agriculture and a trade agreement made vulnerable by the US’s displeasure with South Africa for not falling in line with US foreign policy following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Such was our government’s concern about protecting this trade agreement that as early as June last year, a delegation headed by the then ministers of trade and foreign affairs, along with the still current minister of finance, made a placatory visit to the US.

This was followed by a more urgent one in May this year when President Cyril Ramaphosa sent a delegation to the US under the leadership of his national security adviser, Sidney Mufamadi. Parks Tau, the new trade minister, headed a follow-up delegation a few months later, in July.

John Steenhuisen, the DA Leader, also went to the US, more than a month before becoming Minister of Agriculture in the Government of National Unity (GNU). According to his own press statement, his trip was to “spearhead” a campaign “to save South African agriculture”.

In a subsequent press statement, he added that he went to the US to prevent “whole industries” from “collapse(ing)”. Above all, his mission was to assure the US that the “ANC is not South Africa”.

Even Business Unity South Africa (Busa) felt compelled to urge the government to “plead South Africa’s case to the US Congress”.

What, one may well ask, is so special about this agricultural agreement to warrant the government assigning it to its ministers of trade? Or that the DA leader saw as a threat to “whole industries” and that Business Unity South Africa should make its own special pleadings? Agoa is the name of the agreement. I anticipate most readers asking “A” who?

We will return to Agoa — the African Growth and Opportunity Act — in due course. First, a few words about what, unlike Agoa, is presented as a major threat of global importance.

China ‘endangers world agriculture’

Our daily diet of the crafty Chinese taking over the world means there’s always space on the anti-Chinese menu for still more. (I should add, I am no friend of China any more than I am of Russia.)

A recent Bloomberg article, republished by Daily Maverick, headlined “China’s Waning Appetite for Grain Spells Danger for World Market”, is a case in point.

Note, the danger is not for people – let alone hungry people – but the world market! Nor is there any Chinese “waning” for grain. The “waning” is for imports only. Consecutive Chinese bumper harvests have forced the government to stockpile both wheat and maize to support local farmers, while overseas maize shipments have been restricted or even cancelled to prop up the domestic market.

In a world full of hungry – if not starving – people, imagine a bumper harvest being a problem!

The “danger” lies entirely in the Chinese decision to prioritise its food sovereignty. Food security has long been a priority for China, with its history of famine and a commitment to feeding nearly 20% of the global population. Supply chain disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the US-imposed trade war – its number two agricultural supplier after Brazil – have given renewed urgency to reducing China’s substantial import of grains from the US.

Improved wheat harvest conditions now enable China to cut its wheat demand in half. This goal, seen as “feeble consumption” of wheat, is a “blow” to imports.

A similarly alarming picture faces US maize exporters. In the last week of May 2024, the US had just 86,300 tons of maize left to ship to China in the current marketing year that ends in August, drastically below last year’s 631,600 tons, according to the US Department of Agriculture. For next season, there are no outstanding US maize sales to China.

But all is not lost for US maize and wheat farmers. Business Day reassures food exporters by republishing an article by a Reuters journalist that “China’s food security dream faces hurdles”.

The journalist tells us that: “China, the world’s biggest agriculture importer, has set targets to drastically reduce its reliance on overseas buying… in line with its push for food security.”

Targets ‘exceedingly difficult to meet’

But apart from food security being a cause for alarm, worry not is the calming message, for the targets “will be exceedingly difficult to meet”.

The targets are indeed ambitious — 92% self-sufficiency in staple grains and beans by 2033, up from 84% during 2021-2023. Over the 10 years to 2033, a 75% plunge in maize imports and a 60% drop for wheat is expected. For soybeans, the biggest item on a farm import bill that totalled $234-billion last year, Beijing sees imports falling 21% in a decade.

As reassurance, the exporters are told that these targets “defy the trends of the past decade in which grains and oilseed imports have surged 87%”.

The final comfort lies in China’s physical geography: “China will struggle to meet its targets mainly due to a lack of land and water”.

This very brief look at what is seen as the “Chinese danger” to agriculture should alert us to the fairy tale that agriculture is for feeding people.

Commercial agriculture is a food business in which feeding people is a fortuitous outcome.

“The (agricultural) industry needs exports to maintain revenue, economies of scale, and thereby jobs and domestic product affordability. If exports are put at risk, agricultural jobs and indirectly domestic food security will be put at risk.”

We will be unpacking these claims made by Wolfe Braude, of the agricultural business chamber Agbiz, in the course of this article.

Key question

For now, the key question emerging from the section on China is why should reduced food exports be a disaster for food exporters, if agriculture’s primary purpose is to feed its own citizens?

Agriculture originally served this socially essential purpose until the Agricultural Revolution in Britain during the mid-17th to late 19th centuries finally resulted in food productivity outpacing population growth.

The consequential, supposed “surplus” then became the expected outcome, weather permitting. This turned land into a profitable enterprise, along with the commodification of agriculture, commodification being the turning of something, such as an intrinsic value or a work of art, into a commodity produced not for its social necessity, but rather to return a handsome profit by selling on the “market”.

The impact of food being transformed into a commodity had a profound effect on the British working class, as displeased generals discovered at the outbreak of  World War 1. Turning malnourished men into soldiers fit for war was a costly challenge, notwithstanding the food “surplus” available – but not for many among Britain’s working class.

“Food moves where purchasing power is highest, not where needs are most urgent,” the then United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier de Schutter noted, noted almost 100 years after the outbreak of World War 1.

Profit maximisation is why exporting food remains agri-businesses’ first prize, for it is much more profitable than selling on a home market. This is tellingly illustrated by the US Department of Agriculture, which compares the average South African domestic orange price with its export market price, for the years 2014/15 to 2021/22.

The South African trade union Solidarity, with more than 202,000 members, would applaud this export of “surplus” food. They see the virtue of exports being the prevention of “a greater surplus of produce on the local market, lowering the price that producers can obtain”.

Botswana provides a peek into what happens when expected export markets are lost, even when the exports are small. Botswana’s recent three-month ban on South African citrus will “hurt” both farmers and the economy, according to the Mail & Guardian.

Redirecting the lost exports to the South African market will increase supply and thereby “benefit the consumer”, with the implication of this being an unwelcome outcome. Left unsaid is that this benefit will come from lower “consumer” prices and hence lower profits for the citrus industry, according to an agricultural economist at FNB, the Mail & Guardian informant for the article.

Food, as a profit-maximising business, traps most countries in a vicious cycle. This production of food insecurity was, although ignored, well expressed in 2011 by Olivier de Schutter, the former United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food: “The more (these countries) are told to rely on trade, the less they invest in domestic agriculture. And the less they support their own farmers, the more they have to rely on trade.”

Haiti provides an egregious case study of this vicious cycle in which food prices invariably soar. By 2008, local production of food amounted to only 42% of Haiti’s food consumption, compared with 80% in 1986. Haiti now has among the fewest trade restrictions in the Americas. Succumbing, after being pressured for years — mainly by the US — to open its food market still further, food imports were up to 90% in 2015. Once self-sufficient in its production of rice – its main staple food – 80% of its rice is now imported. As one the poorest countries in the world, it has nonetheless had to spend $356-million importing rice, with $232-million (79.26%) going to the US (in 2022).

It is with good reason that an article focusing on Haiti is headlined “LET THEM EAT FREE MARKETS — How Deregulation Fuels the Global Food Crisis”.

A final word from 2011, by De Schutter. In a letter to the then director-general of no less a body than the World Trade Organization, he advised:

“The impact of trade rules can no longer be seen at the level of states alone. It must be sensitive to what really determines food security: who produces for whom, at what price, under which conditions, and with what economic, social and environmental repercussions. The right to food is not a commodity, and we must stop treating it that way.”

Asking for whom the sustainable agriculture is being promoted takes us back to the African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa), where we began this article.

‘Tools of economic diplomacy’

Agoa – a mild instance of trade being the diplomatic politics of war by other means. While adapting this aphorism of the German war theoretician Carl von Clausewitz (1789 to 1831) to include trade might not be recognised by the previously quoted Wolf Braude, Braude does, with the act in mind, note that “trade preferences and market access are often used as tools of economic diplomacy”.

Braude is one of the economists who consider the act to be “vital” to South Africa, not just the agricultural sector.

So, what is Agoa, in brief? In the standard double-speak of diplomacy it stands for the African Growth and Opportunity Act (emphasis added). Agoa was unilaterally introduced by the US in May 2000 to give preferential access to its market to qualifying sub-Saharan African countries.

The act was renewed in 2008 and again in 2015, and has recently been further extended to 2025. While far from being vital to either South Africa or its agricultural exporters, it is nice to have. But at what cost?

Agoa comes armed with two big teeth. First is that being unilateral, it can be unilaterally withdrawn by the US. Second, it remains entirely at the US’s discretion whether to remove a country that it considers to be non-compliant with Agoa’s preconditions.

These criteria, what Braude euphemistically calls the “tools of economic diplomacy”, include whether a country has established or is making continual progress toward establishing:

• A market-based economy that protects private property rights and minimises government interference in the economy through measures such as price controls, subsidies, and government ownership of economic assets, the elimination of barriers to United States trade and investment, including by: (i) the provision of national treatment and measures to create an environment conducive to domestic and foreign investment; (ii) the protection of intellectual property; and (iii) the resolution of bilateral trade and investment disputes.
• The rule of law and political pluralism.
• Expands physical infrastructure, promotes the development of private enterprise, and encourages the formation of capital markets.
• Protects internationally recognised worker rights, including the right of association, the right to organise and bargain collectively, a prohibition on the use of any form of forced or compulsory labour, a minimum age for the employment of children, and acceptable conditions of work with respect to minimum wages, hours of work, and occupational safety and health.
• (The country) does not engage in activities that undermine United States national security or foreign policy interests.
• Does not engage in gross violations of internationally recognised human rights or provide support for acts of international terrorism, and cooperates in international efforts to eliminate human rights violations and terrorist activities.
• If the (US) president determines that an eligible sub-Saharan African country is not making continual progress in meeting these, the president shall terminate the designation of the country.

Aggravating these qualifying conditions – some of which actually sound progressive – are the double standards the US uses when appointing itself as judge and jury. I offer a few examples.

• The reason Ethiopia was kicked out of Agoa in 2022 was its war with Tigray and what President Joe Biden termed its “gross violations of internationally recognised human rights”. Yes, this is the same Joe Biden who repeatedly used his veto at the UN Security Council to protect Israel from the consequence of its gross violations of internationally recognised human rights. And, yes, this is the same president who, following each of the worst violations, increased US financial and military support to Israel.
• Mauritania rejoined Agoa after having made “substantial and measurable progress on worker rights and eliminating forced labour”. However, the same provisions of workers’ rights (see above) also specifies “a minimum age for the employment of children, and acceptable conditions of work with respect to minimum wages, hours of work, and occupational safety and health”. Yet the DRC, like Zambia (among others), has never been expelled despite the voluminous evidence of its disregard of this provision.
• While it is questionable how many African countries practise “political pluralism”, the absolute monarchy in Swaziland does not.
• It falls to Donald Trump to reveal the naked meanness of Agoa presented as the US’s allegedly altruistic contribution to African growth and opportunity. In July 2018, Trump suspended Rwanda’s right to export clothing duty-free under Agoa after the East African nation banned the import of second-hand clothes. This ban followed an agreement adopted by the East African Community in 2016 to prohibit used clothing imports by 2019 in order to boost the local clothes manufacturing business. The East African Community wanted all second-hand clothes imports stopped by 2019. However, a US trade organisation objected to the East African Community’s decision, saying that it would impose “significant economic hardship” – all of $124-million! – in exports on America’s used-clothing industry. As a result, the US threatened to remove four East African countries – Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Rwanda – from Agoa.

Agoa, however, is like a Christmas present given by punitive parents to naughty children when compared with how the world’s few economic powers use the World Trade Organization and some of their own food initiatives dressed up as philanthropy, like the US’s Food for Peace. These reformist measures to give some credibility to claims of food security for everyone will be the subjects of Part Two of this series.

 

Our food systems are designed to perpetuate food insecurity for the many (Part Two)

by Jeff Rudin Sep 16, 2024

https://www.amandla.org.za/our-food-systems-are-designed-to-perpetuate-food-insecurity-for-the-many-part-two/

Part Two in a three-part series; read Part One here.

“Without… a fundamental reassessment, we will remain wedded to food systems where the most efficient producers with the biggest economies of scale are relied upon to feed food-deficit regions… This may look like food security on paper, but it is an approach that has failed spectacularly. The reality on the ground is that vulnerable populations are consigned to endemic hunger and poverty.”

So said the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier de Schutter, in 2011 in his report assessing the compatibility between the World Trade Organisation and efforts to protect the human right to adequate food.

Food security on paper

Foremost among the numerous definitions of food security is the one provided by the Committee of Food Security. The Committee of Food Security, established in 1974 as a permanent intergovernmental United Nations forum on food security policies, is the most inclusive international and intergovernmental platform for ensuring food security and nutrition for all.

Its definition of food security is “when all people at all times have physical, social and economic access to food, which is safe and consumed in sufficient quantity and quality to meet their dietary needs and food preferences, and is supported by an environment of adequate water and sanitation, health services and care, allowing for a healthy and active life.” Significantly, the Southern African Development Community has used this definition since 2012.

Indicative of the Committee of Food Security’s importance, its 51st session in 2023 (the 2024 session is due to take place later this year) was attended by delegates from 130 members of the committee, ten non-member states of the committee, and representatives from 19 United Nations agencies and bodies; 226 civil society organisations; 37 international agricultural research organisations; three international and regional financial institutions; 141 private sector associations and private philanthropic foundations; and 41 observers. Vice presidents, ministers, vice ministers and three state secretaries also attended.

Food security in practice – the crisis of hunger amid food ‘surpluses’

According to the latest reliable information:

• Global hunger: Around 733 million people faced hunger in 2023, equivalent to one in 11 people globally and one in five in Africa.
• Food insecurity: In 2023, about 2.33 billion people faced moderate or severe food insecurity. Among those, more than 864 million people experienced severe food insecurity, going without food for an entire day or more at times.
• Economic access: The lack of economic access to healthy diets remains a critical issue, affecting more than one-third of the global population. More than 2.8 billion people were unable to afford a healthy diet in 2022. This disparity is most pronounced in low-income countries, where 71.5% of the population cannot afford a healthy diet, compared with 6.3% in high-income countries.
• Exclusive breastfeeding: Only 48% of infants benefit from exclusive breastfeeding.
• Low birthweight: Affects 15% of newborn babies, with 22.3% of children under five being stunted. Additionally, the prevalence of wasting among children remains alarming, while anaemia in women aged 15 to 49 years has increased.
• Adult obesity: New estimates of global adult obesity show a steady increase over the past decade, from 12.1% (2012) to 15.8% (2022). Projections indicate that by 2030, the world will have more than 1.2 billion obese adults. Junk food – attributed to poverty and advertising – is the primary cause of this obesity. A review of 35,550 products manufactured by the global top 20 food and beverage companies (representing 22% of worldwide sales in the sector) in a few key countries, including Brazil, China, India and South Africa, found that the overwhelming majority were unhealthy.

Moreover, world leaders, their advisers and other food specialists cannot claim ignorance about this manufactured pandemic. This is because these statistics come from the latest “State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World” report. The report is published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef), the UN World Food Programme, and the World Health Organization.

Two numbers stand out from this State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report regarding South Africa:

• 61% of our population are unable to afford a healthy diet.
• Food insecurity is the lived experience of 36.6 million of us.

Not part of this report are the ones on filicide, of mothers murdering their children and then killing themselves because of poverty and hunger (see here and here).

The report often uses the financial crisis of 2008 as a benchmark. What it didn’t say was that more than one billion people went hungry as food prices soared due to hoarding by the food trading corporations, hedge fund speculation and the criminal activities of the financial institutions. This led to people dying of starvation and consequent food riots and social unrest in both poor and advanced nations. These events brought down the then Haitian government and sparked the 2011 Arab Spring.

The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report warns that if current trends continue, about 582 million people will be chronically undernourished in 2030, half of these in Africa.

These figures, as Professor Jean Shaoul of Manchester University notes, put paid to any notion of achieving the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2, zero hunger, by 2030. The zero hunger goal, established in 2015, was supposed to “end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture”.

Standing behind these figures, which ought to be unthinkable in 2024, is the UN’s World Trade Organization (WTO).

It remains a safe bet that few people know much more about the WTO than its name. This makes necessary the fewest possible words about the WTO. According to its founding Agreement of 1995, the WTO and its 195 current member countries are, in the grandiose words made familiar in Part 1, committed to: “raising standards of living, ensuring full employment and a large and steadily growing volume of real income… while allowing for the optimal use of the world’s resources in accordance with the objective of sustainable development, seeking both to protect and preserve the environment and to enhance the means for doing so”.

It further recognises the “need for positive efforts designed to ensure that developing countries, and especially the least developed among them, secure a share in the growth in international trade”.

The diplomatic double-speak immediately brings us to the double standards richly embedded in the WTO’s founding document – as well as those of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund before they handed these functions over to the WTO.

Thus, as David Moberg, him of the “Let Them Eat Free Markets” quoted in Part 1 reminds us, in the 1980s the World Bank and International Monetary Fund loans as well as structural adjustment programmes required that countries not only reduce tariffs and other trade barriers, but also dismantle grain reserves, marketing boards and other government institutions designed to stabilise food prices.

Space allows for only two examples of what then became WTO rules.

Agricultural subsidies

In the short elaboration that follows, I draw heavily, unless otherwise stated, on the 2015 “Investing in Agriculture in Developing Countries: the Whole World Says Yes, but the WTO Says No” by Deborah James, the long-serving Director of International Programs at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC, and facilitator of the campaign, Our World Is Not for Sale (OWINFS), a global civil society network (of which the Alternative Information and Development Centre, for whom I work, is part).

The 1994 Agreement on Agriculture, a foundational part of the WTO, included the provisions that agricultural subsidies would both be capped at their then-current level, and be subject to gradual reduction.

This protects the already rich countries that were already subsidising agricultural production. Indeed, even before the Agreement on Agriculture, the US, from roughly 1950 to 1972, opened markets and created dependency on global grain purchases by providing subsidised, low-cost surplus grain. Governments could pay with their local currencies rather than dollars.

The governments of developing countries willingly accepted the aid, hoping to pacify their urban poor while keeping wages low for new industries. The restrictions subsequently introduced by the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank against agricultural subsidies left the developing countries powerless to object to the brazen might-is-right morality of the WTO since its inception.

The WTO’s argument was that countries would be better off producing cash crops for export and then buying food in the global market far cheaper than they could produce at home. Many countries producing the same commodity heeded this “advice”. This led to a drop in world prices due to the oversupplied market. “WTO rules,” Deborah James notes with good reason, “are explicitly designed to increase trade in food rather than facilitate global food security”.

Despite the global consensus on supposedly allowing developing countries to invest in domestic production, WTO rules do not allow developing countries that were not subsidising in 1994 to subsidise beyond the de minimis (Latin for “so small it’s not worth tracking”) amount allowed to all WTO members.

Meanwhile, the US and Europe are allowed tens of billions a year in overtly trade-distorting subsidies for exported products and have yet to implement the abolition of those subsidies to which they agreed in 1994.

Moreover, when calculating the subsidies, countries must figure the difference not between the Managed Service Provider – the middle men – and current prices; they have to use the WTO “reference price”, which is still the average world price from 1986-1988. As James exasperatedly noted in 2015: “As if the price of rice or wheat more than 25 years ago had any bearing on today’s markets.”

Further, while this reference price must be used by developing countries to calculate the subsidies for the type of public stockholding recommended by most experts, the same is not required of developed countries, primarily the US, when reporting its Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

US cotton merits a brief mention. US cotton subsidies alone – which enrich a few thousand producers in politically important congressional districts – have so depressed global cotton prices that Brazil has twice won WTO cases against the US.

But rather than change the subsidies, the US pays off Brazil to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. Unfortunately, this arrangement leaves less politically powerful small farmers in Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad and Mali — known as the C4 — who have been suffering for years, trapped in this one-sided arrangement.

The much-touted cotton deal struck in the WTO’s Nairobi meeting in 2015 does not touch domestic subsidies in the US, by far the greatest source of trade distortion. So, as two food specialists point out in 2015, the C4 can expect to see continued US cotton subsidies estimated at $1.5-billion per year, which will increase US exports by 29% and suppress cotton prices by 7%.

This will cost the C4 an estimated $80-million per year in lost cotton revenues. That is more than 300 times the (2014) gains from market access under the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which totalled just $264,000 (the act is covered in some detail in Part One).

This brings us to the prohibition on stockpiling food – the second of the WTO’s inequities I undertook to cover.

Stockpiling of food for emergencies is for rich countries only

Martin Khor (1951-2020), the longtime executive director of the South Centre, an intergovernmental organisation of developing countries based in Geneva, called in 2013 for the adoption of a clear statement on the legitimacy of public stockholding for food security. This, he said, was in keeping with international law commitments to reducing poverty and ensuring food security.

What could then be more appropriate than allowing them to hold food stocks, thus enabling them to deal with food shortages and fluctuations in global market prices?  UN Special Rapporteurs on the Right to Food had made similar calls before. All were ignored. The global grain trade was supposed to take the place of governments with their once-held reserves stored for hard times.

The last words on this subject belong to the indefatigable Olivier de Schutter: “We must ensure that the debate starts from the correct premise. This premise must acknowledge the dangers for poor countries in relying excessively on trade. We must also assess the compatibility of WTO disciplines and the Doha agenda with the food security agenda. Without such a fundamental reassessment, we will remain wedded to food systems where the most efficient producers with the biggest economies of scale are relied upon to feed food-deficit regions and where the divide only gets bigger.”

What’s this about Doha?

The WTO’s ministerial meeting (known as rounds) in Doha in 2001 had on its development agenda the recognition of nothing more outrageous than:

• Reforming agricultural subsidies.
• Ensuring that new liberalisation in the global economy respects the need for sustainable economic growth in developing countries.
• Improving developing countries’ access to global markets for their exports.

But nothing happened until WTO members in Geneva began efforts to put the negotiations back on track. The date for finally reaching an agreement was 30 July 2004. The deadline was ignored. Many promises to relaunch Doha followed, the last being scheduled for the Ministerial Conference in Nairobi in 2015. It, too, was a failure. This led to the Financial Times declaring the death of Doha. The death also heralded the demise of the WTO as the UN’s multi-national trade organisation.

But that is a story for another time.

For now, and to complete this section on what the WTO means by food security, a few words must be spent on India’s groundbreaking law guaranteeing food for all its people.

India’s National Food Security Act 2013, also known as the Right to Food Act, aimed to provide subsidised food grains to approximately two-thirds of the country’s 1.4 billion people (unless otherwise stated, I’m drawing on Deborah James’s 2015 article “Investing in Agriculture in Developing Countries: the Whole World Says Yes, but the WTO Says No”.)

When the National Food Security Act was promulgated in 2013, over half of the population depended on agriculture, with most farms being no larger than a few acres. Hundreds of millions suffered from hunger and a lack of access to adequate food; half of children under five years old in the country were chronically malnourished.

The Right to Food Act is intended to reduce poverty among both producers and consumers by what was called a public stockholding, or food reserves, programme. And it is because of this that it runs afoul of the WTO, headed by the US.

In an article from October 2013 headed “US Farm Subsidies Are Unquestionable, While India’s Hungry Are Being Conveniently Traded at The WTO”, an outraged Hindustan Times journalist noted: “The double standards are clear.”

In 2012, the US provided $100-billion for domestic food aid, up from the $95-billion it spent on feeding its 47 million undernourished population in 2010, including spending on food coupons and other supplementary nutrition programmes.

In India, by contrast, the Food Act was expected to cost $20-billion and feed an estimated 850 million people. Against an average supply of 358kg/person of subsidised food aid (including cereals) in the US every year, India promised to make available 60kg/person in food entitlement.

Yet, while the WTO is quiet on the US subsidy for feeding its poor, the US has launched an attack on India for attempting to “roll back commitments” for “creating a massive new loophole for potentially unlimited trade-distorting subsidies”.

These claims, in James’s view, are “egregiously hypocritical” because the US is the world’s largest agriculture subsidiser. The US filed domestic support of more than $139-billion in 2011 – which is double the amount of those subsidies in 1995. Most of this is for food stamps for the poor.

But the US is still allowed around $15-billion in overtly trade-distorting support. And while the European Union’s domestic support of $79-billion is still high, at least it has been reduced since the WTO’s inception. In fact, members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development spent a total of $258-billion subsidising agriculture in 2013, according to the organisation.

India kept pressing for progress on the legitimacy of its Food Security Act until WTO members resolved to “make all concerted efforts to agree and adopt a permanent solution on the issue of public stockholding for food security purposes by 31 December 2015”, moving up the date by two years. This meant that a decision would be taken at the ministerial meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, in December 2015.

Despite the spin put on the Nairobi outcome, the two previously quoted food specialists concluded it would be “hard to imagine US negotiators even discussing reductions in its domestic farm subsidies”. Nairobi provided no reaffirmation of the Doha Development Agenda. Nor was there any permanent solution on the public stockholding issue; there was just a promise to negotiate an unspecified safeguard mechanism for developing countries.

An article, “Hunger and Malnutrition in India after a Decade of the National Food Security Act, 2013”, published by the National Law School of India University, brings us to 2023. Noting that the act is a milestone in the history of food security legislation in India, it found that despite ten years of food security being a legal right and the availability of sufficient quantities of food grains, India has at least 189 million people — 14% of its population — suffering from serious hunger.

The Global Hunger Index, released on 14 October 2022, placed India in its “serious” category for the 22nd consecutive year.

“The fundamental and unanswered question,” asked the authors, is “why do so many people in the country face persistent hunger and vulnerability for generations”? Astonishingly, the WTO escapes even a single mention in the long article!

The African Union is complicit in allowing the WTO to keep starving its own people. Although this cannot be developed here, African leaders reproduce the WTO’s goals and language. A clear example of this is its Malabo Declaration of 2014.

It is clear from Part Two that trade reflects global power with all its imbalances, inequities, and hypocrisies. Trade, in other words, is an international dimension of unequal power relations. This was well captured by our then finance minister, Trevor Manuel, as early as 2005: “The problem is not that international trade is inherently opposed to the needs and interests of the poor, but that the rules that govern it are rigged in favour of the rich.” (Mail & Guardian, 21 January 2005).

Part Three will suggest a different “reform agenda” from the much spoken about one by the GNU. It will show how the “rules rigged in favour of the rich” can be reduced. Easily, with the appropriate political will.

 

Breaking the trade chains that perpetuate food for the few and hunger for the many (Part Three)

by Jeff Rudin Sep 23, 2024

https://www.amandla.org.za/breaking-the-trade-chains-that-perpetuate-food-for-the-few-and-hunger-for-the-many-part-three/

Part Three in a three-part series; read Part One here and Part Two here.

“Every international body that deals with agriculture has come to recognise the need to prioritise food security over simply promoting trade. While the original Rome Declaration on Food Security in 1996 talked about ensuring food security through market-based mechanisms, the 2009World Summit on Food Security placed emphasis instead on national investments in agriculture. The African Union announced in the ‘Maputo Declaration’ in 2004 the commitment by each country to invest 10 percent of national budgets in agricultural production, which it reiterated (in 2014) in launching the ‘Year of Food Security’.”

This unambiguous statement by Deborah James directly contradicts South Africa’s focus on the necessity of food exports, as was covered in parts One and Two of this series. This begs the question of which policy is rational?

Contradictory positions can be equally rational

Agri-SA is dedicated to “protecting and promoting” South African agriculture. Its article “Rapid Increase of the National Minimum Wage is Throttling Agricultural Sector Growth” concludes with a repeated “call to government to prioritise food security and employment protection in the determination of the national minimum wage”.

Is this call irrational rather than rationally reflecting the needs of its members? A simple and incontrovertible definition of rational being in “accordance with the principles of logic or reason”.

What is insufficiently recognised is that most people most of the time seek to act rationally. Sharp differences nonetheless arise because people’s behaviour is usually shaped by their position in society – including its (hegemonic) value system – and the rational needs and aspirations to which it gives rise. People with similar social positions invariably link up to form groups of varying size and socioeconomic power.

How one might then ask, is rational change possible if the antagonists are both acting rationally? How, more particularly for this series, do we break the trade agreements that condemn the many to food poverty while recognising that those agreements exist because they are rationally designed to provide food for the few?

The few have economic and political power; the many have only the numbers. And numbers count in a democracy. When only 39% of eligible voters actually voted in our May election, and when that means that the party with the largest vote in that election represents only 15.7% of eligible voters, then what, besides being a sick democracy, is the lesson of our May election?

The main one, I suggest, was the failure of the side with the numbers to transfer their majority into realised votes. The absence of any credible, alternate party is the main reason for this failure.

This gives rise to a relatively easy challenge among the many others. Rather than questioning the rationality of those who promote the priority of exporting a commodity – food – paid for by the food poverty of the many, expose the double-speak they proffer as a rationale for their position.

Recall Agri-SA’s just-quoted appeal to the government. The right to continue paying farm workers poverty wages was made in the virtuous name of “food security and employment protection”. This objective contradicts their appeal to the government not to increase the national minimum wage. This makes it irrational.

To the tens of millions who know only food insecurity and unemployment, as well as many among those tens of millions who didn’t vote, I offer the following for their consideration.

How to achieve paradigm shift

An answer to this fundamental challenge – with the shift being “an important change that happens when the usual way of thinking about or doing something is replaced by a new and different way” – begins with two simple steps of recognition:

1. That the “normal” way of doing things is not “natural” and that (many) alternatives are invariably available.
2. That economists in particular have a long history of providing purportedly scientific cover for what is presented as “the only way”.
3. Well-known academic and commentator Ismail Lagardien devotes a recent Business Day article to this long history, entitled “Prominence and Prestige Tie Economists to Power and Privilege”.

He writes: “It is power that determines which ideas or beliefs are taken seriously. It is all the more concerning, though, that it has been almost impossible to affect the immovable beast that is economic orthodoxy.”

John Galbraith, the internationally renowned economist, offers a reason for this immovability. He observed that the rich are “engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness”.

Orthodox economists provide that justification. This is why they are so respected.

Besides having been an iconoclastic economist, Galbraith was unusual in being an economist with wit: “Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.” (Economics, Peace and Laughter, 1971.)

When even economists can’t find a justification for some double-speak – other than acknowledging the morality of might is right – they contrive to bury the problem, to erase it from economic history.

In this book, Oxford University professor Ha-Joon Chang details how most developed countries, which now impose “free trade” on the so-called “developing countries,” became developed by practising protectionism to defend their infant industries.

But then comes the pesky Oxford University professor, the émigré from South Korea, Ha-Joon Chang, who, among his many talents, was also an archaeological economist with his 2002 book, “Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective”.

His book details how most of the developed countries – Britain and the US in particular – who now impose “free trade” on the so-called “developing countries”, became developed by practising protectionism to defend their infant industries. Having thereby reached the top of the ladder, they then kicked it away to become the champions of free trade.

This is why “economics is a political argument”, in Chang’s pithy words (“Economics: The User’s Guide”, 2014). Like Galbraith, Chang was not inhibited about critiquing mainstream economics. Despite scientific pretences about being a science, Chang uses the much-used concept of “free markets” to expose the scientific posturing of economists: “There is really no objective way to define how free (a) market is… The free market is an illusion. If some markets look free, it is only because we so totally accept the regulations that are propping them up that they become invisible.” (“23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism”, 2010.)

Making this invisibility visible, along with demystifying economics and the “formidable nonsense” to which economists are reduced (Galbraith, “The Great Crash, 1929”, 1954) are the first steps towards paradigm shifting.

Constitution makes parliamentary endorsement of primacy of exporting food irrational

Empathy is the source of why most people wish to think well of themselves. It’s also the origin of why “fairness” is a universal value and has been so probably since the beginning of humankind. Fairness exists even in the morality of gangsters. These features can turn the rationality of those who export food as their form of profit maximisation into an irrationality, into a contradiction between their business and the ethics they espouse.

The South African Constitution serves as an example. All the trade agreements that guarantee food insecurity for most people enjoy parliamentary approval. This was indeed the substance of both parts One and Two of this series.

All parliamentary parties have long committed themselves to addressing the triple shames of poverty, unemployment and inequality. Moreover, all members of both Houses of Parliament swear or affirm to “obey, respect and uphold” the Constitution.

Yet, many people have forgotten or never known that our Constitution begins with a Preamble proclaiming such things as:

1. “Establish(ing) a society based on… social justice and fundamental human rights.”
2. A government “based on the will of the people”.
3. “Improv(ing) the quality of life of all citizens.

The Constitution proclaims its Founding Provisions to include “human dignity, the achievement of equality and the advancement of human rights”.

The Constitution declares that its Bill Of Rights “is a cornerstone of democracy in South Africa” (S7.1) and that:

• “The state must respect, protect, promote and fulfil the rights in the Bill of Rights” (S7.2).
• “Equality includes the full and equal enjoyment of all rights and freedoms” (S9.2).
• “Everyone has inherent dignity and the right to have their dignity respected and protected” (S10).
• “Everyone has the right to… sufficient food” (S27.1.b).
• “The state must take reasonable legislative and other measures, within its available resources, to achieve the progressive realisation of these rights” (S27.2).
• “Every child has the right… to basic nutrition” (S18.1c).
• “A child’s best interests are of paramount importance in every matter concerning the child” (S28.2).
• “In this section ‘child’ means a person under the age of 18 years” (S28.3).

The exporting of food as the cornerstone of our agriculture is in breach of all the above, despite what for some is the rationality of the “market”.

Making the breach all the more contemptuous of the Constitution is that every child’s right to food is unconditional, for it is not covered by S27.2. The 2024 edition of the annual South African Child Gauge, published by the Children’s Institute at the University of Cape Town, makes sober reading, even without any mention of the Constitution and its guarantees.

A report on the latest Child Gauge, headlined “New Study Finds SA’s Little Children Are in Deep Crisis”, notes: “South Africa’s children are in deep crisis — hungry, neglected, abused, developmentally challenged.”

Having now covered the theoretical, constitutional and moral parts of how to bring about a food security paradigm shift in favour of most South Africans, we come to the final part of my answer.

The reform road to reducing food poverty

Eliminating food poverty will, alas, take more than reform, in the opinion of many, including me. However, reform is a beginning, not least because it speaks directly to the food insecure, as well as the anticipated millions who hunger for a viable alternative to the world as it is.

The needed reforms are radically different from those the Government of National Unity (GNU) is most vocal in calling for. The GNU wants more free markets, privatisation, investment, public-private partnerships and BEE.

In a word, reform for it means more neoliberalism. A radical rejection of neoliberalism does not necessarily mean a revolutionary rejection of capitalism. (See my three-part series on neoliberalism recently published by the Daily Maverick – here, here, and here).

My admired economist, Ha-Joon Chang, for instance, is not alone in combining his ruthless critique of neoliberalism with his acceptance of capitalism (“23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism”, 2010).

But there is a difference between radical reform and reformism. Reformism addresses symptoms, not causes, while radical reform confronts causes.

Whether or not these radical reforms are plastic surgery depends on one’s understanding of capitalism. This isn’t to dismiss reformists, many of whom do important work; rather it is to make explicit the inherently substantial limitation of what they do.

SA Harvest, for instance, seeks to turn the mountain of edible food that is annually wasted into 30 billion meals. The Hunger Project is another example, despite it seeing “investor participation” as a “vital ingredient” to its “recipe for resilience”. And then, there’s the longstanding international organisation committed to the oxymoron of “Fair Trade”.

Transforming ‘free trade’ into first feeding South Africans

“Let’s be clear,” writes the founder and chief executive of SA Harvest, Alan Browde, in his article “Twenty Million South Africans Face Hunger Every Day”, “the hunger crisis in South Africa is catastrophic. You might think this is an exaggeration, but the data speaks for itself.”

Alas, the “exaggeration” is sufficiently exact to evoke memories of another of the notorious “Great Hungers” co-existing with the export of food, as the Irish potato famine of 1845-1850 is known. Mercifully, the scale of ours is no match for the Irish one, as Drew Forest details in his “Death trail of market zealots” (a must read in my opinion).

Out of an Irish population of 8.5 million in 1845, one million died and a further one million emigrated. Nor have our “market” economists sought to make our food catastrophe rational, like other economists who attributed the Irish famine to God’s infinite wisdom, which includes the wisdom of the British government not interfering with the imperatives of the “free market”, while using that wisdom to continue exporting large amounts of Irish food during the Great Hunger.

It’s a “wisdom” our government still needs to dismiss. It should come to see – or, more accurately, be made to see – that “we, the people” enshrined in our Constitution, and “we” the children to whom our Constitution guarantees food must be our government’s first priority.

Doing this sounds simple enough. It’s the metamorphosis of our government from being the protector and expensive salespeople of agri-businesses’ “surpluses” into the butterflies of food for all.

Some selected agri-business farms would be retained. What would change is their market, with a switch from prioritising the export market to the home market. Complementing this reversal to the home market and the food security it offers to everyone would eventually be labour-intensive, relatively small, agroecological farming, which includes addressing the already-being-experienced climate change threat to agriculture. Agroecological farming additionally offers the prospect of large-scale job creation.

How to face the final hurdle before the food paradigm shifts

The first requirement of the paradigm shift is recognising the formidable, united front guarding the status quo to ensure nothing changes. This united front begins with the government, Parliament, commercial agriculture and the other beneficiaries of the food export business.

Manufacturers of food for the local market, along with supermarkets, are important members of this vested interest group (See David Sanders, The Struggle for Health, 2nd edition, 2023) for they welcome their market freedom given by the (relative) absence of regulations.

Exporters to South Africa welcome the fact that a mere 2% of the tariff codes attracting a duty have been reviewed in the past five years, or that 93% of R86-billion in customs duties paid from July 2023 to June 2024 have not been reviewed in more than 20 years.

This “permanent protection” of South Africa’s international trade is no mere oversight. Daily Maverick’s Georgina Crouth, the source of the tariff code and custom duties information, quotes a former trade and industry commissioner, Meluleki Nzimande, as saying that when the government takes decisions on these matters, foreign relations figure highly.

“There’s much the government could do,” concludes SA Harvest’s Alan Browde. Despite its fundamental reformism, Browde attributes the government’s failure to make the required “fundamental systemic changes” not to the rationality of its own policy rooted in treating food as a profit-maximising commodity, but rather as a failure of the government’s political will.

Rather than being a failure of political will, the opposite is more apposite: it’s the determination of the government’s political will, not its failure, that forces people to choose between buying food or electricity. That choice is forced on them by a government, acting on behalf of a complex of agribusiness interests, which freely chooses to prioritise the food-exporting business.

And the economists can hardly be forgotten. We’ve already covered them, but the two most recent examples merit mention.

The first, a Business Day article headlined “Economists Warn on Above-Inflation Pay Raises”, expresses concern about pay increases that “relegate many people to below the breadline”.

Price increases are, by implication, a necessity of the economic law that “the employer has to recoup the losses somewhere”! The often-cited economic expert, Dawie Roodt, blames the ungrateful workers already privileged by being employed, who, because they “organise themselves to protect their jobs”, make “it difficult for the unemployed to enter the job market”.

The governor of the South African Reserve Bank is the second economist to warn against inflation just because of the recent slowing of the inflation rate. If economists were not (mostly) the hired guns of the rich, proper job creation would be their priority rather than the arbitrary inflation targets they’ve set for a compliant Reserve Bank.

An alternative to this United Front of the Privileged is a United Front of those forced in multitudinous ways to pay for the austerity imposed on them by the government and its economists, who, by protecting themselves from the consequences of their austerity policies, remain loyally wedded to neoliberalism.

People with any sense of justice for the majority and the various political groupings already challenging neoliberalism’s austerity would be part of this United Front. One such group is the Anti-Austerity Campaign with its slogan of “Give us our Daily Bread”.

Only a mass movement will provide the tipping point for the needed paradigm shift. The challenge is to make as many people as possible aware that daily bread is unavailable only because of a government and its economic advisers who see agriculture’s main purpose as being the production of a supposed surplus for export.

These same economists maintain that agricultural exports help provide the essential need for foreign exchange. This is an issue for another time. For now, it must be noted that foreign exchange is subject to the minimal regulations of neoliberalism rather than being part of a compressive industrial strategy.

Integral to the reform campaign is that, like food, electricity is seen as a commodity subject to the neoliberal canon of full cost recovery by Eskom, along with a similar neoliberal holy writ that turns citizens into customers expected to pay whatever the market rate may be for human essentials.

Free basic electricity has nothing to do with people’s actual electricity needs, even for those ever-diminishing numbers who manage to register themselves as “indigent”. It exists only as a needed moral illusion – an ideological cover for the ANC and those who are genuinely uncomfortable with South Africa’s in-your-face inequality – that the needs of the poor are reassuringly being met.

Very few South Africans know about trade. Yet they know about their hunger poverty. And they can see the food they can’t afford on display in the supermarkets and other food shops.

This is to say they know without knowing the role trade agreements play in South Africa’s world-beating inequality. They experience — without knowing it — the reality of trade being the continuation of the diplomatic politics of war by other means.

Inspired by Martin Luther King, with his “audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture of their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits”, the challenge — for those who agree with the analysis offered in this article — is to make the possibility of another world known to the millions who know only their food poverty.

Dreams need not be the only place to find the food security guaranteed by our Constitution and to which the UN is supposedly committed.

Jeff Rudin works at the Alternative Information and Development Centre and is a member of the Amandla! Collective. This article is published jointly with the Daily Maverick.