The Hill: 'A shocking investment deficit that will take years to recover'

Sunday, August 10, 2008

So says a Minneapolis think-tank about the failure of governments to invest in agriculture, a view endorsed in unusually blunt language at the recent world food summit

by BARRY WILSON

In a world of international diplomatic language filled with nuance and weasel words, blunt talk and accusation are as rare as a McGuinty government minister agreeing that the Mike Harris government got at least a few things right.

So it was refreshing and flabbergasting to hear the chief bureaucrat for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) begin a June world food summit in Rome with some very blunt talk about why the world in summer 2008 is facing the spectre of rising food costs, growing hunger and the political instability it creates.

Look in the mirror, FAO executive secretary Jacques Diouf told a meeting which included more than 40 heads of government gathered to plan a response to what is perceived as a world food crisis.

He began the conference by lecturing member countries that they were reaping the crop they had sown. For 25 years, despite promises to the contrary, they had neglected agriculture in their national policies, stifled investment and choked the sector of credit, infrastructure and transparent markets.

The result has been a decline in productivity in many areas, an exodus from the land and the inability of world agriculture to keep up with growing demand.

Meanwhile, governments willing to spend $1.2 trillion on weapons and close to $400 billion supporting agriculture in the developed countries have been unwilling to pledge $30 billion annually to deal with poverty, hunger and under-investment in agriculture, in the developing world, he complained. "How can we explain to people of good sense and good faith that it was not possible to find $30 billion a year to enable 862 million hungry people to enjoy the most fundamental of human rights, the right to food," he said. "It is resources of this magnitude that would make it possible definitively to lay to rest the spectre of conflicts over food that are looming on the horizon."

As Diouf was speaking in Rome, Canadian senators on the agriculture committee in Ottawa were preparing to issue a report which complained about a lack of government investment in rural Canada and a problem of rural poverty that is one of Canada's largest dirty secrets.

In the developing world that was the FAO focus, the issue has been lack of investment.

In parts of Canada, particularly on the Prairies, the problem has been de-investment. Infrastructure built by previous generations has been allowed to erode or been deliberately destroyed in the interests of centralized transportation and delivery points which are more efficient for the corporations now in control but less convenient and more costly for farmers.

The issue, whether in Rome or in rural Canada, is that the importance of rural life has been diminished or minimized as the political and media focus switches to the city as the centre of all economic and social progress.

The world food crisis of 2008, and Diouf's criticism of the lack of rural and agricultural investment as the root of the crisis, illustrates the folly of an urban-centric mindset as prevalent in Canada as in Kenya.

Supermarkets don't produce food. Farmers do. The Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy got it right when it said, "For 30 years, governments, aid donors and development agencies have neglected agriculture. The sector was seen as backward, unproductive and a poverty trap. The result is a shocking investment deficit that will take years to recover."

Canadian politicians and rural denigrators should take note. BF

Barry Wilson is a member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery specializing in agriculture.