Subsistence farmers could help global food crisis--group
Agence France-Presse
First Posted 19:18:00 06/04/2008
WARSAW -- The world food crisis is a wake up call for developing nations to turn subsistence farmers into agricultural entrepreneurs able to feed growing populations, according to a global farmers' organization Wednesday.
"These governments have got to wake up and empower farmers to solve the problem," Jack Wilkinson, head of the International Federation of Agricultural Producers (IFAP) told Agence France-Presse on the sidelines of the 38th World Farmers' Congress in the Polish capital.
"This crisis is the effect of 20 years of neglect in agricultural policy," Wilkinson insisted. "Farmers can solve this food crisis right now but we need the tools to do it."
A recent UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report estimated that in order to feed growing demand, food production must increase 50 percent by 2030.
Despite record production in 2008, food prices are expected to remain high, impacting on the world's poorest people the most and sparking riots in numerous countries heavily reliant on food imports, the FAO report noted.
A FAO food security summit underway this week in Rome aims to spearhead solutions.
Grouping 600 million independent family farmers in 115 organizations from 80 countries around the globe, the IFAP is the world's largest family farmers' organization.
It says that to meet spiralling demand and avoid excessive import costs, governments in developing nations must sit down with their farmers and hammer out strategies to realize their full production potential.
This, after decades of relying on dumping-priced surpluses from the West to feed their people.
"The crazy economy we had for a while made it make sense for developing countries to buy grain from the developed world at below the cost of production," Wilkinson said, pointing to subsidy schemes which sparked overproduction in industrialized nations in the 20th Century.
"Why not see this crisis as an incredible opportunity to support local agriculture in developing countries?" Wilkinson asked.
"Which prime minister is calling his farmers and saying we've got a problem here, what do you guys need so you can increase production by 20 percent? Do you need credit? Do you need a road built? Do you need collection stations? Do you need to clean the grain after harvest?," said Wilkinson, himself a Canadian wheat farmer.
"Not many have had these meetings yet -- I'm telling you, they need to start now," he said.
IFAP says that boosting production in the developing world is also a matter of empowering women as the vast majority of food there is cultivated by women.
A declaration set to be adopted by its congress Wednesday pointed to the urgent need for developing states to invest in their farm sectors, build commodity supply chains to help small farmers market goods and implement risk management schemes to counter-balance exposure on the free market, among other measures.
Developing a basic food processing and storage industry to preserve crops is also sorely needed, Wilkinson said.
"We are losing between 20 and 30 percent in many developing countries in crop loss after harvest as food just rots or spoils," said Wilkinson.
"That is a staggering amount and we know it could be solved instantly with the application of existing technology", he added, noting that such solutions are often simple and inexpensive.
"Governments have a fundamental responsibility to put the fundamentals in place to allow farmers to move beyond subsistence.
"So we don't want this crisis, this wake-up call to come and go and for everyone to say, 'boy, that was a tight one,'" he said.
"We'll recover from this one in about 12 months because farmers are very resilient, but we need to have policies in place from now until infinity to feed the people of the world."
"We know all these demand-side issues, the climate-change issues and we've got to get a policy to deal with them right now. We've got to respond to this not as a crisis, but as -- 'this is the future'".
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