Tackling the food delusion

By Matt Dempsey

For the last 25 years, the EU has operated a continuous policy to reduce food output in Europe. Not only has there been no institutional price rise for any major commodities since 1983, but many products - milk, cereals, beef and sugar, have seen their support prices cut dramatically in actual money terms.

As a result, self sufficiency has fallen dramatically, with 2007 seeing Europe deficit in cereals for the first time since the late 1970s, it is also deficit in beef, and has just a small surplus in milk. By far the main reason for lower production is lack of profitability for farmers.

But despite the continuous erosion of farmer prices, Europe still hugely matters as a world food producer. It still produces 17% of the world's wheat, 25% of the world's milk, 20% of the world's pigmeat and 13% of the world's beef.

Just this week, the World Food Programme, which gives food aid to the poorest of the poor, sent out an emergency appeal for funds to simply keep people from starving - but who is meant to keep emergency stocks of food, which we have so consciously run down by pauperising so much of commercial farming around the world?

Governments and supermarkets have used overhanging stocks to reduce prices for farmers, and so inevitably when there is a weather emergency or an energy crises, the needed buffer is not there.

Food purchases, unlike computers or cars, cannot be put off for a month or a year. As we have seen, capacity, once run down, takes time to rebuild and most importantly, a degree of food self-sufficiency is critically important if whole nations and peoples are not to be left destitute and hungry.

It is remarkable how little thought has been given to putting in place an international system of food production and trade that gives people the best possible chance of being regularly adequately fed, and at the same time where farmers earn an adequate living - one sufficient to ensure a cross generational commitment to farming and food production. The European Community put such a system in place, but handled the issue of surplus when they arose too clumsily. For the present, our policy makers seem transfixed by a WTO approach, which is now, even to the most detached bystander, completely inappropriate in the case of food.

So far, we have dodged the really fundamental issues in setting national food prices and the conditions under which international trade should take place.

Ireland has a good deal of international credibility in this area. It should at least launch the debate in a European framework. These world trade talks should be parked