World leaders put food security on agenda

By Matt Dempsey

After last Thursday's nationwide stoppage and astonishingly well supported IFA protest in Dublin, the message is very clear: There is a widespread understanding across the country that the present WTO proposals are deeply flawed and are causing deep concern across all of Ireland.

The nationwide inclusivity of the protest has given the political establishment a shock, and presents a new opportunity to the incoming government to reappraise the view of how the WTO issue should be approached from a national point of view.

We are now waiting for the final agricultural proposals from the WTO - at this stage it seems that the timetable has slipped yet again, and they are unlikely to be out until the second week in May. This means that the planned Ministerial meeting for mid-May will not take place until late May or perhaps June.

It is not only Ireland that has difficulties with the process. Developing countries have also seen how the much hyped sugar reforms have simply eroded the price of sugar on the markets to which they had preferential access, and they see the same inevitability in this current process.

At the same time, there is no progress on the whole services side - mainly the banking and insurance sectors. But the eight major industrialised countries of the world - on which the EU as a body also sits - has, for the first time in 30 years, put world food supplies on their agenda for the July meeting.

This can hardly come as a surprise, with numerous exporting countries now imposing bans or taxes on the export of foodstuffs, and many importing countries facing riots because of the increasing global prices and scarcities.

The last 25 years have seen a steady erosion of farm prices and an erosion of both agricultural research and farmer profitability. These are the two joint reasons for the current scarcities. A global free-trade approach will not solve these issues.

The only sensible conclusion is that a new view has to be taken of how food security is to be assured. The function of a food and agricultural policy is to feed people, not to act as a lubricant for opportunistic international trade.

The world market has never been more than a residual outlet, except for a handful of low cost producers. Reliance on it, which is what this WTO round is aiming for, will give neither consistency of supply nor stability of price - both essential components of any sensible food policy for producers and consumers.

The WTO proposals are out of synch with the times and with the reality of oil at $120 a barrel. The world leaders are more in touch than blinkered WTO negotiators. It's time to put the current discussions into cold storage and reassess precisely what we are aiming for in our Agri and food policies.

It is still noticeable that we have not yet got an objective assessment of how the current proposals would impact on Irish agriculture and the wider economy.