Rising Food Prices: Drivers and Implications for Development
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briefing paper
Rising Food Prices
Drivers and Implications for Development
Alex Evans, Centre on International Cooperation, New York University
Chatham House Food Supply Project | April 2008 | CH BP 08/02
Summary points
Global food prices have risen 83 per cent over the last three years. The increases have been
driven by high income growth in emerging economies (probably the single most significant factor),
use of crops for biofuels, the relative inelasticity of supply, historically low stock levels and some
speculative investment.
More recently, national concerns over inflation and prices have led some countries to reduce
exports and others to try to build up stocks – creating a feedback loop that feeds on itself to drive
prices up still further. In the medium to longer term, ‘scarcity trends’ – climate change, the cost of
energy inputs, scarcity of land and water – could limit the supply-side response.
In the immediate term, the priority is to increase both the volume and the quality of humanitarian
assistance available to poor people, including by moving away from in-kind food aid and towards
cash transfers or voucher systems – although it is important to be clear that there are outstanding
questions about how these social protection systems will work, and they should not be seen as a
panacea. The issue of compensatory financing may also arise for some countries facing balanceof-
payments difficulties.
In the longer term, the key challenge is to increase the supply of food: the World Bank estimates
that demand for food will rise by 50 per cent by 2030, as a result of rising affluence and growing
world population. Achieving this challenge will require something close to a revolution, and a
massive investment in agriculture in developing countries.
If supply fails to keep pace with rising demand, then the question of ‘fair shares’ is likely to emerge
as a significant global issue. Already, the effect of a burgeoning global middle class switching to
diets with more meat and dairy products – both relatively inefficient in terms of grain use – has
been to reduce the affordability of staple foods for poorer consumers.
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Introduction
Food prices are rising fast. In 2006, the FAO food price
index rose by an average of 9 per cent compared with the
previous year. By 2007, that figure had increased to 23 per
cent – 37 per cent if December 2007 is compared with
December 2006.1 Over the last three years, according to the
World Bank, global food prices have increased by 83 per
cent.2 While high price events are not unusual in agricultural
markets – even if food prices stabilize at 25 per cent
above their 2001 level, this would still only bring them to
early 1990s levels – the unusual feature of the current situation
is that the price spike applies to almost allmajor food
and feed commodities, rather than just a few of them.3
The move to current price levels has also been
unusually sudden. As recently as 2005, the Outcome
Document from the UN World Summit noted the need
to ‘address the impact of weak and volatile commodity
prices and support the efforts of commodity-dependent
countries to restructure, diversify and strengthen the
competitiveness of their commodity sectors’.4 Less than
three years later, corn is at around its highest level in 11
years,5 rice and soya are at their highest level in 34
years,6 and wheat – like crude oil and gold – has
recently touched its highest level ever.7
This briefing paper focuses on what this important
change means for international development. It starts
by assessing the drivers of rising prices, noting that
while in the short term the pressure is on the demand
side, a suite of ‘scarcity issues’ – climate change, water
scarcity, energy security, pressure on land – will
increasingly affect the supply side over the longer term.
The paper then discusses the implications of higher
prices for developing countries, before setting out a
brief survey of implications for development policy,
focusing in particular on humanitarian assistance, but
also touching on increasing supply, helping lowincome
countries to benefit from rising prices, scarcity
issues, trade and the question of fair shares.
Drivers of increasing prices
At present, the main drivers of increasing prices are on
the demand side. Historically, demand growth for food
has been about 1. 5 per cent each year; now, however, it
has risen to 2 per cent, and Goldman Sachs estimate
that it will be as high as 2. 6 per cent within a decade.8
The World Bank estimates that food production will
need to grow by another 50 per cent by 2030 (and 85 per
cent for meat) to fulfil projected demand.9
A particularly important part of the picture has been
rapidly rising income growth, notably in emerging
economies such as China and India. Joachim von
Braun, Director General of the International Food
Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), argues that high
income growth accounts for perhaps half of the recent
increases in food prices.10 As middle classes grow more
affluent, food consumption patterns change too – often
1. IFAD, ‘Growing demand on agriculture and rising prices of commodities – an opportunity for smallholders in low-income, agriculture-based countries?’, briefing
note for Round Table at IFAD Governing Council, 14 February 2008.
2. Andrew Martin, ’Fuel choices, food crises and finger-pointing’, New York Times, 15 April 2008.
3. Ibid.
4. UN World Summit 2005 Outcome Document: see http://tinyurl.com/2vp8ol.
5. Chris Flood, ‘Wheat and corn prices poised for further rises’, Financial Times, 11 January 2008.
6. Javier Blas, ‘Rising prices set to worsen global hunger’, Financial Times, 18 December 2007; Javier Blas, ‘UN pleads for $500m to avoid food crisis’, Financial
Times, 24 March 2008.
7. Javier Blas and Isabel Gorst, ‘Wheat prices in biggest one-day rise’, Financial Times, 25 February 2008.
8. Jeffrey Currie, ’Food, Feed and Fuels: an outlook on the agriculture, livestock and biofuels markets’, Goldman Sachs presentation, March 2007: see
http://tinyurl.com/yqldjv.
9. Jenny Wiggins and Javier Blas, ‘Bread and butter issues: rising prices may herald the first global food shortage since the 1970s’, Financial Times, 23 October 2007.
10. Julian Borger, ‘Feed the world? We are fighting a losing battle, UN admits’, The Guardian, 26 February 2008.
‘Over the last three years,
according to the World Bank,
global food prices have
increased by 83 per cent’
towards diets richer inmeat and dairy products that are
much more intensive in terms of both grain and water
use.
The role of biofuels as a source of demand for grain
has also been a significant element of recent food price
rises (von Braun estimates 30 per cent of the picture).11
The US already spends $7 billion a year supporting
ethanol.12 This consumes 20 per cent of America’s corn
crop13 – a figure likely to rise to 32 per cent by 2016.14
Looking ahead, the EU has a target for 10 per cent of its
transport fuel to come from biofuels by 2020, while the
US has proposed a target of 36 billion gallons of renewable
fuel by 2022.15
But there are also supply factors in play. In the
shorter term, one issue is that food supply is quite
inelastic, i.e. supply responds relatively slowly to
increases in demand. IFPRI estimate that aggregate
agricultural supply increases by only about 1–2 per cent
for each 10 per cent increase in price – and by even less
when (as now) prices are very volatile.16 The problem of
reduced exports from important food producers (such
as India, Argentina and Kazakhstan) is also problematic,
especially when matched by importing countries
seeking to purchase larger than normal volumes of
food in order to build up stockpiles. Another shorterterm
supply-side issue is that some current price
volatility is attributable to speculative investors
seeking safety in commodity markets from the weak
dollar and from falling equity and bond markets –
although opinion is divided over how significant a
factor this is.17 There is also the factor of low inventory
stocks, which explains some of the current market
volatility.
In the short term, food prices look set to ease somewhat,
particularly if (as now seems likely) the northern
hemisphere enjoys a good wheat crop.18 But in the
longer term, four more fundamental supply-side
factors – which might collectively be termed ‘scarcity
issues’ – are already starting to make themselves felt,
and are likely to become more significant.
First, the costs of agricultural inputs – and especially
energy – are rising. Today’s global agricultural
system is predicated on the availability of cheap,
readily available energy, for use in every part of the
value chain: both directly (e.g. cultivation, processing,
refrigeration, shipping, distribution) and indirectly
(e.g. manufacture of fertilizers, pesticides – the cost of
urea, a fertilizer, has almost tripled since 2003).19 But
as noted earlier, oil prices are already at their highest
ever level; many analysts expect them to stay relatively
high over the medium to long term. In addition, since
food can now be converted into fuel, there is effectively
an arbitrage relationship between the two,
implying an ongoing linkage between food and fuel
prices.20
Second, water scarcity is likely to become a more
pressing issue. Global demand for water has tripled in
the last 50 years;21 500 million people live in countries
chronically short of water, and this number is likely to
rise to 4 billion by 2050.22 A particular worry is depletion
of limited groundwater resources, on which some
parts of the world – including the US, Egypt, Pakistan,
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11. Ibid.
12. International Institute for Sustainable Development: http://www.iisd.org/pdf/2007/media_grain_journal.pdf.
13. Reuters, ‘Ethanol, biodiesel eats into US corn stockpiles’, 15 May 2006, at http://tinyurl.com/27cuk8.
14. US Department of Agriculture estimate: see http://tinyurl.com/yp4juw.
15. Worldwatch Institute: see http://tinyurl.com/ypdnrm.
16. International Food Policy Research Institute food policy report, The World Food Situation: New Driving Forces and Required Actions, December 2007: see
http://www.ifpri.org/pubs/fpr/pr18.pdf.
17. See, for example, Martin Wolf, ‘Life in a tough world of high commodity prices’, Financial Times, 4 March 2008.
18. Javier Blas and Krishna Guha, ‘Commodities’ prices fall as hedge funds cut exposure’, Financial Times, 24 March 2008.
19. Lex column, ‘Flying fertiliser’, Financial Times, 10 April 2008.
20. Jeffrey Currie, interview with FT.com, 19 July 2007: see http://tinyurl.com/24dmdp.
21. Ashbindu Singh, A Tale of Two Trends: providing information and knowledge for decision-making in water-scarce regions through water assessments, UNEP: see
http://www.unwater.org/downloads/wwwSingh.pdf.
22. Robin Clarke and Jannet King, The Atlas of Water (London: Earthscan, 2004).
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India and China – have been enjoying a ‘free ride’ for
the past two or three decades.23
Third, there is the issue of land availability. Some
commodities analysts argue that whereas historical
increases in demand have been met through increasing
yields, in future an expansion of acreage will also be
required.24 However, this will be expensive, given the
infrastructure investment involved; there may also be
diminishing returns, since much of the best land is
already under cultivation.25 Above all, there is simply
increasing competition for what land there is, including
food, feed, fibre (e.g. timber, paper), fuel, forest conservation,
carbon sequestration and urbanization, on top
of high rates of soil loss to erosion and desertification.
The FAO estimates that there is at most 12 per cent
more land available that is not already forested or
subject to erosion or desertification, and that 16 per
cent of arable land is already degraded.26
The fourth, and perhaps most fundamental, factor is
climate change. Overall, the International Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) projects that global food
production could rise if local average temperatures
increase by between 1 and 3 degrees Celsius, but could
decrease above this range. Crucially, however, this is
before extreme weather events are taken into account;
and the IPCC judges that extreme weather, rather than
temperature, is likely to make the biggest difference to
food security.27 Glacial melting will affect agriculture as
well: the IPCC estimates, for example, that many
Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035, with catastrophic
results for Chinese and Indian agriculture
during the dry season.28 Its assessment is also that
‘climate change increases the number of people at risk
of hunger’, and will lead to an increase of between 40
million and 170 million in the number of undernourished
people.29
Many of these factors, on both the supply and the
demand side, also apply to fisheries and aquaculture.
Demand for fish and seafood is rising sharply, again
largely because of increasing affluence. But while the
FAO estimates that an additional 40 million tonnes of
aquatic food a year will be needed by 2030, it also notes
that catches of wild fish have remained roughly stable
since the mid-1980s, at around 90 million tonnes a year,
and forecasts that this figure is unlikely to rise substantially.
30 These underlying trends will place increasing
emphasis on aquaculture, which last year accounted for
43 per cent of fish consumption (up from just 9 per cent
in 1980).31 However, future expansion of the sector will
depend not only on increasing investment capital, but
also on availability of land, fresh water and energy –
which as noted above, are all already subject to stresses
of their own.
All in all, the jury is still out on whether recent food
price rises will be sustained or not. Many commentators,
including the World Bank, estimate it will take
‘several years’ for supplies to increase to rebuild stocks
and allow prices to fall.32 However, over the longer term,
structural factors – a population forecast to rise to 9.2
billion by 2050, rising affluence and the four ‘scarcity
trends’ referred to above – suggest the possibility of a
structural, rather than merely cyclical, shift. Models
from both IFPRI and the US Department of Agriculture
show that while food prices will not rise much more
23. Ibid.
24. Jeffrey Currie, ‘Food, Feed and Fuels’ (note 8 above).
25. Bidwells, The bull run in soft commodities: commodity cycle or structural shift in food and farming?, briefing note: http://www.bidwells.co.uk/documents/
SoftCommodities.pdf.
26. Ibid.
27. IPCC, Fourth Assessment Report, Working Group 2, Chapter 5: ‘Food, fibre and forest products’, 2007, pp. 275 and 299.
28. Lester Brown, ‘Melting Mountain Glaciers Will Shrink Grain Harvests in China and India’, Earth Policy Institute briefing note, 20 March 2008.
29. IPCC, ‘Food, fibre and forest products’, p. 300.
30. The FAO’s last State of World Aquaculture report (2006) estimated that of the nearly 600 species groups it monitors, 52 per cent of wild fish stocks are fully
exploited, 17 per cent over-exploited, 7 per cent depleted and 1 per cent recovering from depletion; 20 per cent are moderately exploited and only 3 per cent
under-exploited.
31. FAO, ‘Nearly half of all fish eaten today farmed, not caught’, news release, 4 September 2006, at http://www.fao.org/newsroom/en/news/2006/1000383/
index.html.
32. World Bank, High Food Prices: A Harsh New Reality, 29 February 2008: see http://tinyurl.com/362wcg.
over the next decade, they are also unlikely to fall
significantly.33
Implications for development
Rising food prices will hit poor countries and poor
people hardest, and will present an obvious impediment
to achieving the Millennium Development Goal of
halving hunger by 2015. The FAO has already
announced that 36 countries are in crisis in terms of
food security, and will need external assistance;34 of
these, 21 are in Africa (although not all of them have
been affected equally).35
Poor people typically spend a high proportion of
their income on food purchases: Oxfam put this figure
at around 50–80 per cent.36 Of particular concern are
landless poor people in rural areas. Most poor people
are rural, and most rural poor people are net food
buyers, who are unlikely to be compensated fully by
additional employment as agriculture grows, or by
higher wages.37 However, the extent and rapidity of
current rises mean that urban populations are also
being hit, as World Food Programme head Josette
Sheeran recently noted: ‘There is food on shelves but
people are priced out of the market. There is vulnerability
in urban areas we have not seen before.’38
Humanitarian assistance
High food prices are already posing extensive challenges
to the provision of humanitarian aid. The World
Food Programme currently feeds 73 million people in
78 countries (less than a tenth of the world’s undernourished).
Its agreed budget for 2008 was $2.9 billion,
but rising costs – for logistics as well as for food itself –
mean that, according to the WFP, this level will not
even cover current deliveries and at least $500 million
more will now be needed.39 Josette Sheeran raised the
possibility in a recent interview that the agency would
have to look at ‘cutting the food rations or even the
number of people reached’ if the additional funding
were not forthcoming.40
Improvements in aid quality are needed too: humanitarian
aid still needs to shift to a proactive insurance
model from its current reactive configuration.
Although the Central Emergency Response Fund – in
which funds are allocated before emergencies – is likely
to meet its 2008 target of $500 million, this remains a
small proportion of the overall requirement.
Humanitarian requirements in 2007 were $4 billion, for
example, and the older, more reactive Consolidated
Appeals Process remains the main window for
funding.41
Domestic policy measures
Numerous countries have already reacted to rising food
prices with concern and a broad range of policy inter-
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33. Simon Maxwell, ’Will rising food prices derail development efforts?’, ODI blog, 29 February 2008, at http://blogs.odi.org.uk/blogs/main/archive/2008/02/29/
5520.aspx.
34. World Bank, High Food Prices; FAO, Crop Prospects and World Food Situation, February 2008.
35. The full list is Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Burundi, Central African Republic, Chad, DRC, Republic of Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Dominican Republic, Ethiopia,
Eritrea, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, Indonesia, Iraq, Kenya, DPR Korea, Lesotho, Liberia, Mauritania, Moldova, Nepal, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Russia
(Chechnya), Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Swaziland, Timor Leste, Uganda and Zimbabwe.
36. World Food Programme briefing note at http://www.wfp.org/english/?ModuleID=137&Key=2778; Borger, ‘Feed the world?’ (note 10 above).
37. Simon Maxwell, ‘Will rising food prices derail development efforts?’; World Bank, High Food Prices.
38. Borger, ‘Feed the world?’.
39. Ibid.
40. Javier Blas and Gillian Tett, ‘High food prices may force aid rationing’, Financial Times, 24 February 2008.
41. Data taken from OCHA: see http://ochaonline.un.org/Default.aspx?alias=ochaonline.un.org/cerf.
‘Poor people typically spend a
high proportion of their income on
food purchases: Oxfam put this
figure at around 50–80 per cent’
ventions designed to address the situation. The
approach taken by most countries so far (Azerbaijan,
Bangladesh, Bosnia, China, Egypt, the EU, Ghana, India,
Indonesia, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, Peru, the
Philippines, Russia, Taiwan and Turkey) has been to
reduce or eliminate import tariffs.42 However, at least
some of these reductions in import tariffs have been
offset by the imposition of additional export tariffs or
quotas by other countries – some of them major
producers – in order to reduce domestic prices
(Argentina – where the move has led to major unrest
among farmers – China, India, Kazakhstan, Ukraine
and Vietnam).43 Among other approaches currently
being tested are making purchases to establish or
replenish stockpiles and strategic reserves – which in
turn increases pressure on prices (Iraq, Malaysia,
Turkey and the UAE); increasing subsidy levels (Egypt,
India and Oman); capping prices (China, Russia and
Thailand); and examining the possibility of introducing
rationing (Malaysia and Pakistan).44
Various countries have witnessed protests, riots or
other forms of civil unrest that are at least partly attributable
to rising food prices. At the time of writing, some
of the most serious disturbances so far have been in
Egypt, Haiti and Lebanon; unrest has also been experienced
in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, China, Côte d’Ivoire,
Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Mozambique,
Niger, the Philippines, Senegal, Uzbekistan, Vietnam
and Yemen.45
As these lists show, rising food prices are of concern
in every part of the world, and so far there is little
consensus among governments on what to do about the
issue. Currently most donors appear to be in information-
gathering mode themselves, although World Bank
President Bob Zoellick has called for a ‘new deal’ on
food, including a recommendation that countries
investigate cash transfers targeted at poor consumers,
rather than the less efficient option of regulating food
prices across the entire economy.46 There is significant
scope for donors to help developing countries to share
information on which approaches have worked where.
Import costs and trade balances
The World Bank has argued that more expensive food
imports will disrupt the trade balances of relatively few
countries, because the majority will see largely offsetting
gains in other commodity exports; from the Bank’s
perspective, the countries most adversely affected
include Jordan, Egypt, the Gambia, Lesotho, Djibouti and
Haiti.47 However, the impact of rising food prices needs to
be looked at in tandem with concurrently rising energy
prices, which are also imposing strain on many
importing countries. An International Energy Agency
study in December 2007 found that the rising cost of oil
had already wiped out the benefits of increased aid and
debt relief to 13 non-oil-producing African countries
including South Africa, Ghana, Tanzania, Ethiopia and
Senegal. According to the IEA, the increased cost of oil
bought by these countries since 2004 was 3 per cent of
their combined GDP – more than the total sum of debt
relief and aid they had received over the past three years.48
If the combined effect of higher food and energy prices
is to create balance-of-payments problems for countries,
the question of compensatory financing may emerge as a
significant issue. So far, the InternationalMonetary Fund
reports that demand for financing fromfunding windows
such as the Exogenous Shocks Facility has been low,
although critics retort that this is at least in part because
of the significant conditionality attached to such lending.
It is also important to note that funding windows
designed to provide liquidity on shocks such as sudden
changes in terms of trade are built on the assumption
that such shocks will be short-lasting. If – as suggested
earlier – food prices have risen as a result of a longer-
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42. Sources: media coverage.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid.
45. Matthew Green, ‘Cameroon crisis continues as inflation surges’, Financial Times, 4 March 2008.
46. Krishna Guha and James Politi, ‘Zoellick stresses fight against hunger’, Financial Times, 23 January 2008.
47. World Bank, High Food Prices – a Harsh New Reality, briefing note, at http://tinyurl.com/362wcg.
48. Ed Crooks and William Wallis, ‘Africa aid wiped out by rising cost of oil’, Financial Times, 28 December 2007.
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termstructural shift, then there are open questions about
how quickly countries taking out loans will be able to pay
them back, potentially heightening pressure to increase
the concessional element of such loans.49
Policy implications
What does all this mean for policy-makers – and especially
for donors?
Humanitarian assistance
Start with what rising food prices mean for the humanitarian
system, where short-term pressures are likely to
be most acute. First, consider the issue of aid volume in
the context of humanitarian assistance. As noted
earlier, the World Food Programme has called urgently
for an additional $500 million. Given the scale of recent
food price increases, it does appear likely that additional
funds will be needed just to maintain current
levels of food assistance. It would be of particular
concern if the US were to follow up on suggestions that
it might reduce the amount of food aid it provides to
theWFP as a result of rising prices and costs, given that
the US is by some distance the largest donor to the
programme.50 (Washington is reported to have told the
WFP that it is facing a 40% increase in food commodity
prices compared with last year, and hence will ‘radically
cut’ the amount it gives away – although more recently
it has announced a $200 million increase in food aid,
suggesting that this risk may have abated somewhat.51)
But at the same time, more specificity is needed on
how the WFP’s headline figure breaks down. It would
be useful, for example, to know how the $500 million
would be distributed between different types of aid
(such as food aid, vouchers or cash transfers), and
between which recipient countries. It is also essential
that the WFP’s call for additional funds be set in the
context of the needs of the UN humanitarian system as
a whole, given that the programme accounts for only
around half of total global food aid.52 While there is no
doubting the WFP’s effectiveness in setting out its case,
donors also need to hear from other multilateral agencies
(notably UNICEF, the UN Development
Programme, FAO and the World Health Organization),
and ensure that OCHA (the UN’s Office for the
Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) is in the lead on
coordinating funding calls as well as other emergency
action from across the sector.
This raises the question of wider humanitarian
system coherence. While progress was made in 2005 on
strengthening OCHA’s coordination role at global level,
on the role of Humanitarian Coordinators in country
and in the use of pooled funding arrangements, much
remains to be done. The WFP has much to contribute
here. It is fair to say that at the time of the UN High
Level Panel on System-Wide Coherence in 2006, the
WFP was not among the principal enthusiasts for a
more coherent approach. But as the humanitarian
system moves into a demanding context with the
potential for faster-paced operations, better interagency
coherence becomes more important than ever.
On a related note, it would be interesting to explore the
possibility of a ‘one UN’ initiative on food security, which
49. Stephany Griffith-Jones, letter, Financial Times, 2 January 2008. See also Stephany Griffith-Jones and José Antonio Ocampo, ‘Compensatory Financing for
Shocks: What Changes are Needed?’, working paper, 2008: see http://tinyurl.com/5w5pxt.
50. The US provided around $1.1bn of assistance to the WFP last year, mostly as food aid. The EU and Canada are the second and third largest donors, at
$250m and $160m respectively, mostly given in cash.
51. Borger, ‘Feed the world?; Reuters report, ’Bush releases $200 million in emergency food aid’, 14 April 2008, at http://tinyurl.com/4nn2hr.
52. World Food Programme, Food Aid Flows 2006, at http://www.wfp.org/interfais/index2.htm.
‘While there is no doubting the
WFP’s effectiveness in setting
out its case, donors also need to
hear from other multilateral
agencies ’
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Rising Food Prices
could bring a harmonized approach to bear both at the
global level and in specific countries (UNDP’s office in
Yemen has already been approached by the government
with a view to piloting such an approach). Such an initiative
might bring together the WFP, FAO, IFAD, UNICEF,
UNDP and WHO, and focus on developing and mobilizing
resources for a package of policies and
programmes, potentially for presentation at the
Secretary-General’s summit meeting on the Millennium
Development Goals in New York in September 2008.
Another important current issue is changing ways of
giving humanitarian assistance. As noted earlier, many
donors (including the WFP) are increasingly focusing
attention on social protection programmes, given that
poor countries tend to lack social welfare systems – a
deficit that places many poor people with precarious
livelihoods at acute risk from economic shocks and
stresses. For such vulnerable people, access to food is as
important as the availability of food, and social protection
programmes can play an important role in closing
the gap.53 But it is important to stress that the current
enthusiasm for social protection approaches is relatively
novel, and that the evidence base on the effects
and challenges of such projects is not yet as extensive
as it could be.
In particular, humanitarian donors need to be
acutely aware of the political impact of a large-scale
shift towards the provision of safety nets. If donors
provide cash or food directly – as opposed to through
national governments – then there is a potential risk of
diluting states’ own accountability to their citizens.
Better answers are also needed to questions about the
potential inflationary impact of some social protection
measures, the best combination of cash and in-kind
transfers, what kind of targeting and conditionality
works best, and so on.54 It is too soon to see social
protection systems as any kind of panacea to the issue
of high food prices. Donors should also assess carefully
what the value added would be of the WFP’s moving
into wider social protection, given the humanitarian
sector’s relatively limited experience of social safety
nets, and the extent of the organizational change and
shift away from traditional core business that this
would imply for the WFP.
In the background lies the question of what it will
mean for humanitarian assistance if (as considered
earlier in this paper) the recent shift to higher food
prices is structural rather than just a blip – if, in other
words, this is the ‘new normality’. At present, around
850 million people are classified as ‘food insecure’. At
times of peak demand, humanitarian agencies have
been able to feed about 100 million people at the very
most. If a longer-term effect of changes in world food
markets were to increase the number of people in need
of humanitarian assistance significantly beyond that
level, then it is not clear that the humanitarian system
would have the capacity and knowledge to respond,
even if sufficient financial resources were available. It is
therefore essential that in addition to coping with the
current short-term turbulence in food markets, donors
make a sustained effort to ask ‘what if?’ questions and
plan for further contingencies.
Wider issues
As discussed above, the implications of higher food
prices extend far beyond humanitarian assistance. The
suddenness with which the issue has emerged has raised
not only the political stakes, but also the risk of knee-jerk
policy responses. Meanwhile, the complexity of the
drivers of rising food prices makes a comprehensive
approach essential – while also increasing the likelihood
of unintended consequences from policy responses.
Policy-makers therefore face an awkward and hazardous
balancing act between the urgency of responding, on the
one hand, and taking enough time to understand the
consequences of what they are doing, on the other.
The remainder of this paper identifies some of the
larger policy questions that arise for aid donors. In most
cases it does not attempt to answer them; at this stage,
the aim is to build the evidence base and to act as a cata-
53. Elizabeth Cromwell and Rachel Slater, Food Security and Social Protection, ODI submission to Commission for Africa, September 2004.
54. Ibid.; see also DFID, Using social transfers to improve human development, DFID practice paper, February 2006.
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lyst for more intensive and thorough conversations,
involving a wider range of actors, with the objective of
building shared awareness around the issue. With that
caveat stated, consider the following issues:
Increasing supply. Perhaps the hardest question is how
the world is going to increase food supply to meet the
huge rise in anticipated demand noted at the beginning
of this paper.55 Much work needs to be done, quickly, to
figure out where this increase is going to come from
(both geographically, and in terms of new agricultural
techniques and technologies), and what needs to be
done to make it happen. An urgent first step towards
increasing the available food supply should be to
ensure that production of biofuels does not undermine
food security – an issue now acknowledged by
President Bush, who has commented that ‘If you look at
what is happening in corn, you’re beginning to see the
food issue and the energy issue collide.’56 While an
outright ban would probably be unwieldy and undesirable,
discussion of basic standards for biofuels
production – with food security at their heart – should
be an early priority for policy-makers.
Helping low income countries to benefit. While supply
increases in the shorter term are likely to come from
existing ‘breadbasket’ countries such as the US,
Canada, Russia, Ukraine, Brazil and Argentina, there is
longer-term potential for lower-income countries to
play a significant part as well – especially in Africa,
largely bypassed by the first Green Revolution, where
productivity remains far lower than in other regions.
But although poor countries should in theory be able to
benefit from rising prices for agricultural commodities,
the reality is that they are held back by poor infrastructure,
the need for better access to technology and
finance, restrictive supply chain standards and other
barriers as well. Aid donors therefore need to be clear
about how crucial their role will be in this. Until
recently, agriculture was seen as a rather unfashionable
relic of the past in many donor agencies (and perhaps
especially in their country offices). That needs to
change quickly: donors need to invest heavily in
programme aid – and in many cases, rebuilding their
own capacity – in rural development.
Managing scarcity. Donors will also need to be capable
of helping countries to devise integrated strategies for
managing scarcity in land, water, energy, food and the
effects of climate change. The first step towards this is
mainstreaming throughout donor agencies a much
better sense of how these scarcity trends link to each
other – as they all do, frequently in subtle and complex
ways. On top of that, donors need to integrate scarcity
issues more thoroughly into their governance and
economic analyses (as underlined by the role of land
disputes as a catalyst for the recent post-election
violence in Kenya). Within the specific context of food,
a good starting point would be to build a much more
comprehensive picture of the overall resource footprint
of different foods (and in the process, move the debate
on from its current unsophisticated focus on the minutiae
of specific variables, such as ‘food miles’).
Trade. Donors also need a clearer picture of the trade
dimensions of the current food prices issue. As noted
earlier, the current picture of food-focused trade measures
is growing more complex by the day, as importers
lower import tariffs even as exporters raise export tariffs.
Meanwhile, some countries – including China – are
apparently exploring the potential for bilateral food
supply arrangements, of the kind already becoming more
common in energy supply. Other countries are displaying
enthusiasm for import substitution policies – most
notably the Philippines, which has announced its intention
to move from being one of the world’s largest
importers of rice to self-sufficiency within just three
years.57 Donors and development advocates need to find
55. See Wiggins and Blas, ‘Bread and butter issues’ (note 9 above).
56. Javier Blas and Jenny Wiggins, ‘Expensive tastes’, Financial Times, 18 March 2008.
57. Conrad Carino, ’Rice sufficiency not impossible, experts say’, Manila Times, 7 April 2008.
their way towards a renewed strategic stance on agricultural
trade. Even before food prices began their sharp
increase, there was lively debate in the donor community
about the extent to which agricultural trade liberalization
would in practice benefit low-income countries. That
debate is now further complicated by the fact that even if
liberalization is desirable in principle, careful attention
will need to be paid to the need to sequence reforms, in
order to avoid (for example) the risk that rapid elimination
of Common Agricultural Policy export subsidies
could increase food prices in developing countries.
The question of fair shares
Finally, there is the elephant in the room: the long-term
question of fair shares, pithily illustrated in a recent
cartoon in the US in which a portly man in a suit takes
a maize cob out of an African child’s food bowl, with
the speech bubble, ‘Excuse me. I’m going to need this to
run my car.’58
Inequality between countries is falling for the first
time in a generation. From 2003 to 2007, per capita
income grew faster in every region of the South than in
developed countries: hardly news in East and South
Asia, but a major shift in Latin America and Africa. In
1980 developed-country GDP was 23 times higher than
in developing countries; in 2007 it was 18 times higher.59
Yet even as inequality between countries falls, it is rocketing
within them – particularly within developing
countries, and above all in emerging economies such as
China, where the difference between the top 20 per cent
and the bottom 20 per cent has grown by 40 per cent
over the last three years.60
In his book Development as Freedom, Amartya Sen
observes that ‘the focus has to be on the economic
power and substantive freedom of individuals and
families to buy enough food, and not just on the
quantum of food in the country in question.’ Later, he
observes that ‘[some] who buy food may be ruined
because the real purchasing power of their money
incomes may have shrunk sharply. Such a famine may
occur without any decline in food output, resulting as it
does from a rise in competing demand rather than a fall
in total supply.’
Now, Sen’s questions may be starting to apply at the
global level. Even while the line between developed and
developing countries grows more blurred with each
passing year, the gulf between the haves and the havenots
has never looked wider. In a context of increasing
tightness of food supply – which is likely to grow
further as population, affluence and scarcity trends all
continue to rise – we may well reach a situation in
which relative inequality can have absolute implications
for the world’s poor, and in which a burgeoning
global middle class inadvertently takes food beyond the
purchasing power of the world’s poorest people.
Indeed, we may already be there.
Conclusion
This is a time of massive change for global food policy,
in developed as well as developing countries. In addition
to the concerns discussed in this paper about what
higher food prices mean for poor people, there are questions
about environmental standards; obesity and
health; animal welfare; competitiveness, between countries
and companies; the security of globalized
‘just-in-time’ supply chains; and numerous other issues.
At the heart of these debates is the deceptively simple
question: what should global food policy be trying to
achieve? We need to be clear at the outset about the
nature of the choices that we face. There are real tradeoffs
between different potential objectives in food
policy – such as competitiveness for consumers, security
of supply, environmental conservation, local
sourcing. That raises the question: who is the ‘we’ that
decides the shape of 21st-century food policy? Who has
the power to make choices?
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58. See http://www.globaldashboard.org/scarcity/a-thousand-words/.
59. Figures from UNCTAD Trade and Development Report 2008, quoted in John Vandaele, ‘Globalisation “localises” inequality’, IPS analysis note, 11 March 2008:
see http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=41549.
60. Ibid.
It is vital that advocates for development get
involved in these debates now, and start making the
argument that the primary objective of the world food
system in the 21st century must be to feed all of us, as
healthily as possible. From there, work can be started to
evaluate what such a food system might look like. But if
the hard questions about overall objectives are swept
under the carpet, or answered without being properly
considered, then one outcome seems certain: the
world’s poor will be under-represented in the debate,
and marginalized by its outcome.
But as they start to put forward their case for a food
system designed to meet the needs of all the world’s
people, advocates for development should take great
care with the narratives they set out. Food has always
been an emotive subject, and never more so than when
questions start to be asked about whether there is
enough to go around. People rarely make better decisions
for being in a fearful frame of mind. ‘Malthusian’
narratives carry with them a risk of self-fulfilling
prophecy if they lead to bad decisions, and are in their
way just as deterministic as ‘Cornucopian’ narratives
with their message of inexhaustible plenty.
Instead, development advocates may find that the
emergence of food as a top-rank political issue provides
them with an opportunity to form new alliances, new
coalitions and new drivers for change. Stressing the
reality that we have the power to make choices about
the kind of food system we want is a good starting
point. In that light, we may find that ‘food democracy’
is a more useful frame than ‘food security’ – both in the
kind of thinking that it engenders, and in the policy
options and approaches that it implies.
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Rising Food Prices
‘Stressing the reality that we
have the power to make choices
about the kind of food system we
want is a good starting point’
Chatham House is one of the world's leading
organizations for the analysis of international issues.
It is membership-based and aims to help individuals and
organizations to be at the forefront of developments in an
ever-changing and increasingly complex world.
Alex Evans is a Non-resident Fellow at New York
University’s Center on International Cooperation, where
he runs the Climate Change and Global Public Goods
programme (email: alex. . edu). He is
leading a joint CIC/Chatham House initiative designed
to provide policy-makers with a strategic assessment
of global food prices and their implications, particularly
for developing countries. The study is being conducted
in association with Chatham House’s research project,
UK Food Supply in the 21st Century: the New
Dynamic. The financial support of Oxfam and Foodvest
is gratefully acknowledged.
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