There has in this decade been new understanding in the area of food security to the effect that the agenda is not just grain production and targeted employment and food distribution programmes for poor populations. Such programmes have a role, but only as a part of a strategy and a policy framework of widespread growth and income generation and this may also in fact under fairly plausible circumstances require diversification away from grains. Land and water development programmes are a central part of this approach. Much of the discussion at Johannesburg and earlier at WFS+5 was around the findings by now well known that widespread agricultural growth based on sustainable land and water development and management programmes, has a dual effect: - food commodities become available at cheaper prices and sufficient and sustainable employment and income is generated.
A large part of the poor and hungry segments of the work force are low productivity food producers. Demarcation of hunger zones - and targeted programmes - has to take this lager context into account. This larger context is the requirement of an explosion of small projects of a sustainable kind on land and water development, diversified agricultural sub-economies on and of food, non-food crops and non-crop based agriculture like animal husbandry, fish, and tree crops and rural diversification possibilities. Markets, training for processing and trade, and first stage processing are examples. Development of newer organisational systems which encourage fast replication of success stories and credit reform are essentials, as also macro policy reform targeted at the agricultural sector.
Developments at Johannesburg have seen a major improvement in the understanding of the new paradigms and concretisation of the partnership and financing arrangements for it. We trace these developments and make a plea that the Asia-Pacific region must aim at policy convergence to push these concrete agendas forward, so that water and food security targets are achieved. Otherwise flag waiving and slogans on environment will not really push the Sustainable Development Agendas beyond Rio and Rio was ten years ago.
Recent work with participative rural appraisal analysis suggests that the earning power of hungry households is related in a significant manner with the demographic status of the household (hungry households more often tend to be women headed or consist of disabled workers) and health status of the members of the household (morbidity significantly reduces economic status). On the positive side, hungry households in rural areas showed considerable dignity and desire to improve their status. The democratic policy was seen as a factor empowering them and in fact there was considerable resistance in classifying themselves as destitute or hungry. Food security policies have to be embedded in more general human security approaches.
A hunger removal programme, embedded in a food security strategy will have to be a part of the wider process of diversification of agriculture and larger exposure to trade. Sustainability considerations will also require release of land from low productivity cereals to more appropriate cropping sequences in different agro-climatic regimes.
There is evidence to suggest that short sighted policies at the international level are leading to diversification trends being reversed by distorted trade practices. This is strange since trade should normally hasten diversification and suggests that macro and trade reform needs strategic synchronisation with the poverty removal agenda.
An increase in food prices makes the poor relatively worse off, as amongst others a classic Indian study by R.Radhakrishna in a framework of complete demand systems had shown in one of the earlier works of this type. Such work using large data sets of time series of cross-sections of household budgetary studies, led to the by now "conventional knowledge" that faster increase in food prices would make the poor justifiably feel relatively more deprived. With food stocks, foreign exchange reserves, monitoring methods and remedial policies, these trends can be avoided. [...]
In India, the present author was the chairman of the Alagh Task force that defined the poverty norm at 2400 Kcal per person for rural areas and 2100 Kcal for urban areas, or the poverty line, is anchored in a given calorie norm and the corresponding all-India consumption basket for 1973-74. It also developed a procedure for updating the poverty norm for years for which household consumption surveys were not available. Based on demand and income distribution studies done by Radhakrishna and his associates, the task force developed income and price responses of both poor and rich households separately in rural and urban areas. This work started a tradition of econometric investigation which has continued (Table 1 below gives some recent estimates.) This meant that income supplementation and public distribution policies working through pricing and dual markets (an open market and a rationing system) could be integrated quantitatively into commodity market and policy reform specifically aimed at households below the poverty line. This was the beginning of market based solutions to the problem.
India and some other countries, notably the Arab Republic of Egypt, adopted a system of dual pricing in respect of selected goods of mass consumption. The rationale of such a policy is derived from the fact that price elasticity in respect of essential commodities - cereals, pulses, edible oils - is relatively higher for persons below the poverty line both in urban and rural areas. These kinds of policies are now undergoing dramatic changes in a phase of rapid growth, opening up of economies to trade impulses and diversification.
The diversification of the agricultural demand basket became a significant feature of the ESCAP economies from the mid-eighties onwards. FAO projected that up to 2010, GDP growth would be 7 percent annual in East Asia and 4.4 percent in the Near East and North Africa, with the West Asian (Near East) component growing faster. Per capita income growth was 5.7 percent annual for East Asia. With this kind of income growth there was a shift of demand to non-cereal food items and commercial crops. Oilseed demand, for example was to grow at 4.2 percent annual in East Asia and 4.1 percent annual in the Near East and North Africa. Countries projected to have high volumes and growth of agricultural imports were Japan, Hong Kong, the Republic of Korea, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Thailand, Kuwait and Oman. These countries were estimated to be large and growing markets for fruit and vegetables, meat and countries like Japan and Korea, of fish. In fact up to the mid nineties the agricultural import of each of these countries was growing between 4 to 8 percent annual.
[...]
Table 1
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Studies by the International Food Policy Research Institute suggest that malnourished children of age five years or below, in rural India are now placed at 250 million. The only rural area in Asia, where this number is marginally exceeded is China, where malnourished children are placed at 266 million. China and India are large countries and so the absolute numbers are large, but substantial numbers are undernourished in the rest of South Asia and also countries like Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. These are also all countries with a demonstrated capacity to grow grain.
[...]
However, grain growth will slow down more than in the past. In fact livestock production grew by 4.3 percent in South Asia and generally the pattern is that non grain crops grow faster than grain crops and animal husbandry and fish even faster. Diversification is the name of the game and incomes grow fast in response to demand changes. But it is not happening fast enough. You need investment in land and water and as the Bangkok Declaration says, their is synergy in land and water investment when it is made together. You need reform and investment in rural infrastructure. This reform is more difficult. [...]
More recently the East Asian slowdown seems to have led to a slowdown in the diversification of the agrarian economies of the NIE's and this is genuinely worrying since IFPRI models have conclusively demonstrated that without trade and infrastructure reform the poverty and food security agenda will definitely get a setback. I have for this lecture developed a simple indicator of diversification' namely the change in the index of livestock production in a country divided by the index of agricultural production. According to World Development indicators, long term annual GDP growth rate through 1997 was 6.9 percent, 7.0 percent, 7.3 percent, 8.1 percent for Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and the Republic of Korea, respectively. In the period 1984 to 1994, the incremental livestock to agricultural production ratio was 2.12, 2.18, 2.59 and 2.56 respectively for these countries. For those of you who are economists this emerges from the Engels Law. The GDP growth of these countries went down to 4.7 percent, 2.9 percent, 0.3 percent and 4.4 percent and the incremental livestock to agricultural production ratio went down to minus1.79, 1.01, minus 1.61 and minus 0.72 in these countries, from 1994 to 1999. On the other hand countries like China and India which grew at around 8 percent and 6 percent respectively since 1980 and where the growth did not decelerate, had the incremental livestock to agricultural production ratio of 1.82 and 1.15 in the earlier period and 1.59 and 1.53 in the later period suggesting that the momentum of diversification and widespread agricultural growth was kept up. Again detailed data on vegetable and fruit production is available only for the nineties, but the incremental vegetable to cereal production ratio is minus 1.14 in Indonesia, minus 2.58 in Malaysia, minus 0.3 in Thailand and 1.43 in South Korea from 1994 to 1999. In fact since grain export is highly subsidized in the OECD countries there are further constraints on diversification as some Asian countries are also grain exporters. These are fairly serious matters and highlight the importance of macro policies if poverty removing agendas are to be given priority.
Approaches such as that contained in Robert Wade's well known World Politics Paper on East Asia's Economic Success and his famous justification of `strategic trade theory' is I believe still relevant. Wade's paper shows that it is a small world, since he begins and ends his paper with a reference to an Indian description of South Korea's policy perspectives in the early phases of industrialization. The reference by Wade to a South Korean perspective from Y. K. Alagh's view from South Asia in the Asian Development Bank's journal the Asian Development Review (Y.K.Alagh, 1989 ) became a widely cited part of the strategic trade theory literature. Later, for example John Stopford was to place this experience in a larger strategic global political economy perspective and draw management implications for the global firm from it in a contemporary perspective. As Stopford argues a strategic approach to policy in a globalised economy is not easy, since mindless intervention can breed sloth and vested interest, but there is no question that as Stiglitz has recently shown, there is no unique way to reform and the poverty agenda should be a part of the agenda.
What is the nature of reform required? The problem of imposing a hard budget constraint at the local level and helping those who help themselves, is a difficult one to address. Another way of setting the problem, is to harness the great vitality of decentralized markets in replicating widespread rural growth, within the core areas of local and global concern. The need is to harness the great vitality of decentralized markets in replicating widespread rural growth, with institutions and organizations which foster limited and well focused areas of community and cooperative action. If a community is willing to pay the price of reform, it should not be asked to wait, for the reform as designed by a global or national institution, for the system as a whole.
Watershed development, for settled agriculture alternately tree crops, reclamation of saline lands, farmers run lower level irrigation systems, aquifier management in difficult situations, like coastal aquifiers, tribal irrigation cooperatives, tank irrigation have all been reported as success stories in the context of poverty removal and food security and studied. The question is replicability on a larger scale.
There is by now considerable acceptance of these needs in the global debates. For example one of the preparatory meetings for the World Summit on Sustainable Development at Johannesburg was the Expert Thematic Round Table on Promoting Sustainable Development in A Globalizing World, Feb.2002. This expert group squarely addressed the issues we have been pleading for as listed above. The former Swedish P.M. Ulsten, the present author and the Former Environment Minister of New Zealand were the monitors for the different sections of the discussion. Amongst others "The following proposals for action emerged from the discussion of the Round Table are important, because with minor changes they have been incorporated in the Johannesburg Declaration:
Human security implies safety from chronic threats such as hunger, disease and oppression, linking it to the broader concept of human development. One third of people in the world live on less than US$2 per day. More than one billion people in developing countries live without adequate housing, and an estimated 100 million are homeless. What is it that makes individual households as well as national and regional societies vulnerable to hunger and famine? How does the affected population cope with vulnerability and risks? And how far can research contribute to a reduction of these risks and strengthen the coping capabilities of these communities?
Endemic poverty can be different from both hunger and vulnerability. Poverty in India is now estimated at 28 percent of the population, but we know that people who claimed that they do not have two square meal a day went down to less than a twelfth of the population in 1993 from around a fifth in 1983.
Does environmental stress leading to famine situation have a different impact on women, children or the aged? The questions about the linkages between hunger, poverty, land degradation, destruction of resources and demographic changes have been discussed for decades. The Brundtland Commission on Environment and Development stated: "Poverty is a major cause and effect of global environmental problems. It is theoretically futile to attempt to deal with environmental problems without a broader perspective that encompasses the factors underlying world poverty and international equality."
It is mainly the poor that suffer from famine, hunger and malnutrition. But not all poor people are equally vulnerable to hunger, and it is not always the poorest who are exposed to the greatest risks. There are many other factors that determine the vulnerability to hunger. These include the risk of exposure to crises, stress and shocks. There is also the population which is subjected to risk by civil breakdowns and violence on a community scale. As the Chairman of the Advisory Committee of the Gujarat Disaster Management Authority I have argued that the fast development the state has gone through, without corresponding development in civil society organisations, can lead to greater vulnerability. If Gujarats manufacturing sector doubles every seven years as it has in the past and development takes place on a highly decentralised scale as it has, with every district having more than ten thousand workers in the manufacturing sector' when disaster hits like an earthquake or civil violence, the damage is far more. Earthquakes are natural, but damage depends on land use, the nature of development and social and governance institutions to cope up.
As vulnerability is not coincident with poverty, malnutrition or other indices of human deprivation, more research should be based on a better understanding of such environmental crises. Also public responses to improve the coping facilities of social groups should be assisted by targeted research and development projects, and not just by relief. A number of approaches have been chosen to address these problems (e.g. entitlement, empowerment, enfranchisement). Food security should be closely tied to human security. While food supply to the rural poor is still a major problem, more emphasis on urban food security is needed.
The general tendency to combat environmental and social forms of degradation as expressed in famine and poverty should be not only to be "reactive" but to stress preventive measures. The term "preparedness" should move into the centre of attention. This leads to the increased necessity of early warning systems. Policy makers have reacted already by establishing short and medium term early warning systems for the most vulnerable regions. The Famine Early Warning System being developed by the United Nations is an example of such a reaction. However, without accurate socio-economic and political information from the field, such computer assisted warning systems based mainly on biophysical parameters, will not be able to accurately predict famines social breakdown in a given region.
The concept of partnerships should include phasing, sequencing and much greater understanding of the local nuances of the reform process. Our argument in each case is that policies for enduring development basically emerge from the positive energies, which can be generated by a socio-economic structure and such a process of development is sustainable in the sense that it generates resources for propelling it and also works within carrying capacities. The tasks of creative' systems are to lay down the contours of such development and governance systems at national, regional and global levels have to support such development and help those who help themselves. The argument is that of meshing market and strategic objectives.
An interesting corollary of our argument is that such partnerships have to both local and global and the global questions cannot be addressed without addressing local and national issues. This was the basis of the Rio declaration and needs constant reaffirmation. The same issue has been emphasized in the global models presented in the last few years. Sustainable policies are not just questions of global negotiations, but have to grapple with issues of energy requirements, land use, food demand changes and agriculture and technology for meeting industrial and service requirements. This point can be made in a somewhat different manner. If communities are out of balance with their resource endowments, there can be no question of significant advance in the areas of global concern like carbon sequestration or biodiversity.
Country case studies on large countries also bring out the severity of sustainability constraints being faced and the need to make a beginning to " favourable " paths immediately. China and India are two examples. Growth in large countries underlines the quantum jumps being faced. Indian studies make the point that if severe water shortages are to be avoided, the improvements in irrigation efficiency and cropping intensity will have to be much faster than historical rates. If bad coal of over a billion tonnes is not to be burnt for power needs, alternative energy management styles will have to be implemented and hydel and nuclear options considered, in addition to a major focus on renewables. Modern technology will have to be integrated with artisan and rural populations so that the benifits of national and global markets can percolate to the work force. Trade and globalisation will have to grapple with these questions. Regional arrangements may well be a part of the answer. If these kinds of links cannot be established in concrete terms, the concept of partnerships will remain an empty box, even after Johannesburg.
Thank you.
