From your knowledge and experience how have trade agreements and rules affected the four dimensions of food security (availability, access, utilization, stability)?
If markets were functioning properly, as they are supposed to do in elementary textbooks, then, trade would be extremely beneficial for food security : By selecting the techniques corresponding to the lowest cost, markets would minimize the difficulty of ensuring access to food, even for the poor. And by pooling statistically independent risks, they would stabilize prices in a golden long run equilibrium…
Unfortunately, actual markets do not work like that. The major reason is that producers do not know much about the long run equilibrium prices. They are mistaken, sometime over optimistic, and producing more than necessary, and sometime unduly pessimistic and producing less than it would have been desirable. Then, with a relatively rigid demand, large price fluctuations follow. The latter’s are very detrimental, creating a feeling of insecurity, which results in less investments, and less production than would be necessary for securing “access” to food. I don’t speak of “stability” (obviously reduced by price fluctuations ) nor of “access” (dramatically reduced during the phases of penury, but also during gluts, whence workers are going to be fired out of bankrupt firms). Regarding utilization, I don’t know, although I suspect that large price fluctuations are not and ideal way of optimising this aspect.
Another major market shortcoming had been noticed by Thomas Robert Malthus more than 200 years ago : with a permanent oversupply of poor workers, in a perfectly free market, the productivity of labour is likely to fall below the value of the minimal food requirement, thus forcing some workers to die (and the sooner the better for alleviating suffering) until labour be scarce enough to raise its price. If one is not satisfied with such an outcome (this is my situation) , it is better to forget about extreme liberalism…
What is your knowledge and experience with creating coherence between food security measures and trade rules? Can rights-based approaches play a role?
In order to remedy the above mentioned drawbacks, it is perfectly impossible to devise a national policy without staying in contradiction with the current WTO rules, because any such intervention will be “distorting”. The only feasible policy in this respect would be international, applied everywhere to anybody. It would also contradict the liberal doxa , to some extent involving international authorities into the economy.
If an international strategy is not possible, then, national ones might be possible, under the condition that departures from the WTO rules be allowed….
How can a food security strategy, including components that explicitly support small-scale farmers in agro-biodiverse settings, be implemented in ways that might be compatible with a global market-based approach to food security?
It is simply not possible.
M. Jean-Marc Boussard