Trade Liberalization and Food Security:
The present trade agreements are mostly commercial driven and 4 dimensions of the food security is scarcely reached. Most of the trade agreements are between self sufficient nations leaving behind the needy nations with scarce resources. International Policies should concentrate all the nations and ensure appropriate distribution of the produce.
As mentioned in the references cited, agriculture constitute very less percent of the nation’s export and very few portion of agriculture produce cross borders in the world. Trade Liberalization would help in ensuring food security in all the parts of globe yet several factors need to be considered while liberalization. Liberalization of Trade policies and ensuring Food Security involves several issues interlinked with them. Some of them are:
Moral Imperative: Very complicated one to achieve, but every nation should develop a moral imperative to distribute the excess agricultural produce to the nations with grave need for it.
Food Safety: Food safety standards vary with nation to nation. Hence liberalization should be made after designing common food safety standards for nations in the world. This activity would ensure hassle free food trade among different world nations.
Crop Diversity: There exists danger of loss of crop diversity by simplifying international trade policies, as the farmers would tend to grow only the crops which possess international demand in order to gain profits. Hence trade policy liberalization should be concentrated on different crops.
Subsidies: Allowing agricultural subsidies would encourage even small scale farmers, belonging to areas favorable for agriculture, for production of quality produce, which can be further traded after keeping suitable buffer in the nation.
Food Loss/Food Wastage: Ensuring reduction in food loss and food wastage globally, would in turn increase availability of food and the excess of produce may be exported to needy.
Needy Countries: Liberalization policies should be designed in such a way to facilitate needy countries and not in way to profit developed countries. There should be phase wise liberalization involving needy countries first then the other nations.
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Vijay Yadav. T
INDIA
Mr. Vijay Yadav Tokala