The Chronicle Essay
Food Trade and Food Rights
By George Kent

UN Photo

In a recent UN Chronicle issue [Issue 3, 2001], Asbjørn Eide pointed out that the obligation to protect the right to food “requires measures by the State to ensure that enterprises or individuals do not deprive individuals of their access to adequate food”. What if that deprivation does not result from the actions of any enterprise or individual, or any specific actor, but instead results from the nature of the social and economic system in which people are embedded?

What if it is the market system itself, and not bad actors within it, that causes the problem? And what if people are unable to get enough food not only because of the operations of market systems within countries, but also because of the patterns of international trade? Who then has what responsibilities to assure that every individual’s right to adequate food is realized?

Many suggest that the globalization of international trade will benefit everyone. The rising tide of trade supposedly will lift all ships. But it may be that instead, as the critics suggest, it lifts only yachts, and swamps vessels that are leaky and decrepit.

The global economic system, like the systems within advanced industrial nations, does a lot of people a lot of good. However, at the same time, it does harm to others. Weak groups are often hurt by patterns of trade, debt servicing and structural adjustment. The economic system that advantages the strong disadvantages the weak, making them even more vulnerable.

Global trade contributes to the steadily widening gaps between rich and poor. Between 1960 and 1989, economic growth in the richest nations was 2.7 times as fast as in the poorest nations. In 1989, the nations with the richest 20% of the world’s population received about 82.7% of total global income, while the nations with the poorest 20% of the population received only 1.4% - a ratio of 59 to 1. The World Bank’s World Development Report 2000/2001 acknowledges: “In 1960 per capita GDP [gross domestic product] in the richest 20 countries was 18 times that in the poorest 20 countries. By 1995 this gap had widened to 37 times.”

The dilemmas of trade are raised in relief when we examine the patterns in world food trade. Most international food trade takes place among the richer countries of the world. Only a small share of world food trade is among the poorer countries. There is, however, a substantial amount of trade between poor and rich countries.

In this trade between rich and poor, there is a net flow of food from poorer to richer countries. The developed countries import more than they export, while the developing countries export more than they import. The poor feed the rich.

Is this problematic? Market advocates point out that poor countries are paid for this food, and they would not engage in the production and export of food unless they saw it as advantageous. Moreover:

• A large share of the international trade in food products is comprised of high value products that are of little interest to consumers in the poorer countries.
• Most food trade is among developed countries. The net flow of food from developing to developed countries is relatively small.
• Foreign exchange earnings from the export of high-value food products can be used to import much larger volumes of low-cost foods, with a large net nutritional gain.
• There is no systematic evidence that export-oriented countries suffer from higher levels of malnutrition.
• Food exports yield substantial foreign exchange earnings for the exporting countries.

Critics raise different points:

• Food exports can lead to declining food security in poor exporting countries.
• Export-oriented food production diverts labour and capital away from production for local communities.
• Although earnings from exports conceivably might be used to import cheap food for those most in need, usually they are not used that way. The poor are not the ones who decide how foreign exchange earnings are spent.
• Central governments promote export orientation in order to increase foreign currency holdings and thus enhance their power.
• The benefits of trade between partners of uneven power are distributed unevenly, with the result that the gap between them widens steadily.
• Excessive production for foreign markets can lead to environmental damage, particularly in monoculture plantation operations.
• Excessive promotion of exports can lead to weakening commodity prices, to the disadvantage of exporting countries.

The volume of exports from developing countries, and even the price, may not be a good indicator of the extent to which the people of those countries draw economic benefit from the trade. Many export-oriented food production operations in developing countries are owned by people from developed countries. For example, under the Lomé Convention, the quotas and tariffs faced by others in accessing the market of the European Union are not imposed on certain African, Caribbean and Pacific countries. This privileged access applies to exports of canned tuna from these countries to Europe. The French own most of the tuna canneries in these countries. Similarly, many plantations and food processing plants in poor countries are owned by corporations based in rich countries. Much of what appears on the books as income to poor countries may only be passing through.

UN Photo

In some ways, both the advocates and the critics of export-oriented food production are correct. Increasing foreign exchange earnings is of particular interest to governments and to the richer people within poor countries. When a country shifts to increasing export orientation in its food production operations, the benefits are likely to shift from poorer toward richer people within the country. Increasing export orientation can result in a net gain of benefits to the country as a whole, but a net loss to the poor. In principle, it is possible to compensate for this negative effect with transfer payments to those who are harmed. The difficulty is that the poor, being politically weak, have little ability to press for such transfer payments.

Increases in food exports can lead to declines in per capita supply of food in several ways. In some cases, it could be a simple matter of redirecting products that had been consumed locally to buyers abroad who are willing to pay more for the products. Often, however, the linkages between exports and domestic supplies are more complicated than that. The export product may be one, like shrimp, coffee or seed cotton, for which there is little demand in the exporting country. But there may be a linkage in that resources which previously had been used to produce for local consumption are now devoted to production for export. Or it may be that the Government, interested in increasing its foreign exchange, invests far more of its energy and resources into promoting export production than into promoting food production for local consumers.

International trade may be a good means for generating wealth, but it is usually not a good means for providing basic foods for the poor. Traded food generally is too expensive.

The division between international trade advocates and its critics can be understood in terms of two connected points: markets do not benefit everyone equally, but are beneficial mainly to the rich and powerful; and strategies of self-sufficiency do not benefit everyone equally, but are beneficial mainly to the poor and weak.

This explains why the strongest advocates of free trade are the rich, and the strongest advocates of self-sufficiency are the poor and their friends. Strategies of self-sufficiency protect the weak from potentially exploitative relationships with those who are stronger.

To transcend this division, the poor must build self-sufficiency in order to be able to engage in the global marketplace from a position of strength - that is, they must have food sovereignty. Poor countries must build up their capacity to say no to the forces of globalization, because only then will it be safe for them to say yes.

If international trade, as a system, regularly contributes to the widening of the gap between the rich and the poor, there must be some obligations of the international community, taken as a whole, to correct or compensate for that phenomenon. One option would be to look for an alternative to trade as we know it, such as various “fair trade” schemes. Another approach would be to preserve the present system, but to provide various forms of protection and compensation for those at the bottom. Adapting the model followed within many developed countries, there could be a system of global taxation, and transfer payments from top to bottom, to create a kind of safety net, assuring that there is some level below which human dignity is not permitted to fall.

In some countries, a firm safety net is established, based on the idea that the poor are entitled to a certain minimum level of assistance. People are recognized as having a right to adequate food. It is generally expected that people will provide for themselves, and national governments recognize their obligation to provide enabling conditions that allow people to provide for themselves. However, many national governments also recognize that they have an obligation to provide for those who cannot provide for themselves; people are not left to starve in the streets.

Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights affirms that “everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food”. The right is reaffirmed in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and also in the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Most analysts focus on the corresponding obligations of national governments to people within their own jurisdictions. However, the Universal Declaration also states, in article 28, that “everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized”.

Since adequate food is a human right, the obligations apply internationally. The rights and the corresponding obligations do not end at national borders. Projections by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, described in its report The State of Food Insecurity in the World: 2000, show that the widespread malnutrition in the world is not going to end unless something is done very differently at the global level. Under human rights law, the international community is obligated to create conditions that will end hunger in the world.

The first step down that path would be for the international community, acting through the United Nations agencies, to acknowledge that obligation, not simply for national governments, but also for the international community as a whole. It should be recognized that the international community is subject to human rights obligations similar to those of States. Where the Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living - that ought to be understood as meaning everyone, and not just the people who live under a particular national government’s jurisdiction.


Links:
UN Chronicle: Issue 3, 2001
WTO: Agricultural Trade

George Kent is Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Hawaii. He is Co-Convener of the Commission on International Human Rights of the International Peace Research Association and also the Coordinator of the Task Force on Children’s Nutrition Rights.