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	The Big Zero in G20 by Jeffrey Sachs & Brett House Mail & Guardian (South Africa)   April 2009   Among the headlines at last week"s G20 summit, an important fact was lost in the buzz: the G20 has done almost nothing for the world"s poorest countries.   Millions of people in poor countries depend on assistance for food production, health services and safe water. Unless the world acts now, the global economic crisis could leave another generation without access to basic nutrition and schooling.   Media reports highlighted the $1.1-trillion package committed by G20 members. The BBC World Service called this a "breakthrough" for developing countries. And it is, but only for the middle-income countries and so-called emerging markets.   At the very most, less than 5% of this package -- about $50-billion -- is targeted at low-income countries, but this too is an exaggeration. At least half of this $50-billion has not been raised. Moreover, none of this $50-billion will be used to provide the grants desperately needed by poor countries. Instead, it will be disbursed as loans.   The largest component of the $1.1-trillion, perhaps $750-billion, comprises new forms of lending authority for the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Yet this new IMF "money" -- basically short-term loans -- is useful, at best, for middle-income countries trying to fend off the global credit crunch. A crunch, remember, that began on Wall Street and in the City of London. Such short-term loans are little solace for the billion hungry people in developing countries, mainly in farming families, who don"t grow enough food to earn an income or to meet even their most basic nutritional needs. The G20 has so far left them high and dry.   A planned gold sale by the IMF, combined with some modest earnings on IMF lending, is meant to add $6-billion to the IMF"s most favourable financing for the poorest countries. Low-income countries might also gain a little more access to standard IMF credits, but to little avail. None of this will make much difference to the real fate of the poorest of the poor.   The one part of the G20 deliberations that might -- just might -- make a difference is the renewal of the pledge, first made in 2005 at the G8 Gleneagles summit, to increase annual aid to Africa by at least $25-billion by 2010. UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon worked hard with the other G20 leaders to ensure that a reaffirmation of the Gleneagles commitment would be part of the G20 summit"s outcomes.   It"s worth remembering that the value of this pledge is now a bit more than $25-billion a year owing to inflation since the pledge was first made. The numbers are the following. Aid to sub-Saharan Africa in 2008 -- net of debt relief -- was about $35-billion. To meet the Gleneagles commitment, this figure would have to rise to about US$65-billion by next year. But a few G20 countries, such as Italy, are cutting aid, not increasing it. The G20 has pledged to make up the gap -- $30-billion a year on top of current aid flows -- but who is going to do it?   A cynic would say: "Nobody."After all, the rich countries have promised and promised again to deliver more aid, but their actions continue to fall far short of their commitments. Some say that this doesn"t matter; that aid is a failure in any case. But those who claim that aid is a waste don"t have hungry children. They don"t face diseases such as malaria and respiratory infections. They don"t consume unsafe water every day. And they don"t travel miles over difficult terrain to get to the nearest school.   Aid can make a critical difference. It can ensure that farmers plant better seeds and that they have the fertiliser needed to grow enough food for their communities. It can ensure that a village clinic staffed by community health workers can provide the bed nets and medicines needed to fight malaria and other silent killers. Aid can drill new boreholes to provide adequate supplies of safe water. And it can finance the construction of new classrooms and staff them with trained teachers so that the next generation can escape the trap of extreme poverty once and for all.   Urgent action is therefore needed for the G20 to make good on its aid promises. The next meeting of the G20 is scheduled to take place in the US later this year. By the time they arrive, each of the G20 leaders should ensure that his or her country is living up to its promises to the world"s poorest people, the promises the leaders reaffirmed last week in London. This is the only reliable path to a sustainable recovery from the very deep crisis in which we find ourselves.   * Jeffrey D Sachs is director of The Earth Institute and Quetelet professor of sustainable development, Columbia University. Brett House is senior macroeconomist at The Earth Institute, Columbia University. Below is a link to recent articles and essays by Professor Jeffrey Sachs. Visit the related web page
	A Local Shared Resource, Not a Global Commodity by La Via Campesina / War on Want   A Local Shared Resource, Not a Global Commodity, by Jesse Lerner-Kinglake. (War on Want)   Any effort to solve the problem of hunger is set to fail unless we adopt a new approach to how the world makes, distributes and sells food.   The issue of global hunger has never been more urgent. For the first time in history, more than one billion people live in hunger. Each day 25,000 people starve to death or die from an illness caused by hunger. Shockingly, many of those who actually produce the food have been hit the hardest. Three quarters of the world’s hungry live in rural areas, of whom the overwhelming majority are farmers in poor countries.   While environmental catastrophes such as drought exacerbate the plight of the rural poor, the main causes of poverty and hunger in the developing world are man-made. In particular, the economic hardship facing many farmers can be attributed to the free trade policy prescriptions championed by the World Trade Organisation (WTO), International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. Even though they are unaccountable to the broader international community, these institutions wield enormous influence over the agricultural policies of developing nations.   To drive forward their strategy of ‘trade-based food security’, the IMF and WTO have forced developing nations to open up their markets to food imports and reorient their economies towards an export-based system. Exposed to direct competition from giant agribusiness, small farmers in the global South have struggled to stay afloat. Moreover, under the trade terms established by the WTO, agribusiness firms are increasingly able to sell their products to consumers in developing nations at a low price, undercutting small-scale farmers who rely on income from domestic markets.   As well as being thrust into competition with large farming firms, poor farmers are being squeezed by corporate sales practices. When farmers in the global South purchase seeds developed by corporations, they are often forced to sign a contract obliging them to buy fertiliser from the same firm, often at an inflated price.   Farmers have little choice but to buy crop products offered by Western firms. Under intellectual property rules written by the WTO, corporate firms now own 98% of the patents covering vital inputs used for farming. Armed with patents for a vast array of seeds, livestock breeds and other essential organisms, agribusiness can dictate the terms under which local communities grow their food.   The most harmful range of farming products currently on the market are genetically modified (GM) crops. Promoted by agribusiness as a silver bullet in the fight against global hunger, GM crops are in fact more expensive to grow and produce poorer yields. Despite the harm these crops can cause, the GM revolution has gained momentum in recent years, leading to a massive boom for firms like Monsanto and Syngenta.   Although the export-based system of food production has kept millions of small farmers in poverty, world leaders have refused to try a different model. Instead, governments have invested heavily in projects that seek to train small farmers in poor countries as entrepreneurs to compete in the global marketplace.   Yet an alternative to the current approach to food production is taking root. Across the developing world, grassroots organisations are challenging corporate farming practices and the model of production for export. Based on the principle of local control over resources, the ‘food sovereignty’ movement prioritises the needs of small-scale farmers over the profits of big business. This new paradigm recognises that the key to fighting global poverty lies in community ownership, sustainable agricultural policies and workers’ rights.   From Sri Lanka to South Africa, Brazil to Mozambique, these local organisations – many of them partners of War on Want – are successfully building communities of self-sufficient farmers. A leading voice in the food sovereignty movement is La Via Campesina. With members across 56 countries on five continents, La Via Campesina represents millions of small farmers, giving them a political platform to challenge the corporate model of agricultural development.   By promoting local alternatives such as community markets and farming collectives, these groups of small farmers are able to protect their livelihoods from the impossible demands of a world market whose rules are stacked against them. Movements such as La Via Campesina are also promoting organic methods as an alternative to destructive corporate farming products like GM crops. Taken together, these measures will help define food as a resource to be owned and shared locally – and not as a commodity to be traded and profited from on the global market.   April 2009   A G8 on agriculture without farmers = more hunger and poverty.   The first G8 on Agriculture which ended yesterday the 20th of April in Cison di Valmarino produced a final declaration which not only admits its own failures in the past, but previews a future full of contradictions.   The G8 will never be able to alleviate hunger in the world by making its decisions behind closed doors, in the absence of the main actors in the global debate on agriculture – the millions of peasants and family farmers, women and men, who feed the world.   The G8"s assertion that “farmers must be the main protagonists” rings particularly hollow when the meeting this weekend was explicitly designed to limit the access of farmers organisations and reduce their visibility. The text finally produced by the G8 is extremely contradictory. While it recognises the role of food producers and the crisis effecting rural areas, it fails to define a real strategy which could alleviate this crisis. The declaration on one hand talks of placing “agriculture and rural development...at the centre of sustainable economic growth by strengthening the role of agricultural households and smallholder farms and their access to land” and on the other of “reaching a balanced, comprehensive and ambitious conclusion of the Doha Round”, two policies which are incompatible - the WTO has repeatedly been shown to have negative effects on smallholder agriculture as it liberalises agricultural markets and privatizes natural resources.   The declaration also supports the proposed creation of the Global Partnership on Food and agriculture while at the same time recognising the centrality of the role of the FAO – two positions which cannot be reconciled. The existing institutions of the UN must be at the centre of the solution to the current crisis – not the World Bank and IMF.   Apart from the contradictory nature of their declaration, the G8 at least included one admission which has been blatantly obvious to the rest of the world for many years – that the world has failed in its attempts to halve the proportion of the world"s hungry by 2015 in line with the Millennium development goals.   Any real policy for putting farmers and sustainable smallholder agriculture at centre stage would allow states to protect the rights of their people to work and eat. Farmers, who represent about half of the world workforce, are the first one to be affected by hunger and malnutrition.   Representatives of the international peasant"s movement Via Campesina were assembled in Treviso this weekend to make their alternatives heard. Their demands are simple – allow peoples and countries to define and protect their own agricultural systems, without negatively affecting others. Transform the agro-export model in both the north and south to one based on local, sustainable agricultural production, based on sustainable family farming. Visit the related web page
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