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	Power of Global Food Corporations undermine people"s public interest by Jan-Douwe van der Ploeg IPS & agencies Netherlands   Oct 2010   Last month, the Food and Agriculture Organisation invited experts to talk about the increasing price of wheat. "Global cereal demand and production still appears in balance," they concluded, "and there is no indication of an impending world food crisis."   "Lazy thinking," says Jan-Douwe van der Ploeg, professor of rural sociology at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.   "Almost one billion people are hungry and another one billion are chronically malnourished. Isn"t this a food crisis? Hunger has always existed, but for 50 years the phenomenon has been global and permanent."   Behind the food crisis we face a severe agrarian crisis, he says.   "Farmers have to struggle harder and harder in order to survive, because of low prices and turbulent markets. This is a paradox: for consumers prices keep rising, but for farmers, prices are too low to earn back their investments."   Where does the difference go to? "To food empires," Van der Ploeg says. "The market is more and more dominated by industrial trade conglomerates, like Ahold, Nestle, Cargill, and many more, governing production, processing, distribution and consumption of food.   Those empires are able to manipulate markets and squeeze wealth out of agriculture. In this regime, small disequilibria in the markets translate into huge price fluctuations."   Empires don"t usually own resources, but control the networks. "Both farmers and consumers are dependent on their entry points and exit points. They can set standards and prices." Governments are called upon not to distort markets and to liberalize trade, but these empires are the ones that distort the market, says Van der Ploeg.   "If it"s in their financial interest to grow asparagus, chicken, green beans or flowers in poor countries and sell it to rich countries, they do it, even if the population is starving.   That is not necessarily bad for poor countries, says Anoesjka Aspeslagh, spokesperson for the Dutch supermarket division of the multinational Ahold. "Our demand creates thousands of jobs, and income for people in the exporting countries. Especially because we cooperate very closely with producers to improve labour conditions and living standards."   Van der Ploeg points to the side effects. "Peru, for example, was turned into the world"s biggest asparagus exporter. The country, however, is very desertous, so the local farmers are deprived of their much-needed water. Besides, the situation is not stable. Now already the asparagus production is shifting to China."   "Yet supermarkets have become the most powerful players among the food empires," says Myriam Vander Stichele, senior researcher at the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations in Amsterdam.   "They have acquired a very strong role as gatekeeper between consumers and the processing industry. For example, even the big banana multinationals have to accept low prices and short-term contracts nowadays. Moreover, many supermarkets are now becoming producers as well, making them even more powerful."   Their power is not just economic, but also political. "They lobby like hell against stricter regulator," says Stichele. There"s really a lack of good regulation on the contracts between supermarkets and other companies."   The power of food empires is worrying, says Van der Ploeg, because their only interest is cash flow. "They have to pay off their debts, created to acquire other companies and to monopolise large segments of the global food supply chain. Expansion is the keyword. This debt made some companies almost stumble over their own legs, as Parmalat did." This Italian food empire left a total debt of 14 billion euros.   The imperial, or "corporate", food regime also affects farmers. Food empires prefer large-scale industrial farming, for its predictable and standardised output.   However, not only are these industrial farms often less productive and less efficient than the small farms they replace, they appear to be extremely vulnerable to economic shocks. "The companies are highly dependent on stability, easy credit and ongoing growth," says Van der Ploeg. "When this disappears, as now is the case, they go broke."   Governments and researchers are quick to call on technological innovation to boost production, especially in developing countries. "They are almost autistic in their simplistic solutions. They don"t see that hi-tech systems are the very reason that farmers are competed away."   The division between entrepreneurial farming and peasant-like farming is growing, says Van der Ploeg. "Fortunately, more and more farmers acknowledge that farming is more than producing commodities. They look for an integrated, multifunctional approach and become less dependent on articificial resources."   This is a trend in developing and developed countries alike. "In western Europe, multifunctional farming already creates billions of euros of added value, in a sector that stagnates as a whole. In Brazil it"s the same: while some farms keep growing bigger, the number of small farms has increased from 3.6 to 4.2 million in the last eight years."   This is a very important undercurrent, according to Van der Ploeg, who warns that the food empires have no future. "With their short-term policies they undermine the very agriculture they need. It"s very dangerous, but eventually they will collapse."
	Millennium Goals, Five Years to Go by Jeffrey Sachs, The Earth Institiute - Columbia University USA   As 140 heads of state and government gather at the United Nations for the Millennium Development Goals summit, they and the public will ask what has come out of this decade-long effort.   The answer will surprise them: A great deal has been achieved, with some of the most exciting breakthroughs occurring in Africa.   I recall how the Millennium Development Goals were initially greeted with cynicism — as unachievable, pie-in-the-sky, a photo-op rather than a development framework. Cynicism has been replaced by hope, born of experience, commitment and breakthroughs.   Back in 2000, the situation in Africa was widely regarded as hopeless. Roughly half of Africa’s population was living on less than one dollar a day. AIDS, malaria and TB were out of control. Wars were pervasive; Liberia, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Uganda, Somalia, and the biggest of all, Congo, were all entangled in conflicts. The African economies had stagnated or declined for a generation.   When my colleagues and I suggested that AIDS, malaria and other epidemic diseases could be controlled and that Africa’s economic growth could be spurred if the world helped the continent to achieve the Millennium Goals, we were often greeted with derision. Africa, I was told, was simply too violent, too corrupt, too divided to improve.   A decade later, the picture has changed dramatically. AIDS incidence has declined, from an estimated 2.3 million new cases in 2001 to 1.9 million in 2008; longevity has risen tremendously, with millions of Africans now on antiretroviral treatment.   Malaria is dropping decisively because of programs to distribute bed nets and provide medicines.   Measles deaths fell by 90 percent between 2000 and 2008, before a frustrating uptick this past year when donors mistakenly cut back their financing for immunizations. Primary school net enrollments have risen from 58 percent in 2000 to 74 percent in 2007. Most of Africa’s major wars have subsided.   Africa’s economy has also picked up. During 1990-2000, Africa’s per capita G.D.P. declined by 0.3 percent per year. Between 2000 and 2010, per capita growth was around 3.1 percent per year. And Africa has shown resilience in the current crisis, with this year’s per capita economic growth at around 2.5 percent.   Extreme poverty is declining, though not yet fast enough to meet the MDG targets. The share of the African population in extreme poverty has also declined from around 58 percent in 1999 to probably under 50 percent in 2010.   The Millennium Development Goals themselves deserve a lot of credit by providing a powerful organizing framework and a bold but realistic time horizon.   Dozens of African governments have now adopted national planning strategies based on the Millennium Goals. Nations around the world now have specific, time-bound, outcome-oriented plans that are showing real progress because they are tapping into the synergies of poverty reduction, increased agricultural output, disease control, increased school enrollments and improved infrastructure as targeted by the Millennium Development Goals. The donor countries helped to promote major advances in public health when they created the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations.   China’s economic rise has also pulled up the demand for Africa’s mineral and hydrocarbon resources. China obliged as well by becoming a major funder of Africa’s roads and power networks — critical areas where the United States and Europe have mostly stopped financing investment projects.   Asia and the Middle East more recently have become major markets for Africa’s tropical agricultural output as well. African leaders, such as President Bingu wa Mutharika of Malawi, also broke old donor-led shibboleths by establishing new government programs to get fertilizer and high-yield seeds to impoverished peasant farmers who could not afford these inputs. Farm yields soared once nitrogen got back into the depleted soils.   The Millennium Development Goals have always recognized the need for a global partnership to end poverty, and U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and U.N. agencies have been persistent in their support of this ambitious agenda. Ironically, though, the main obstacles to achieving the goals by 2015 in Africa are international in origin, many due to high-income countries.   The first challenge is the donor shortfall in honoring specific financial commitments to Africa. Africa was told in 2005 by its donor partners to expect about $60 billion in financing from all of the world’s governments in 2010, but actual aid is only around $45 billion.   The second is human-induced climate change, another visitation upon Africa from the outside world. The region that has contributed by far the least to human-induced climate change is the one bearing the highest price in terms of drought and crop failures.   The third threat is large-scale corruption, often fueled by major American, European and Asian companies. Of course, it is Africa’s responsibility to resist temptations, but global companies (sometimes with the support or tacit knowledge of governments) must also stop spreading the big dollars around.   The fourth threat is rampant population growth. The Roman Catholic Church, politically powerful throughout the continent, continues its opposition to birth control and family planning.   The fifth threat is trade. Europe and the United States preach free trade, but then close their markets to African agricultural products.   The sixth risk is that of neglect. President Obama has spent only one day in sub-Saharan Africa, and has hardly said a word about the Millennium Goals to the American people. Ironically, it is the precisely the goals themselves, rather than hundreds of billions of dollars of annual military spending, that can offer the U.S. and other countries a path to security in places like Afghanistan, Yemen and the Horn of Africa.   The world leaders will agree on the right principles at the summit: targeted investments for agriculture, education, health, energy and microfinance; gender equality; the complementary roles of development aid, trade and private financing. The real question is whether the rich countries will deliver what they’ve promised in the five remaining years, after having fallen far short in the first 10.   When the donor nations have not just talked but have actually pooled their funds to support the national plans of poor countries, the speed of advance has been breathtaking. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria is the right model. If donors will match that successful effort with similar pooled support in areas such as smallholder agriculture, primary education, primary health, family planning and infrastructure, Africa’s leaders can do the rest.   On their 10th birthday, the Millennium Development Goals offer the world a realistic path to ending extreme poverty. Visit the related web page
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