1.All you need is aid
2.How can the G8 solve hunger?
3.G8 needs reminding the market doesn't know best when it comes to hunger
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1.All you need is aid
John Hilary
Progressive Development Forum, 10 June 2013
http://progressivedevelopmentforum.wordpress.com/2013/06/10/all-you-need-is-aid/
And so it came to pass. The resounding message coming out of this weekend’s hunger summit and IF campaign event was exactly as predicted: more charity is needed to solve Africa’s problems, not structural change. Aid agencies declared themselves thrilled at the generosity of donor governments, while David Cameron got the "golden moment" he desired courtesy of Bill Gates and other celebrity endorsements. Any criticism of the G8’s corporate assault on African farming by means of the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition was relegated to the sidelines. The following summary of news coverage gives a flavour:
*UK commits £375m to help feed world’s poorest children (BBC News)
*The G8 food summit: World will give £2.7bn aid to end hunger (Independent on Sunday)
*Bill Gates: UK leading the way in tackling world hunger (Observer)
*London hunger summit yields $4bn commitment on child malnutrition (Guardian)
*Britain commits to £375m extra in aid (Telegraph)
*Hunger Summit secures £2.7bn as thousands rally at Hyde Park (Metro)
*Britain and Bill Gates sign up to £2.7bn international fund to tackle world hunger (Express)
All those IF campaign members who assured us that this time it would not be about aid might like to explain the above headlines. For two examples of how the news could have been framed differently, see the Morning Star’s front page from today [Headline: £375M TO STARVE AFRICA'S POOREST: PM hands massive "aid" deal to mega-firms destroying farmers' livelihood]
https://twitter.com/jhilary/status/344014992774946817/photo/1
and even a different take from the Murdoch press:
*Welby: Curb the tax havens to feed poor (Sunday Times)
There have, of course, been a number of comment pieces and statements in the past few days to put an alternative view on the G8, hunger and the IF campaign; these will form a starting point for discussions at the forthcoming Progressive Development Forum to be held on 16 July, and are listed here for ease of reference:
*G8 needs reminding the market doesn’t know best when it comes to hunger (Guardian) [see item 3 below]
*The real winners from today’s hunger summit (New Statesman)
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/06/real-winners-todays-hunger-summit
*G8′s new alliance for food security and nutrition is a flawed project (Guardian)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2013/jun/07/g8-new-alliance-flawed-project
*What’s the problem with the If campaign? (Red Pepper)
http://www.redpepper.org.uk/whats-the-problem-with-the-if-campaign/
*Stop UK aid giveaway to multinationals (civil society sign-on statement)
http://www.waronwant.org/overseas-work/food-sovereignty/g8/17893
Ultimately, if we wish to mobilise the British public behind any call for global justice, we cannot allow the retrogressive messaging of the aid agencies to continue unchallenged. This conviction is what brought the Progressive Development Forum together in the first place, and it’s why concerted action is more urgent than ever.
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2.How can the G8 solve hunger?
Ian Scoones
Future Agricultures, June 10 2013
http://www.future-agricultures.org/blog/entry/how-can-the-g8-solve-hunger
[Ian Scoones bio: http://www.ids.ac.uk/person/ian-scoones ]
Next weekend the leaders of the G8 gather in Northern Ireland for their annual summit. This year it's hosted by the UK, and Prime Minister David Cameron has been highlighting hunger and malnutrition as a major priority, together with the Enough Food for Everyone If… campaign. Top issues are transparency around tax and land deals, and tackling undernutrition in the developing world. A pre-summit summit and rally in Hyde Park were held in London last weekend to discuss the issues.
Africa and agriculture were at the centre of the debate, and the themes touched on many central to the work of the Future Agricultures Consortium research programme. But questions are being raised about the approaches being taken. Have the wider questions of policy and politics been taken into account? Will the silver bullets of agricultural and nutrition interventions really work in practice? Are the solutions to the scandal of continued hunger and child malnutrition technical, or actually more social and political?
Tim Lang of City University in London was quoted in the UK Sunday newspaper the Observer as commenting: "We've had many summits talking about hunger..., but not enough has happened to change the food system. My worry is that this one is shifting policy focus away from the complex picture of how food connects land, health, power and ecological damage. Technical fixes like food supplements may appear sensible, but they do little to address the systemic problems.... What I want to see is political leaders accepting that their task is to recalibrate the food system entirely. We have to recivilise food capitalism and recalibrate markets."
In other words, we need to tackle unequal policy processes around food systems, North and South. This theme was central to our work on the political economy of seed systems, highlighting that solutions lay less in new technologies, but in institutional and political issues around ensuring access to seed technologies. Equally, Future Agricultures research on land deals shows how large areas of land are being acquired, with little accountability. Making land deals more transparent is definitely a good idea, but exactly what this will mean in practice is unclear, as Anna Locke and Andy Norton describe in a recent blog post for Future Agricultures and ODI. Equally, vitamin enriched sweet potato - a product launched again this past weekend - will help tackle deficiencies, but, as Sally Brooks has shown, biofortification - the breeding of nutrient-enriched crops - may not be the easiest, cheapest, or most appropriate solution to undernutrition.
[See: http://www.sallybrooksconsulting.com/publications/ ]
The G8 summit is expected to give more impetus to the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, launched at last year's summit by the US. This is an alliance of governments, private sector players, and others, committed to delivering new technical and market based agricultural and nutrition interventions, in a number of focus countries. But, as I wrote just over a year ago, there are concerns about the role of large, western agribusiness concerns in the New Alliance, and how these big players may exclude others, including local private sector players, as well as Africa-led policy initiatives, such as the African Union's Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP). This concern is being raised again by NGOs, activists, and others.
Of course the G8 is an exclusive club that does not involve the new emerging powers, all increasingly influential in Africa. Looking at China and Brazil’s role in African agriculture, it is clear that they need to be at the table too.
As the summit nears, a greater emphasis on the politics of policy at global, regional and national levels is needed. This requires attention to the complex, often slow and difficult process of effecting change. Unfortunately, quick fixes and silver bullets never work.
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3.G8 needs reminding the market doesn't know best when it comes to hunger
Nick Dearden
The Guardian, 9 June 2013
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/09/g8-market-hunger
*Partnerships with food giants such as Monsanto and Unilever will not eradicate hunger – and they might well make it worse
[image caption: New Delhi demonstration against hunger. Children demonstrate during a global day of action in New Delhi, India, on the eve of the G8 hunger summit in London on 8 June 2013]
David Cameron's attempt to detoxify the Conservative party has rested on a set of policies that include supporting gay marriage, encouraging women into public office and increasing international aid.
In many ways the last of these has been most successful – and the government has drawn few attacks from the opposition for its development policy, as it has increased the aid budget even while making harsh cuts elsewhere.
This week Cameron attempts to gild his image on the global stage when he chairs the G8 summit. He has long waited for his "Blair moment", at which some of the razzmatazz of the last British G8 – in 2005 at Gleneagles – is recreated, if somewhat toned down to suit a time of austerity.
A centrepiece of Cameron's G8 was the "hunger summit", at the weekend, at which politicians from around the world came to plan the "eradication of hunger". Nobody can deny the ambition of that goal. But that does not mean we should applaud any policies that claim to be able to reach it.
The policies that the hunger summit endorsed will not eradicate hunger – and they might well make it worse. They are based on the same principle that guides all of the government's development thinking – namely the idea that "the market knows best". That's why African farmers' movements rejected a major component of the hunger summit – the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition. This alliance was launched at the last G8 and promises to increase investment in agriculture through "partnerships" with food giants such as Monsanto, Syngenta, Cargill and Unilever.
On Saturday, as the New Alliance added three African countries to the current six, anti-poverty groups including Jubilee Debt Campaign, Friends of the Earth and War on Want, demanded that the British government withhold the £395m of aid that it has pledged. Africa's farmers labelled it a "new wave of colonialism" because countries taking part in new alliance pilots are told, for instance, to make it easier for foreign corporations to buy up agricultural land and end trade protection.
This route to eradicating global hunger was tried and failed many times in the heyday of the British empire. It cost millions of lives on the Indian subcontinent in the 19th and 20th centuries, as support and protection for ordinary farmers was ended and food distribution was dictated by the market. Food was exported and stockpiled to attain higher prices, even while local populations starved to death.
Hunger is no more a result of food shortage today than it was then. The "market knows best" policies have not delivered food to the hungry. Real solutions are out there. A UN process (through the committee on world food security) is working to develop a set of principles to challenge the control of food systems. Massive grassroots networks, such as La Via Campesina, are working for "food sovereignty": the right to have not just access to food, but control of the food system. It calls for land redistribution, a focus on domestic production, collective and organic farming and public support for farmers.
The concentration of power in the hands of corporations, especially financial business, is at the core of global injustices such as the deprivation of food. Yet across the board, the British government sees these behemoths as the solution to injustice.
Large numbers of the British public have marched and campaigned for a fairer distribution of power and wealth in the world. It is an insult if the very tools that they have defended – such as the development department and its budget – are used in a way that makes the world less fair.
G8 summits have traditionally seen campaigners get on the streets to question who holds the reins of global power. Why is it that eight countries have such a say over the lives of 7 billion people? Rather than giving Cameron a "golden moment", we must use the G8 to reclaim the development agenda as a broad-based call for social justice.