Food security in developing countries is facing a serious threat due to a number of converging factors – climate change, World Trade Organisation agreements, rising consumption and demand for biofuels.

Most developing nations, including China and India, are net importer of food grains. They also contain the bulk of the earth’s 850 million poor and hungry. India and sub-Saharan Africa each account for 25% of the world’s poor, while the figure for China is 18%.

Moreover, global demand for food is set to double by 2050. The United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) predicts a 50% rise in population in developing countries and increased individual consumption as average income levels rise.

Over the last 15 years, global consumption has increased at an average 0.9% per year, while production has risen only 0.7%, according to European research firm Cheuvreux.

Food production is already failing to keep pace with swelling demand and rising food prices, leading to food riots in many parts of the world. India and China have not seen price-linked food riots yet, and are now taking action to avoid them by securing supplies.

China’s food production could fall by 23% by 2050 due to changes in temperature, water availability, soil condition, extreme weather, crop diseases and pest outbreaks - Greenpeace

Droughts, floods and food production

Climate change will aggravate this situation, according to studies by FAO and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). They indicate that a rise in temperature will affect food supply dramatically by shifting crop growing zones; changing the habitats of pests; increasing risks of plant disease, insects and weeds; shrinking the area of cropland due to floods; and rising sea levels.

In 2006, severe drought halved agricultural production in Australia, while a mix of drought, storms and floods caused harvests to decline in the US, European Union, Canada, Argentina and Russia. The IPCC warns that yields from rain-fed agriculture in Africa could fall by up to 50% in coming years due to climate change.

Lin Erda, a climate change expert at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing, says climate change has already started impacting Chinese agriculture. Lin gives the example of winter wheat grown in the northern China, which is gradually becoming less resistant to cold spells due to rising temperatures.

A Greenpeace report out this month says if current climate-change trends continue, China’s food production could fall by 23% by 2050 due to changes in temperature, water availability, soil condition, extreme weather, crop diseases and pest outbreaks. A Stanford University study, published in the February issue of Science this year, found that rice, millet and maize production could drop by 10% in South Asia by 2030.

Experts say that while global warming will affect all countries, the impact will be more severe on developing countries as they have fewer resources. These countries generally depend on a large number of small farmers, who are especially vulnerable when droughts, floods or excessive rains damage crops, grain stores and infrastructure. Declining production would force developing countries to import more food and pay higher prices on the world market.

In Bangladesh, the price of rice jumped 70% – from $0.30 to $0.71 per kilo – in 2007 after a cyclone destroyed $650 million worth of rice crop. Early this year, unexpected snowstorms in the rice-producing areas in China almost led to social unrest when food prices shot up more than 23%, pushing inflation to 8.7% in February, an 11-year high.

The WTO fallout

Critics, such as the charity Oxfam, say the WTO Agreement on Agriculture (AoA), which came into force in January 1995, is also contributing to distortions in global food production and supplies.

The agriculture treaty required developed countries to reduce domestic support and export subsidies for farm produce, while developing countries reduced tariff and non-tariff barriers to give greater market access to developed nations.

However, in practice, the US and EU authorities used the domestic support system in the AoA to pay billions of dollars of subsidy to their producers every year under the heading of research, marketing assistance and infrastructure services.

The latest round of WTO negotiations collapsed in July after trade ministers from 30 major countries failed to resolve their differences over agriculture

A large number of confectionery producers in Swaziland went out of business after 1995 due to EU sugar subsidies, Action Aid UK reports. “Swaziland produces sugar at less than half the cost of the EU and yet it is unable to compete with EU confectionary imports.” The report adds that dumping of subsidised EU milk powder forced thousands of farmers out of business in the Dominican Republic.

Haiti, which reduced tariffs from 35% to just 3% to allow US imports of rice under pressure from the International Monetary Fund saw its own rice industry collapsing: thousands of farmers were forced to quit when they could not compete with subsidised US rice. Once nearly self-sufficient, Haiti now needs to import 80% of its rice, according to Oxfam. In May this year, the prime minister of Haiti was forced to resign after widespread food riots rocked the nation as US rice doubled in price in just one year.

Fears of adverse impacts on local farmers have prompted developing nations, led by China and India, to oppose fresh agriculture agreements being negotiated at WTO. The latest round of negotiations collapsed in July after trade ministers from 30 major countries failed to resolve their differences over agriculture.

India and China, 70% of whose population work in agriculture, say they will not agree to a new WTO deal unless they get a special safeguard mechanism allowing them and other developing countries to protect farmers as and when cut-price grain imports surge. A surge would happen only if these countries reduce duty to allow cheap imports from the US and EU. Currently, India and China don’t allow free imports of grain. The US vehemently objects to any special safeguards for developing nations.

Seed patents criticised

Meanwhile, the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) under WTO can also affect the food security of developing countries, according to critics. Multinational seed corporations are rushing to claim patent rights over plant varieties using the provisions of TRIPS (see our special report). A large number of claims relate to climate change-resistant seeds.

Suman Sahay, convenor of New Delhi-based advocacy group Gene Campaign says: “Allowing life sciences companies a monopoly over seed production and sales seriously threatens self-reliance in agriculture and the livelihood of farmers.”

Competition from biofuels

Rapid industrialisation and urbanisation in China and India has seen vast tracts of agricultural land converted into industrial projects and townships. Increasing demand for biofuel is also prompting farmers in several countries to switch from food crops to feedstock crops, such as sugarcane, maize, palm and Jatropha.

Indian companies are rushing to seek land from various state governments to establish Jatropha plantations for biofuels


Maize production has substantially increased in the US after the government introduced subsidies to support the biofuel industry. Maize has replaced soy, resulting in higher prices for soy. Soy consumption in China is significant, less so for India.

Several countries in Asia are busy setting up biofuel plants to tackle their own energy deficit, which could lead to land conversion for feedstock. In Indonesia and Malaysia, large areas of forest and agricultural land have already been converted into oil palm plantations.

India plans to plant Jatropha on 11 million hectares for biofuels. Several Indian companies including Reliance Energy, Godrej, Tata, Indian Oil Corporation and Natural Bioenergy are rushing to seek land from various state governments to establish Jatropha plantations.

The FAO annual report, released this October, says that biofuel production using agricultural commodities tripled from 2000 to 2007. The FAO warns that growing demand for biofuel agriculture will continue to put upward pressure on food prices.

Mitigating the problem

Worried by food riots, Asian countries are taking steps. India’s National Plan on Climate Change, published in July, includes setting up a mission to make farming sustainable, “to devise strategies to make Indian agriculture more resilient to climate change”. The mission would be tasked with identifying and developing new varieties of crops capable of withstanding extreme weather triggered by global warming. There are as yet no details about how this will be achieved, or how the government would deal with company seed patents if climate change became a major threat to food supply.

India and Vietnam also suspended rice exports this year to meet domestic demand. Malaysia is setting up a national food stockpile to tackle seasonal shortfalls.

Duncan Macintosh, the development director of Manila-based International Rice Research Institute, says: “The long term solution lies in increasing per hectare productivity in Asian countries.” That would mean substantial investment in agricultural science and technology, and in irrigation.

In the short to mid-term, however, developing nations look set to remain vulnerable to food shortages and global price hikes.

Source: Climate Change corp - By Rajesh Chhabara