Bold action needed from G20 agricultural ministers to tackle food

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The G20 must scrap damaging biofuels policies and demand more transparency on food stocks as part of urgent measures needed to tackle global food price volatility, said Oxfam today ahead of the G20 Agriculture Ministers Meeting in Paris on 22 and 23 June. � Oxfam is also calling on G20 Ministers to reconsider the case for food reserves so that vulnerable countries can better manage the kind of price spikes that left an extra 150 million people hungry during the last food price crisis. A new report ?Living on a Spike' published today by Oxfam and the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) illustrates how many poor communities are impacted by rising food prices and how many people are blaming governments for failing to respond adequately. Oxfam has recently launched the GROW campaign to end hunger today and in the future. G20 meeting must improve on communiqu� - urgent action needed on biofuels, food reserves and stock transparency "An early draft of the G20 communiqu�, leaked last week did not go far enough in trying to tackle food price volatility. We hope that ministers will be bolder at the meeting," GROW campaign head Katia Maia said.�� "A recent inter-agency report to the G20 on food price volatility made it crystal clear that biofuels were part of the problem. The G20 must urgently remove biofuels subsidies and mandates that are increasing price volatility and failing to tackle climate change. The G20 must also have immediate contingency plans to adjust their biofuels targets when food supplies are endangered," said Maia. Oxfam said the G20 must require major private sector traders and investors to provide governments with adequate and timely information on their food stocks in order to improve market transparency. In a new briefing paper, ?Preparing for Thin Cows,' Oxfam says that policy-makers should also re-examine evidence from countries such as Madagascar and Indonesia which show that properly designed food reserves, combined with other measures, could help developing countries to tackle food price volatility. Oxfam's call comes with a warning that global grain stocks are again dropping alarmingly. When global cereal stocks fall below 15-20 per cent of world consumption, price hikes and market break-down have followed. By the end of this year this ratio could be as low as 17 per cent.��� A global grain reserve of just 105m tonnes would have been enough to help avoid the food price crisis in 2007-8. The cost of maintaining this would have been ${esc.dollar}1.5 billion or just ${esc.dollar}10 for each of the extra 150 million people who joined the ranks of the hungry as a direct result of the last food price surge. India managed to stabilize food prices in 2008 because the government made a massive purchase and release of rice and wheat. "International institutions have warned G20 leaders that renewed food price volatility is now a high risk. However, the same institutions have summarily dismissed food reserves as one of the ways to stabilize prices," report co-author Thierry Kesteloot from Oxfam said. "Food reserves were largely dismantled in the 1990s and have been ignored ever since as too expensive and ineffective," Kesteloot said. Oxfam acknowledged that in some cases food reserves may have been poorly managed in the past but that did not mean the policy itself was wrong - rather, it meant that the reserves themselves needed to be better implemented and governed. "The prevailing view that food reserves in themselves don't work is unsophisticated and short-sighted. There are smart new ways that countries can maintain sufficient food reserves as part of a bundle of policies that could work to limit price surges. We've already seen the huge human cost of countries not having food reserves," Kesteloot said. Oxfam says that G20 governments should agree to scale up national and regional reserves in developing countries and support public intervention of developing countries in buffer stocks managed in a durable, transparent manner. The G20 should commit technical and financial resources to establish these reserves and encourage other governments to do so. New report on food price crisis reveals human cost and political discontent Oxfam and the Institute of Development Studies report, ‘Living On A Spike,' is based on interviews conducted over three years (2009-11) on how people are affected by and adapting to rising food prices. Interviews were conducted with eight communities in Indonesia, Kenya, Zambia and Bangladesh. "The steady rise in global food prices from 2009 through 2011 is producing a pattern of many ?weak losers' and a few ?strong winners' in these four countries," Oxfam co-author Duncan Green said. "People who are already struggling in low-paid informal work such as street vendors, casual labourers and transport drivers say they are worse off year-on-year and tend to blame their governments. But some groups - usually those who are already relatively better off, like public sector workers - have done better because their earnings have kept pace with inflation." IDS co-author Naomi Hossain said: "Our interviews reveal that food price hikes affect people's quality of life in all its dimensions, not just their calorie intake. The anxieties of the daily grind have become even more arduous and attritional. Physical and mental health has suffered, along with marital and parental relationships; stress because of over-indebtedness; social lives and social cohesion. People are being hit in more nuanced ways than in the 2008/9 price spike. "The pattern is for people to shift to cheaper, less preferred and often poorer-quality foods." Hossain said: "And always, women are saying that they feel the stress of their children's hunger most acutely, coming under more pressure to provide good meals with less. These stresses are pushing women into poorly paid informal work. In the worse instances, couples split or look for better-off partners to cope with these tough times." Green said: "The key result we have found is that poor people do not merely cope only by working harder, eating less, living more frugally and selling their assets. They also respond politically. They contest official explanations to the cause of their hunger and they are roundly critical of their governments for failing to act effectively. "2011 has not seen the wave of food riots seen in 2008. Yet this research strongly indicates that the current food price spike has eroded political legitimacy in all four countries. We do not know what this means for stability in the future - but the discontent is palpable and directly linked to what are seen as intolerable food and fuel prices," Green said. More from the Oxfam Press Office at http://www.oxfam.org.uk/news