Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
4
TRADING INTO HUNGER? TRADING OUT OF
HUNGER? INTERNATIONAL FOOD TRADE AND
THE DEBATE ON FOOD SECURITY
Bill Pritchard
The need to generate a sophisticated global policy framework to ensure the comple-
mentarity of international trade and food security should represent one of the most
pressing international programmes of the current age. Yet the brutal reality is that
there is very litle in the way of an accepted set of principles or policy spaces to ad-
vance this agenda. Any semblance of a debate in this topic area is terminally fractured
by shisms of ideology, disciplinarity, communities of interest (some with vested com-
mercial concerns) and institutional fragmentation. Depending on who a policy-maker
speaks to, the ability to trade food across countries and continents can be portrayed
either as the answer or an obstacle to improved food security.
his hapter seeks to explain this divergence of opinion. It contends that the heart
of the problem is an institutional disconnection between the multilateral rule-set-
ting regime for food trade and commerce (primarily through the World Trade Or-
ganization (WTO)), and that for monitoring and promoting food security (primarily
through the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)), and the Special Rapporteur
on the Right to Food, whih operates through the UN High Commissioner for Human
Rights). What this means is that, on the one hand, the WTO-based global trade agenda
is advanced with insufficient regard to food security, whilst on the other, efforts by
the FAO and the Special Rapporteur to advance food security are circumscribed by
the overarhing legal requirements of countries to abide by WTO rules. he resultant
policy mishmash ill serves the needs of the world's hungry.
To appreciate the bakground and implications of this institutional disconnection,
this hapter irstly discusses the role of the WTO, with particular reference to its
Agreement on Agriculture (AoA), the primary document detailing the rules of inter-
national food trade. he hapter then outlines the concept of food security, with re-
