Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
only a small proportion of total Northern agricultural subsidies, the quantitative im-
pact of their elimination will be slight (Oxfam, 2005).
To summarize, the WTO is a member-driven organization whih was established
on the basis of a series of compromises at the end of the Uruguay Round. By insti-
tutionalizing these imperfections into the multilateral rules of agricultural trade, it
has acted to aggravate social and economic contradictions in the global food system.
The modest levels of subsidy reductions in the first fifteen years of the organization
speak to the overall resistance in the developed North to the pursuit of hange. hese
countries have managed to retain support for their farming sectors through various
strategic 'box-shiting' mehanisms. Moreover, atempts to break this impasse via
the creation of the Doha Round of multilateral negotiations proved inconclusive. The
collapse of these discussions in 2008 marked the end of a multilateral momentum
within the WTO (Prithard, 2009). When taken together, when it comes to the WTO,
all these issues point to a gaping hole between purpose and ahievement. As time has
passed, its incapability to resolve the tensions of global agriculture has become in-
creasingly apparent. his context being set, we now turn our atention to the second
of the key foci of this hapter - the concept of food security.
Food security
he concept of 'food security' is muh misunderstood. It is oten erroneously con-
flated with notions of food self-sufficiency: whether a community (a nation, city or
region) has enough own-production and bufer stoks to feed its population over
a given period. However, in contemporary international debate, food security has
evolved to develop a meaning whih is more expansive than just self-suiciency. he
intention of this section, therefore, is to set out this meaning and, hence, provide a
basis to link the concept to trade policy issues in the following section.
Until the 1990s, the prevailing perspective in international policy and researh
was to explain hunger in terms of the 'food availability decline' (FAD) model. This
was a production-centric explanation whih saw hunger as occurring when events
(droughts, war etc.) disrupted food supplies and diminished food stoks. Hence, in
1974, the World Food Conference defined food security as: 'availability at all times
of adequate world food supplies of basic foodstuffs to sustain a steady expansion of
food consumption and to offset fluctuations in production and prices' (cited in FAO,
2006, p1).
