Le Monde
Tuesday 22 April 2008
For centuries, it was the center of attention. Then, attracted by city lights, people turned away from it. In the twentieth century, agriculture was marginalized and the farmer despised. The signs of this fall from grace are numberless. However much France many venerate its soil, calling someone a "peasant" is an insult here. Perhaps it's no accident that it was at the Agriculture Fair that Nicolas Sarkozy, an elect of the city if ever there was one, pronounced his famous "fuck-off, asshole." As an insult is never gratuitous, the president, urban to the tips of his loafers, perhaps only said out loud what a good number of city dwellers at one time or another want to say to the people of the fields.
This contempt is global. While 75 percent of the world's poor live in rural areas, agriculture receives only ... four percent of public investment and four percent of development aid. Beyond the cyclical reasons put forward to explain the present food crisis - increase in demand, climate change, competition from biofuels and financial speculation - it's this absence of resources that constitutes the principal grounds for the crisis.
Two rationales explain this unbelievable injustice in the allocation of public spending. Unlike city dwellers, rural people rarely form pressure groups. Paradoxically, it's in developed countries, where they are the least numerous, that farmers have the most political weight (and receive the most aid). Above all, up until just these last few months, the World Bank and most world leaders considered agriculture a residual activity.
Since four percent of the population succeeds in feeding the 96 percent remaining in developed countries, why help farmers in poor countries when their fate is to leave for the city to work in industry and services? To hear World Bank President Robert Zoellick worry today about agricultural scarcity leaves one perplexed. The World Bank is among those the most responsible for the present situation. It was the World Bank that for decades imposed the reduction of all financial and administrative aid to this sector on poor countries, that forced them to favor export crops. The results of this myopia - which some deem tainted with bad faith, so well did it serve the interests of rich countries - are that farmers in poor countries suffer cruelly from the absence of training and public investment, and food self-sufficiency has long been considered obsolete.
Let us dare a politically incorrect observation: does anyone believe that if the rich countries truly cared about agricultural development they would have allowed an African - the Senegalese Jacques Diouf - to serve out three terms (from 1994 to, in principle, 2012) at the head of the FAO, the UN agency charged with food? Even the agency's location - in Italy - is significant. Against the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the FAO carries no weight. What can Rome do against Washington?
The World Bank's turnabout proves that the present tensions, resulting from twenty years of mistakes and passivity, are leading officials to once again consider agriculture a strategic sector. If the media and politicians are focused on the short term (quick, let's save Haiti ...), the FAO and two other UN organizations, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), have prepared the future by organizing the first world agro-industries Forum in Delhi, from April 8 to 11. Over 500 people from 110 countries participated.
Berkeley professor Alain de Janvry reminded everyone that agriculture was a key sector for growth. In China, India, and Vietnam, it was the development of agriculture that allowed hundreds of millions of people to emerge from poverty and the countries' economies to take off. Moreover, the creation of agribusinesses often constitutes a first stage in the creation of a more industrialized economy. If agriculture's share in the global economy is decreasing, agribusiness's share is increasing. Even if the figures are extremely fragmented due to the importance of the informal economy (60 percent of jobs in some countries); agribusiness is undoubtedly the premier economic sector in the world.
Passable Roads and Refrigerators
Today, everyone agrees agriculture has a future. Because of the increase in global population and the improvement in lifestyle it enjoys, demand for agricultural commodities should double between now and 2050. But the future of agriculture occurs through transformation of agricultural products, the importance of which is growing, and consequently through a rapprochement with industry. In the absence of infrastructure, a country like India loses around 30 percent of its harvest and once again becomes a net importer of grains. More than biotechnologies, above all farmers in poor countries need irrigation systems, passable roads and refrigerators that allow them to access markets and to compete with industrialists.
The observations are the same in Asia, Africa, Latin America and central Europe: farmers lack a sustaining environment, networked organizations such as production and training cooperatives, and public infrastructure. Money is also cruelly lacking. But the present crisis could lead investors to take an interest in this sector. Already the Crédit agricole, which had up until now bet on the globalization of its network to assure its development, has decided to return to its rural roots by organizing an international forum on financing the agricultural field. Less out of philanthropy than out of a well-conceived self-interest.
Debates are no longer conducted over agriculture's progressive disappearance, but about its development. But not all ambiguities have been revoked. The countries of the South will have to simultaneously make their agriculture more competitive and partially reorient it in order to satisfy the now-sacrosanct requirement of food self-sufficiency - which will not be easy. At the same time, the countries of the North will have to agree to lift their import barriers, since the aid programs now being decided upon in the face of catastrophe seem to be in part the consequence of the policies Western countries have conducted and imposed.
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