Kopi Time E082 - Carin Smaller on Global Food Security

security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture. Well easier said than done as we have seen over the last year or so, that what was considered a topic largely confined to very poor countries now is becoming a source of global concern both from a short and long term perspective. So I've been asking my friend Asthma that you know, who should I talk to if I want to get

a global sweep of of this issue. Somebody who's comfortable talking about the science as well as the politics and economics of food insecurity and he should suggest that today's guests. So I'm very pleased to have with us. Karen smaller. She is the executive director of the Schomburg Center for Food and Climate. Karen was co director and co author of Serious to 2030 a major initiative that

we'll talk about in detail during the podcast. She is also the author of the guide to negotiating investment contracts for farmland and water published by the International Institute for Sustainable Development or I I. S. D. And this guide sort of marks the first attempt at a model contract for developing countries to attract foreign investment

for agriculture while reducing poverty and protecting the environment. And that's one issue that I want to pick Karen's brain, both the intersection or the intersection of climate change and food insecurity. Karen in her past professional engagement was the Director of Agriculture, Trade and Investment at I. S. D. As well as director of the Trade Information project at the Institute of Agriculture and Trade Policy I 80 p. Karen smaller. Welcome to Covid Time.

founders of the samba center. And as you as you articulated my role is as the executive director

And we have a menu of 10 high impact areas that have been defined by science through this Sara's 2030 project that you mentioned at the introduction and we asked them to make investments in those 10 areas that are backed by the scientific evidence and in the 90 odd countries that we've identified are the highest priority countries to try and solve this issue of world hunger.

As well as 2023, we both respected the price of food and availability of food.

the woods. This crisis is not just about grain prices and availability of grains and it predates the war in Ukraine. This crisis, this food security crisis that we currently have is also about fertilizers, fertilizer prices, and fertilizer availability. It's very much about energy prices and energy availability and it's about access to finance. So all these things, food fertilizers, energy and finance are currently too expensive for poor countries and poor producers to afford.

So that basically means that fertilizers are either not being applied on farms or being applied sparingly. And that means that the next harvest there's not gonna be as much food produced as the last harvest.

The high energy prices means that even where food is being produced, they're less likely to leave the farm because the farmers not willing to pay the high energy prices and the traders, the informal traders and the smes who are transporting these, this produce to market can't afford to do it at the same price.

Um So this issue of transport means we're gonna have food not leaving the farm or less food leaving the farm and less transport, this is going to mean higher chance for the food to be wasted or rotting or just not leaving at all.

And then there's this finance crisis. Um and I mean, we obviously see it most starkly in the case of sri Lanka with the debt crisis, but it's not just about sri Lanka and countries, it's about farmers being in debt, it's about countries being in debt, It's about debt levels all over the world out of control in so many low and middle-income countries and it's this vicious circle, that means we have to be really,

really worried for now. And into 2030, just a small example, the farmers that are currently in debt and we see a lot of those Ukrainian farmers who've been trying to get their grains shipped out of Ukraine, heavily indebted if they can't get those grains out either through land or through the Black Sea, They're not going to be able to plant next harvest next season, and then this crisis is going to go through into 2023.

Latin America. So let's start with China and India, what's your sense of these two countries? Both with respect to harvest and stockpile and and the outlook for 2022 and 2023.

pretty dependent on Ukraine and Russia for imports. So china is actually potentially one of the beneficiaries of this new Ukraine Russia grain deal. But again, china can do more to help ease the global market crisis by releasing some of their stocks onto global markets and making those more available. India has not been the best ally of the poor world recently. You know, they put in place this ban

on on grain exports, on wheat exports. Um and this was really disruptive to markets and to those countries that were, you know, depending on India not banning their exports, but allowing exports to come out. So that India could then replace some of the Ukrainian and Russian grain exports. But India put in place these export bans that was really very badly received by the world. I

think India is now agreed to lift them. But again, India and china are also going to be struggling with not just the food prices, but again, this sort of multiple crisis of fertilizer energy finance. So on the energy front, everybody suffering um on the fertilizer front, everybody's suffering. And on the finance side, there's also, you know, huge problems.

Now, Karen, you said that, you know, India's, you know, sort of ad hoc decision to restrict exports of grain met with criticism and there's been some back and forth and some easing here and there and perhaps china is also on the table in some global forum around this now, 2.5 years ago, wh o found itself in a very difficult position around the pandemic where people were questioning its effectiveness of leadership, whether it was biased here or there and that kind

of stuff. Does the W FB stand on sounder grounds? Is it bringing together all the key actors of the world in this critical time?

And luckily all countries including India and china voted to agree on what they called the W. F. P. Waver, which meant that basically countries agreed at the World Trade Organization to not allow export bans or export restrictions on food stuffs that was being purchased by the W. F. P. For its operations.

So the WFP is actually in a great situation now in terms of countries agreeing that they will not do anything to restrict W. F. P. S ability to do its jobs to source food and to get it to the people who need it where the W. F. P. Is struggling is the numbers of hungry people are so out of control that unless they get much more funding to finance their food distribution or cash distribution programs, they're not going to be able

to actually get to all the hungry people. And you have this dreadful situation where they're having to choose one hungry person over another or basically target those who are on the verge of starvation and not get to the usual um people that they're trying to help. So WFP's problem is less about sourcing the food and more about getting the money they need or the support they need to finance their food.

But again here, I think W FPs in an okay situation, you had a huge announcement by the biden administration in this Ukraine bill that was adopted by Congress where a huge chunk of that Ukraine bill was a few billion dollars allocated to emergency food assistance for the W. F. P. Um you've seen Germany announced additional money. Um part of which will go for emergency food aid assistance and a number of other countries.

structural aspects of food insecurity if I'm not mistaken. I mean I think there are human document Which showed that through the 70s and 80s, even in the 90s, the worldwide, you know, hunger rate was going down and then over the last decade or so it's been going up again, which I find very troubling given that world is much more prosperous today than it was

10 or 20 years ago. So why are we becoming gradually more food insecure and you know, walk us through the you know, all these various structural drivers.

But for the past and I think it's less than a decade, I think it's only about five or six years, we suddenly see this rise in food insecurity again after getting so close to wiping out hunger. Um so five or six years we've seen an increase. The pandemic was by far the biggest setback to global food security with more than 100 million people with an additional 100 million people going into hunger as a result

of the pandemic. And now with Ukraine a further, we don't know exactly how many but 50-80 million more people again being pushed into hunger. Why is this happening? Um so I think there are three main factors. The first is in the last five or six years we have experienced more economic slowdowns. I mean today we're talking about recessions as well, but many more economic slowdowns in the low and middle income countries for various reasons. In some cases, it's because of low commodity prices, low

oil prices, low, low low mineral prices. Um in other cases it's for other reasons, but we've seen these economic slowdowns and they always put a negative dent into food security the second and the more I think more serious problem that's with us for the future are the climate shocks, droughts, floods and cyclones. Climate change has now become one of the main drivers of food insecurity and this is with us to stay as we know, we are not going to meet the 1.5 degree target.

Climate change will be a reality is already a reality. It is just going to get worse. And so these shocks are going to continue and I mean, we've seen it already, you know, we're seeing it now, the droughts, the floods undermining harvests and then the third driver, which has always been a driver and always will be. And I think is probably the hardest one to eradicate in our lifetimes is conflict whenever you see conflict, you see hunger rising.

So for me there's these three factors that are really undermining food security with the pandemic. The main problem was access not availability access basically meaning there was a lot of food in the market but people lost their incomes. So while those people sitting in the rich world got safety nets and got all support from their government, those sitting in the

poor world, their governments couldn't afford to help them. And so they lost their with the lockdowns, they lost their jobs from one day to the next no job, no income, no food. Um That was really the shock of the covid for so many people in low and middle income countries with you, the Ukraine issue as we've discussed, there's an availability issue,

there's an access issue. There's these disruptions to grain markets with the ports being stopped with countries putting in export bands, there's low global stocks, but there's also the fertilizer and the energy issue. So what do we need to do to fix this to stop this horrible reversal of otherwise decades of progress. So I think immediately people need cash to basically get them over the crisis to be able

to be able to afford food, um healthcare etcetera. So I think we need a massive global social safety net program. I think the U. N. Needs to oversee it. But I think we need a social safety net program on the scale we've never seen before that's going to be the key factor to help us get over this current crisis.

over the crisis. Even though if we start getting into the discussion, I think there starts being a more and more persuasive argument in favor of a basic minimum income for everyone if we accept that the new norm is shocks and I think the new norm is shocks, whether they're climate shocks, pandemic shocks, conflict shocks. I think this is the new norm at least for the coming decades.

Um we we saw an improvement in agricultural productivity and that's also sort of flattened out, which I find personally rather striking given you know, so many high tech solutions out there these days from satellite imaging

and smart irrigation and so on. Um first of all, do you agree that, you know, we have sort of flattened out in terms of popular around the world or is it the case that we still have a lot of low hanging fruits in terms of improving agriculture technology around the world and improving our food productivity.

but biodiversity, loss, pollution. And we are paying for that today so that it's now come back to bite us and now environmental problems are one of the main drivers of food insecurity and poverty, so we've got to deal with the consequences of that success, I would say it was not only about yield improvements and productivity gains and green revolutionary technology. I think there's

a lot of other factors that were in play. A lot of countries like china succeeded not because they improve productivity in agriculture, but because they improved productivity productivity in non agricultural sectors, manufacturing services, infrastructure, china moved people out of agriculture as a way to develop.

That's quite different to what you see some of the latin american countries having achieved where they really pushed agriculture as the engine of growth and their engine of economic development, Brazil, Argentina Uruguay, all these countries, Costa rica, you know, agriculture was the way that they got out of hunger and poverty,

but it's not a universal story. There's a lot of other countries that, you know, Vietnam China pursued a different model that's been arguably more successful because they've now got very diversified economies. Um technology has been a huge factor, but not just crop technologies, not just technologies that improved yields, technologies that improved access to energy or improved mobility or made it easier to apply machinery technology. All of these other factors have also played a role.

And I do think that as we find solutions for our, for our current and future problems, we can no longer just rely on the old way we did things. Um even those who are huge supporters of the Green Revolution um realize that we can't keep doing it this way that as you said, we've reached in some places, we've reached the limit of our yield potential?

We haven't everywhere, there's still massive productivity gaps in agriculture in africa, so there's still a huge yield gap to fill in african agriculture, but if we do it in the same way as we did it in Asia and latin America, we will keep exacerbating these environmental problems that are undermining our ability to solve these problems for good.

but balance of payments. Now, I want to sort of, you know, segue into serious 2030 in in a in a sort of, you know, cumbersome manner because these sort of issues that, you know, how to fund gaps in food security in the short term as well as set basis for the longer term, required Serious analysis, serious costing exercise things that are very credible to, as you were saying earlier, not just ministers that you engage with, but also extremely wealthy philanthropists who want to

see convincing science-based numbers. So who's running these exercises? What are the, you know, costing estimates for the near and medium term? So walk us through serious 2030.

our trying to convince the most powerful. So it was a study commissioned by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the german government to try and answer this question, how much is it going to cost to end hunger and what are the most effective ways of doing it? And we really use that S. T. G. Two framework as our framework for defining what are our targets and indicators. You mentioned it in the in the introduction today.

So what we did was we reviewed half a million articles from the past 20 years of agricultural development literature and then we used a global economic model to estimate how it would cost. So what the literature told us, well, what were the most effective ways to end hunger and what the model told us was how much it was going to cost.

And we were all very surprised with the results Because what we found was that it really is possible to end world hunger and it's possible to do it by 2030 and it's possible to do it in a sustainable way. So what we found is basically that the price tag is an extra $33 billion 2030.

And that with that what we could do was end hunger, we could double the incomes and the productivity of about half a billion poor producers, and we could do it in a way that maintained greenhouse gas emissions in agriculture, to the commitments that countries made in the paris climate agreement.

So we have a hunger target, a producer productivity target, and we have a climate target And of this sort of total package of an additional 33 billion a year, 19 out of the 33 billion has to come from the countries themselves, the low and middle-income countries themselves through their own public resource, mobilization. So that only 14 out of the 33 billion a year has to come from outside help from donors, from philanthropists, etcetera.

And this is in many ways why we founded the Schomburg Center for Food and Climate, because once we saw this evidence based um report come out and we were convinced that it was so possible to end hunger, we decided, okay, we need to establish an organization with a vision to end world hunger sustainably and to do it by empowering those producers and those businesses that are the sort of key to unleashing that um that goal.

So in Sarah's 2030 just coming back um and then I will hand over back to you for other questions. So we basically found that 90 countries need to be prioritized for this investment And that there's 10 high impact areas where we need more investment. So we have these 10 high impact areas and we

group them into three big buckets if you like. So the first bucket and probably the most important is all the on farm investments and these are investments like investments in research and development in technology, in mechanization in assets that basically help farmers to improve their productivity and their incomes. The second is investments to move food from the farm to the market and it's basically things that improve storage is improved business services

that farmers need. And the third is this bucket called empowering the excluded and this is all our social safety nets but it's also our education and vocational training and it's basically the things that allow people to be at a level needed so that they can benefit from everything else. So it's making sure that you have an education, a decent livelihood and a political voice so that when all these other help comes technology inputs, R and D. Business services that you can benefit from it.

But what about european union? What about the rest of Asia? What kind of leadership are we seeing both in terms of commitment to finance at the public and private sector level as well as actual action?

I mean china leading the one belt um initiative, a huge infrastructure project, China financing a lot of the infrastructure development in Africa today and in South Asia, I think china is going to be hugely important in the infrastructure, the way china provides its aid though, can sometimes make countries more vulnerable and we've seen this with a lot of these very attractive loans for infrastructure development and then when the country can't pay it back the chinese government

or the chinese state owned enterprise that is responsible for it takes over these assets. And we see a number of ports, roads and bridges where the country has been unable to repay the loan back, where china has gone in and over, taken over or the state owned enterprises has gone and taken over these assets. Now I think china could do more to make the countries that they're providing these loans to not as vulnerable um to going into debt and being unable to repay

those loans. But I think china, the ASIA Development Bank, the the new asian infrastructure and investment banks are going to be a huge source of additional investment um in the coming decades. Um The european Union's the european union and the european Member States definitely have stepped up. We've seen France and Germany in particular add more resources. We've seen the european commission add more resources.

There is a lot of attention right now on Ukraine because it is the biggest threat to the european Union since World War Two. Um and so they are quite focused there, but there is additional money being made available, but we have, I mean, you have to acknowledge that we have seen leadership from the U. S. In terms of additional support and additional resources, not just for Ukraine but also globally um that we hadn't seen under the previous administration,

Um Karen, the issue about global policy coordination. So is the W. F. P. And as you said earlier that, you know, with the issues of W. T. O. That's where the coordination is taking place, not at the Washington think tanks like the World Bank, I m f they're sort of supporting as opposed to taking the lead.

at the World Bank spring meetings last year. Um And then followed by this big conference called Global Uniting for Global Food Security which was a gathering of Foreign ministers, Finance ministers, um Agriculture ministers and Environment Ministers to try and unite again led by the G seven.

And then for me, the best news was the G. Seven summit that took place in Germany this year, where the G seven leaders announced an additional $4.5 billion this year to help respond to the global food Security crisis. So I think there's been quite good leadership coming out of the G seven. There's also been important leadership coming out of the G-20 with the Indonesian government currently holding the presidency. And there there was a major finance ministers meeting a few weeks

ago on food security. I mean seeing finance ministers gathering to address the global food security crisis is unheard of. Um it just shows you how important this issue is and how important governments at all levels are taking this

the leadership, the Finance Ministry's. Um so we're seeing that we saw the european commission currently led by the french government launching a farm initiative, a food and Agriculture resilience mission initiative where they've pledged additional money and we've seen the italian government taking the lead in

setting up a mediterranean initiative. So, so everywhere a bit we're seeing initiatives emerging, I would say the main the leading coordinating body is the U. N. But there are these sort of other groups that are emerging to help accelerate that progress or work on specific areas or issues of need.

farming infrastructure of Singapore. So we talked a lot about farms which is by definition not urban and we talk about farmers, which I think, you know, largely speaking, we talk about rural farmers, what's your sense of what's happening in this new, exciting field of urban farming.

a sustainable alternative to the current model. It uses far too much energy to produce the food. But if and when we solve the energy problem and we can source these vertical farms with renewable energy, truly sustainable energy. I think they are a very viable alternative to our currently highly polluting high emissions intensive, highly like unsecure because of the climate shocks model of agriculture

that we're currently engaged in. So I definitely think this vertical farming is one of the is one of the areas we should be looking into. It's never going to be the only way we can grow food. And so whilst we pursue these vertical farms we also need to pursue a whole lot of other ways of producing in a more environmentally friendly way. And I think one of the easy to really easy things we can do one is being much more efficient and effective at applying

the inputs we apply. Let's be much more precise about where we apply fertilizer and where we apply pesticide and let's apply it where it's needed rather than just across a whole farm or across thousands of hectares. So everything that's happening in precision agriculture, let's be more efficient at how we use water. Let's stop using flood irrigation and rotational irrigation and let's massively input like drip irrigation. Um so being much more efficient at how we use

the inputs we need for producing food. And the second big thing, which is an easy victory to have is dealing with the waste. The waste at the farm level, the waste at the storage level and the waste at the consumer level. It's not just about the waste we do in our fridge is where we throw out half our fridge because the food, you know, got expired, it's about all the waste that's happening along the value

chain where we're losing a huge percentage. We don't exactly know how much, we think it's somewhere between a quarter and a third, but where we're wasting huge amounts of food because we don't have proper storage facilities, cold storage facilities proper. Um yeah,

more challenging? Are you actually more hopeful? Because the crisis has galvanized, like you said, the finance ministers, which was not necessarily the case in the past. So where do we stand in this juncture of things looking a bit dodgy? But at the same time we are hearing the clarion call of action.

And, you know, I mentioned in the beginning this zero hunger private sector pledge, which for me is one of the, one of one of the most innovative mechanisms we have for everybody to act, any company, no matter how big or how small can make a financial commitment to invest in one of these 10 areas that was identified through the science of Sara's 2030 and in one of the 90 priority countries to contribute to ending world hunger.

So if you're a company or if you're part of the private sector, no matter how big or how small we've had companies pledge $100, we've had companies pledge $160 million. This is not about charity. We're not asking for anybody

to donate money. We're asking companies to say we will invest in areas that will contribute to food security and you don't even have to be a food business, you can be an airline, you can be a tech company, do something that helps the food system get better at ending world hunger.

So anybody who's listening, who's part of a company get your company to pledge, if you're a government provide more money to these 10 areas, we've we've, you know, there's alongside the Zero hunger private sector pledge, there's a huge coalition that was launched called the Zero Hunger Coalition that allows governments, international organizations, companies, civil society, farmers organizations, all to act to make commitments and to act.

And I think that the risk is this not happening because people feel like the problem is too big or it's not theirs and the opportunity is for everybody to get together and to make these very concrete practical commitments to act to try and achieve this goal by 2030.

googling Devious Research Library. Have a great day.