Homi Kharas có ý kiến Brookings cho là đáng để mắt (trên EuropeWorld). Kharas cho rằng, vấn đề lương thực thế giới hiện không phải là lượng cung, mà chính là khả năng tiếp cận nguồn cung đó và chất lượng lương thực. Nhưng có nhiều nghiên cứu rất có ảnh hưởng, lại đưa ra các nguyên nhân bí hiểm, khiến cho nhận thức vấn đề bị chệch đi đáng kể. Sự "bí hiểm" đó tiêu biểu là:
1) Định hướng lương thực giá rẻ, dồi dào.
2) Nguyên nhân giới đầu cơ tài chính gây ảnh hưởng tiêu cực.
3) Các tổ chức quốc tế và toàn cầu cần "làm nhiều hơn nữa, nhưng vẫn theo chiều hướng cũ" (do more of the same!)
Kharas rất đáng đọc, nên tôi để nguyên phần comment của ông ở đây:
COMMENTARY ON "But don’t perpetrate the three food security myths" by Homi Kharas.
Franz Fischler’s plan to banish starvation hits all the right notes, yet he also reinforces three myths about food security that distract from the real issues.
The first is that expanding food supply will be an insuperable problem. People increasingly ask whether the world can really produce enough to satisfy the explosion of demand from more people with the income to buy meat, dairy, fish and other proteins? And whether constraints on land, water and other resources mean we are reaching the limits of agricultural production? The short answer to these is, “yes” the world can produce enough food, and “no” we’re not yet reaching binding constraints.
According to the U.S. Agriculture Department, world grain production has risen from 824m tonnes in 1960 to around 2.2bn tones last year. There have been some fluctuations, but production has remained steady with 27m tonnes being added to production every year. This trend suggests that by 2050 the increase in grain production relative to today would be exactly 50%, the target Fischler sets as the global goal. In other words, major reform is not needed as we already have far better agronomic practices, seeds and fertilisers than ever. The one disclaimer has to be climate change. But that is still so unpredictable in its impact on agriculture that it has to be treated as a “wild card”.
The real issue isn’t global food supply but access to food – its distribution and its nutritional quality. Fischler portrays a world in which food will be cheap and affordable, but that is the strategy that has led to large agricultural subsidies and a focus on increasing yield through monocrops. An alternative strategy should be for food to be local, fresh and nutritious even if that means somewhat higher prices.
Higher prices might even be useful to reduce waste. Post-harvest losses amount to about 14% of total production, mostly in developing countries, and another 15% is lost in distribution and in household waste, mostly in rich countries. In India an estimated half of the wheat and a third of the rice distributed to the poor in government programmes is lost. Put another way, three-fifths of the total supply increase needed by 2050 could be obtained if we just stopped wasting food.
Hunger has much more to do with conflict, lack of income, inequalities within households in access to food along with lack of nutritional education than it has to do with global food supply. By focusing on subsistence farmers, Fischler recognises some of this, but he distorts the message by wrapping it in the overall narrative that “with the right programmes we can produce enough food to go around.”
A second myth is that financial speculators are responsible for higher food prices because of the money they pour into futures markets. For that to be true, speculators would have to buy food today, store it away from the market and hope to sell it in the future at higher prices. But the opposite is happening; grain stocks are lower than ever before, so speculators certainly cannot be blamed for taking food off the market. Certainly it would be good to improve the functioning of global food markets by having rich countries reform their farm policies, as Fischler advocates, but the politics of this are daunting. Food markets are overwhelmingly national and don’t respond one-to-one to international prices. Improving local and national food markets would seem far easier.
The third myth is that the international institutions should be allowed to do more of the same. Fischler mentions successful EU and FAO programmes, but the reality is that the international community doesn’t yet take food security seriously. At the G8 summit in L’Aquila in 2009, world leaders committed to investing USD 20bn in developing countries’ agriculture. A new Global Agriculture and Food Security Program was established with much fanfare, but so far it has received only USD 900m in promises and half that in cash – a fortieth of the target.
It is all too easy for international institutions to talk about helping smallholders, but they focus on small projects with only a few beneficiaries, and whose design flaws mean they can never be scaled up to reach the one billion hungry people who Fischler writes about. Only the comparatively small International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) formally incorporates scaling up in its operational policies.
To banish starvation, we must rethink global food strategies. The first priority is to act on the demand side. Few rich people go hungry, so development policies that raise incomes are crucial. And while striving for an integrated global food market, we should put more effort into vibrant local markets featuring foods consistent with a healthy diet. When international institutions are involved, they need to think much-harder about how to scale up their efforts.
Và đây là bài gốc của Fischler: http://www.europesworld.org/NewEnglish/Home_old/Article/tabid/191/ArticleType/articleview/ArticleID/21839/language/en-US/Default.aspx
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