PARİS'TE TOPLANAN G-20 ÜLKELERİ TARIM BAKANLARI AŞAĞIDAKİ KARARLARI ALMIŞ BULUNMAKTADIR:
- TARIM ÜRÜNLERİNDE GÖRÜLEN FİYAT DEĞİŞİKLİKLERİNE KARŞI MÜCADELE ETMEK,
- KÜRESEL BİR TARIM POLİTİKASI OLUŞTURMAK,
- ORTAK BİR TARIM GİRİŞİM GRUBU OLUŞTURMAK,
- ULUSLARARASI TARIM PİYASASI BİLGİ SİSTEMİ (AMIS) KURMAK,
G20 agriculture ministers dodge the big questions on food prices
The action plan agreed is far weaker than NGOs hoped, and there was less agreement on the causes of food price rises and how to tackle them.
From left to right: the agriculture ministers of France, Bruno Le Maire, and the US, Tom Vilsack, and the World Bank president, Robert Zoellick, deliver a statement during a press conference at the G20 agriculture ministers' summit in Paris.
The action to curb rising food prices agreed by the G20 ministers on Thursday is far weaker than aid agencies hoped and displays a predictable retreat to national interests over any real structural reform – but perhaps the most significant fact is that negotiations have taken place at all. This was the first time the agriculture ministers of the group of leading world economies have held a summit. The contribution of soaring prices to uprisings in the Arab world has reminded global leaders that without action there could be a repeat of the riots that accompanied spikes in 2008 – food inflation and political unrest have been bedfellows throughout history. But there was less agreement on causes of price rises and how to tackle them.
The case that mandates and subsidies for biofuels have contributed to price rises by diverting huge volumes of food crops to fuel is compelling and widely accepted. (Around 40% of the US corn crop now goes to petrol tanks.) Both the FAO and the World Bank have called for the G20 to stop promoting biofuels. But the two big ethanol producers, the US and Brazil, blocked agreement. American geopolitical interest lies in using its vast agricultural surplus to wean itself off Middle Eastern oil; Brazil's growth, meanwhile, is driven by its agroexports. So the biofuels issue has been kicked into the long grass of "more studies needed".
France with its big farming interests and the G20 presidency has pushed hard for an ambitious agreement that would protect producers and consumers from excessive commodities speculation and market volatility. (Banks won deregulation of commodities markets in 2000, allowing them to develop new derivative products such as commodity index funds, which offer investors a chance to track changes in a spread of commodity prices including key agricultural commodities.) There have been huge flows of capital into agricultural commodities in the last decade, and the UN rapporteur on food, Olivier de Schutter, is one of many experts along with aid agencies such as Christain Aid, Oxfam and the World Development Movement, concluding that excessive speculation has been a significant factor in food price rises and volatility.
However, the UK – whose recovery depends on its dominant financial sector – opposed deregulation of markets. The position of its coalition government's Conservative agriculture minister, Caroline Spelman, is that the evidence is inconclusive. Unable to agree, the G20 action plan ducks the issue, choosing to send it back to finance ministers and central banks to deal with as part of reform of the financial system generally. Instead, the communique on action stresses that transparency rather than new regulation is the best guarantee of efficient commodities markets. That will be seen as an ineffectual response by development campaigners.
The deal does commit to a new global agriculture market information system (Amis) so that governments can share better data about the state of food stocks and global production, but the FAO, already short of funds, will have to run it without new money. Private sector players, such as the large grain traders for whom knowledge of stocks and harvests represent a key competitive advantage, are simply "urged" to participate.
There is no deal either on giving up export bans when prices spike. Several countries stopped exports of key crops during that last food price crisis to keep the cost of staples in check at home, but added to anxiety about global supplies, and fuelled further price rises by doing so. Emerging economy governments, perhaps not surprisingly, were not keen to give up one of the few tools they have to keep the lid on urban unrest in times of food inflation. However, there is agreement that exports for humanitarian aid will not be caught up in export bans in future.
The most glaring omission from the action plan is climate change. The impact of extreme climate events has been one of the major drivers of food price volatility in the last few years.