Next week, the UN is holding a major summit on food security in Rome – I’ll be there throughout (and blogging regularly on what goes on). Ahead of the kick-off, I’ve updated the Global Dashboard page on where to get briefed on food prices, and put out a scene-setter press release through Chatham House that sets out a few thoughts on what the summit needs to achieve.
This week’s already seen a couple of new items on food prices that are worth a look, starting with a new annual FAO / OECD outlook report – which this year looks all the way out to 2017. It finds that although prices will come down in the short term (which you already knew, since you read it here on Global Dashboard on March 18th), nominal prices over the medium term will remain “substantially above” levels over the last ten years. In other words, it’s not just a blip.
Also worth a look is World Bank President Bob Zoellick’s ten point plan for food prices, published in the FT this morning. His article confirms that he’s well ahead of the curve on understanding the need for an integrated approach to scarcity issues:he says collective action is needed on “the interconnected challenges of energy, food and water [which will be] drivers of the world economy and security”. (I’ll be publishing a paper on how the multilateral system needs to be reformed to cope better with scarcity issues just before the G8 in early July.)
What will actually happen at the summit is currently anyone’s guess. It’s fair to say that FAO haven’t been very proactive in briefing the media on likely outcomes or what they’re hoping for, which puts them in the rather hazardous position of allowing high expectations to emerge without really managing them. Another risk is that a major spat over biofuels could erupt: Ahmadinejad and Chavez will both be at the food summit, and would like nothing better to embarrass the US over its support for ethanol – and while US subsidies for corn-based ethanol are certainly problematic, it’s hard to see these particular interlocutors opening up much political space on Capitol Hill as legislators contemplate the Farm Bill.
But on the upside, great progress has been made on financing the immediate humanitarian needs (after Saudi Arabia stunned everyone by coming up with half a billion dollars last week – a coup for WFP head Josette Sheeran and for UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Sir John Holmes, who’s invested much time encouraging Gulf countries to contribute). This, together with the prospect of some short term relief on prices, gives policymakers a chance to look ahead towards the longer term challenges as well as short term crisis management.
It’s also hard to remember a time when the UN system and the international financial institutions have worked together as closely or as effectively as they seem to have been doing on the UN’s food task force – a great story, given how fragmented the international system usually is, but one that’s gone largely unreported. Even so, the real work in pulling together the longer term agenda is still in front of us…
