Next Generation Delegation 2016 Commentary Series
Sarah Stefanos, Dual PhD candidate, Environment and Resources, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2016 Next Generation Delegate
In recent years, conversations on global food security have frequently highlighted the importance of the private sector. Certainly, the private sector and NGOs play an important role in helping millions of people around the world access adequate food. Yet the largest investors in food security often do not hail from the private sector; they are national governments.
This emphasis on the private sector may be due in part to a perception that some governments are unable or unwilling to make the investments needed for agricultural development. One initiative, Government Spending Watch (GSW), tracks some developing countries’ spending on agriculture. In its 2013 report, GSW found that of 30 African countries surveyed, only 7 of them had met targets of spending 10 percent of their national budgets on agriculture by 2008. African countries were a focus of the study because agricultural ministers from African countries codified a goal to make agriculture 10 percent of national budgetary expenditure at a meeting in Maputo in 2003.
But these numbers and missed targets fail to reveal the full story. The real question is why are developing country governments not making larger budgetary investments in agriculture? And what do such benchmarks even mean?
The answer might be that these benchmarks and goals may not mean as much as we would like them to mean. Government officials and policymakers have to think holistically and comprehensively when considering how to best catalyze agricultural development and make strategic investments in non-agricultural sectors that directly and intentionally serve agricultural development. Investing in better road infrastructure, for instance, might be just as important for agricultural development as fertilizer access, but the former cannot be considered within an “agriculture” budget. Giving a child an education also cannot be accounted for within an agriculture budget, but that 16 year-old girl who now goes to school might be a farmer and the head of a household who can now better understand the terms of a loan for agricultural inputs.
Moreover, many national governments, especially those in developing countries, might not be able to invest as much as they would like in agriculture because they simply lack the finances. In the twenty-first century, developing country government officials are still grappling with the brutal, and often entwined, legacies of colonialism and extractive industries. Just one small part of that legacy is soil that has been treated far too poorly for far too long. And as a result, crop production is an especially costly, and also a difficult, labor-intensive, and risky endeavor.
Climate change, a phenomenon largely caused by the developed world but which has had the most devastating effects on the developing world, is further exacerbating the difficulties and precariousness of agriculture. Recently, temperatures reached a record 123.8 degrees Fahrenheit in India. Thousands of people died, including farmers who worked in the extreme heat while simultaneously battling a crippling drought.
We cannot depend on the private sector alone to help poor farmers, in India or otherwise, who, in a cruel twist of irony, often do not get enough food to eat in the pursuit of feeding others. Of course, the government can and sometimes must work with private enterprise, but the public good cannot be compromised for profit. Farmers’ lives are at stake and they need free or incredibly low-cost access to water and irrigation infrastructure. Research must be undertaken to identify the kinds of soft and hard technologies that can help farmers reduce their labor and get better yields. And as prolonged or severe droughts in many parts of the world have made farmers desperate, they cannot be expected to pay for improved or drought-resistant seeds out of their own pockets or even on credit. Governments or non-profit organizations need to provide such inputs to farmers without charge.
There is a real opportunity now for the conversation on global food security to change its tenor. It is time for national governments to set their own agricultural development agendas without being beholden to numbers, logics, and development goals that they have not set for themselves. And it is time for developed country governments to fulfill their obligation to financially assist developing country governments in implementing their agricultural development agendas so that food security can be achieved for all global citizens.
Read previous posts in the Next Generation Delegation 2016 Commentary Series:
- Promoting Food Security While Avoiding the Nutrition Transition, Kara Bresnahan, MPH Candidate, University of California, Berkeley