Reflection on the Food crisis

When did agriculture become a hot topic in the international debate again? We can only roughly estimate that it will be between 2007 and 2009. During this period, the financial crisis in the United States and the European debt crisis broke out one after another, and the world energy, resources and environmental crises reappeared. People also found that poverty, food crisis and food security are bringing political and social pressure to many countries and regions in the world. Supporters of the existing international trade order are dismayed to see that food trade alleviates the food crisis and the resulting social crisis no longer seems to be true, and the volatile food prices and the food occupied by the popularity of bioenergy are declaring that the era of relying solely on free trade to solve hunger is over.

Will there be a long-term food crisis and agricultural crisis in the world? Will there be a climate and other ecological crisis that will lead to an avalanche decline in global food production? Will energy prices rise again and again, eventually making long-distance food trade uneconomical and making energy costs higher than the environment can bear? Will biofuels really engulf food that could have solved hunger in poor countries? Is public investment by governments to improve food and agricultural production capacity really necessary? To what extent the food crisis develops, it will lead to more government intervention. If such intervention occurs, is there still room for profitable investment in private capital and venture capital in agriculture? will it lead to the withdrawal of a large amount of capital? In recent years, price fluctuations in the international grain market have stimulated some grain-producing countries to increase grain production and export. however, as an important grain importing economy, the European Union has begun to set up so-called ecological barriers to all kinds of imported goods, including food. will this dampen the enthusiasm of grain-producing countries by shutting out imports that do not meet fair trade and environmental standards? Or can it really promote grain-producing countries to improve the quality of exports?

The trend of these issues is closely related to the interests of grain consumers, practitioners of grain production and processing industry chain, capital representatives involved in agricultural management, public sector and other institutions and people. Of course, more importantly, the prospect of solving the food crisis will also have a bearing on whether everyone can get rid of hunger.

Since 2007, the French Development Agency and the Paris Institute of political Sciences have jointly launched the annual publication "looking at the Earth", which selects a theme each year and makes an in-depth analysis of it from the perspective of global governance from a multi-perspective, multi-thinking and multi-disciplinary observation. supplemented by streamlined summary information and detailed chart data, a panoramic inventory of annual topics on sustainable development is carried out. The 2012 report "look at the Earth" focuses on the global food problem and brings together the wisdom of the most authoritative experts on agriculture and food issues in many countries around the world. The 2012 report, entitled "opportunities for Agricultural change: development, Environment and Food", was edited by Pierre Jacques, Director of Strategy and Chief Economist of the French Development Agency, Director of the Department of Humanities, Economics, Management and Finance of the French College of roads and Bridges, and Rajindra K., Chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change and 2007 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Pachouri, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at the Paris Institute of political Science, Lawrence Tubiana.

This book responds to global public concerns on agriculture and food issues and systematically answers many of the above questions. In the introduction of the whole book, it is pointed out that the sustainable development of agriculture has become the top priority of global development, which involves turning the production links of grain and other agricultural products to green and harmless, improving the efficiency of agricultural production and operation, and reducing waste in trade and consumption. It is also meaningfully mentioned in the book that in order to achieve the sustainable development of agriculture, the agricultural policies of various countries need to shift from the crisis management model of "stop-gap measures" to the risk management model.

The whole book faces the food crisis directly. The second chapter of the book points out that the shortage of food supply in recent years is related to the reduction of stocks caused by the adjustment of food policies in various countries, the decline in production caused by abnormal climate, the consumption of food stocks by biofuels and sharp fluctuations in food prices, and speculation in the derivative market of agricultural products, it is also related to the fact that some grain-producing countries have begun to impose restrictions on grain exports. It is clear that more stakeholders are involved in dealing with and resolving the food crisis than ever before. The game of interests will also be more complex, including "upstream agricultural seed companies, fertilizer and pesticide suppliers, intermediate agro-food processors and downstream large retailers", as well as speculators in the derivatives market.

The book discusses countries in sub-Saharan Africa under the shadow of the food crisis. At present, the region is still in demographic and social transformation, agricultural growth is facing structural constraints, and many international aid and development support policies have failed. Land leases open to foreign individuals and companies have also proved difficult to cope with the water crisis. Subsequently, the book discusses the potential of China and India as the two most populous countries in the world to improve agricultural development, as well as the practical difficulties they face. In the sixth chapter of the book, the Swedish scholar Onothweding warns people to pay attention to the high pressure that social ecosystems outside agriculture already face, reminding that agricultural reform "must take into account the combination of agriculture, agro-food and the new ecological economy." It is necessary to implement an approach based on biological, chemical, physical, geological and geographical knowledge "and to integrate the achievements of technological innovation as well as social and institutional innovation.

In this book, many scholars have put forward a profound reflection on the model of agricultural development that spread from the United States to countries around the world after World War II. After World War II, Indonesia and Brazil began to introduce American-style agricultural intensive experience, but the result did not reduce deforestation and damage to the environment as economists predicted. On the contrary, many agricultural intensive farms fell into a single variety of agricultural products, the ecological balance was broken, operators put in more pesticides and fertilizers, and finally made the ecological environment more fragile.

According to the research results of several agricultural scholars in Latin America, Asia, Africa, Europe and the United States, in order to get rid of and better deal with the agricultural and food crisis, it is indeed necessary to properly adjust the previous path of economic liberalization, re-play the role of the government, improve the quality of public policies, strengthen policy linkages between countries, reduce pollution and strengthen supervision. However, scholars also pointed out that the effectiveness of government intervention in agriculture, especially food production, is usually greatly reduced, and it is easy to slide into inefficiency or even corruption. Therefore, to move towards sustainable agriculture, we need to strike a balance between effective government monitoring and regulation, and international and national industry regulation.