Food security and international trade
December 2015
J. Clapp
The State of AgriculturalCommodity Markets
2015-16
Background paper
Unpacking disputed narratives
Food security and international trade Unpacking disputed narratives
Jennifer Clapp
Background paper prepared for The State of Agricultural Commodity Markets 201516.
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Rome, 2015
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Contents
Acknowledgements........................................................................................................................... iv
Executive summary ............................................................................................................................ v
1. Introduction ...................................................................................................................................1
2. Shifting understandings: food security and trade in historical context .............................................2 2.1 Food security: from national to international to individual conceptualizations ...........................3 2.2 Trade norms: food exceptionalism and trade liberalization ........................................................7
3. Trade as an opportunity for food security .......................................................................................9 3.1 Comparative advantage ............................................................................................................9 3.2 Trade as a transmission belt ................................................................................................... 11 3.3 Agricultural protection imposes costs that harm food security ................................................. 12 3.4 Potential limitations and inconsistencies in the trade as opportunity narrative ..................... 12
Global value chains change the equation .......................................................................................... 13 Factors of production within agricultural sector are inflexible .......................................................... 14 Externalities matter ............................................................................................................................ 15 Dynamic considerations are left out of the picture ........................................................................... 16 Efficiency gains overshadow other goals ........................................................................................... 16
4. Trade as a threat to food security ................................................................................................. 17 4.1 Sovereignty and the right to prioritize food security over trade ............................................... 18 4.2 Multifunctionality of agriculture ............................................................................................. 19 4.3 Liberalized food trade brings risks ........................................................................................... 20 4.4 Potential limitations and inconsistencies within the trade as threat narrative ....................... 22
Greater food self-sufficiency may not be a feasible goal for all countries ........................................ 22 Extra-territorial impacts of protection can harm the food security of others ................................... 23 Farmers right to choose .................................................................................................................... 24 Challenges of ensuring small-scale production produces sufficient food for all ............................... 24 Distributional questions ..................................................................................................................... 25
5. Bridging the divide?...................................................................................................................... 25 5.1 Polarizing tendencies .............................................................................................................. 25 5.2 Is there a way to get past binary approaches to trade and food security?................................. 27
Focus on more open-ended questions............................................................................................... 27 Develop joint language ....................................................................................................................... 28 Explore new indicators ....................................................................................................................... 29 Use global governance forums to strengthen areas of convergence ................................................ 29
6. Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 30
References ....................................................................................................................................... 33
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Acknowledgements This document was commissioned as a background paper for the preparation of the 201516 edition of FAOs flagship report The State of Agricultural Commodity Markets. It was prepared by Jennifer Clapp, Canada Research Chair in Global Food Security and Sustainability and Professor, Environment and Resource Studies Department, University of Waterloo, Canada. Its preparation was guided by a terms of reference prepared by FAO. The paper benefited from comments by participants at a series of meetings held by FAO in the first half of 2015 to provide input into the drafting of the report. The author would especially like to thank Eleonora Canigiani, Jamie Morrison, Ekaterina Krivonos, Susan Bragdon, Ryan Isakson, and Matt Gaudreau for helpful comments on earlier drafts. Thanks are also due to Rachel McQuail for editorial support.
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Executive summary Is trade a threat or an opportunity for food security? Longstanding debates over this question remain unresolved. This is understandable when one considers that the agricultural sector serves a range of vital functions in society. It provides food, which is essential for human survival, and it provides a livelihood for approximately 30 percent of the worlds active workforce. At the same time, agricultural exports are a significant source of revenue for some states, and imports are crucial for food security in other states. Agriculture also has deep ecological connections as well as important cultural dimensions. For these various reasons, there has long been concern about the ways in which international trade might improve or hinder societys ability to balance different social and economic goals as they relate to agriculture and food security. This paper seeks to shed light on this debate by providing an overview of the main opposing narratives and the rationale behind them. It does not seek to advocate one viewpoint over the other. Instead, it seeks to examine the contours of the debate with a view to uncovering why it is so polarized, and how we might move beyond the current impasse in international policymaking. The first section of the paper briefly maps out the historical context of the different understandings of the links between food security and trade. It shows that norms and ideas around the concepts of both food security and trade in agriculture have shifted over time, both independently and in relation to each other. The second and third sections of the paper explain the conceptual basis of two distinct narratives: one that sees trade as an opportunity to enhance food security; and another that sees trade as a threat to food security. These sections examine the arguments put forward in support of these viewpoints and discuss some of the potential limitations and inconsistencies of each approach. Each of these narratives emerges from different scholarly traditions grounded in their own notions of science. The trade as opportunity narrative emerges largely from the discipline of neoclassical economics and relies on the ideas of gains from trade as predicted by trade theory, t
