Speakers:
Dacian Ciolos, European Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development
Shenggen Fan, Director General, International Food Policy Research Institute
Jo Swinnen, Senior Associate Fellow, CEPS and Director, LICOS Centre, University of Leuven
Guido Gryseels, Director General, Royal Museum for Central Africa

Date: 21 November 2011
Venue: Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, Belgium

The Royal Museum for Central Africa, Belgium, hosted the first high-level lecture on food security and development, on 21 November 2011, jointly organised by the Centre for Institutions and Economic Performance (LICOS, KULeuven) and CEPS. As an introduction to this event, Guido Gryseels (Director General, Royal Museum for Central Africa) emphasised the urgent need to redouble our efforts to tackle food insecurity in Africa, currently the poorest region in the world. In his overview of global food security and the alarming state of 925 million hungry people, Shenggen Fan (Director General of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) mainly focused on two points: improving nutrition and reducing price volatility. On the first point, he stressed that under-nutrition and micronutrient deficiencies, i.e. the “hidden hunger”, remain pervasive. Secondly, with high and volatile food prices, he said, we are witnessing a fast-changing global landscape that provides challenges but also opportunities.
Price volatility, which Fan argued has increased in recent years, plays a critical role in food security; it hurts the poor, whether consumers or producers. In his view, food producers will only benefit from high prices if they are net sellers of food and if input costs do not rise in parallel.
Concerning the ongoing debate surrounding financial speculation and its relationship to price volatility, he raised the question of whether price volatility in agricultural markets has attracted speculators or whether it was speculation itself that caused high price volatility.  As a conclusion, Dr Fan noted the increasing influence of non-agricultural factors on food security (energy, global warming, demographic changes, etc.) and recalled the opportunities that the current challenging context offers, especially for emerging countries. He argued that these opportunities are contingent upon a policy move towards business as unusual: promoting smallholders’ productivity, improving their resilience, investing in productive social protection programmes, reforming the global food architecture, and investing in regional and local capacity building.
Before moving on to the second keynote speaker of this event, Jo Swinnen (Director, LICOS and Senior Research Fellow, CEPS) highlighted the intriguing paradox that most food insecure people in the world are food producers themselves; when prices go up, food security for those producers should, in theory, increase as well. Dacian Ciolos (EU Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development) then took the floor by underlining that food security is not only a problem in developing countries; it is also a priority political issue within Europe and therefore needs to be dealt with in a coherent and coordinated manner at the international level.
In this global context, the European Commission has proposed to maintain a strong budget for the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), with three core priorities: (1) ensuring food security, (2) managing natural resources in a sustainable way and (3) maintaining rural vitality. The goal of the Commission, he said, is to make sure that European agriculture becomes economically but also ecologically competitive. On the impacts of direct payments on developing countries, Commissioner Ciolos insisted that the CAP is not a dumping policy anymore, as support has been decoupled from production and as export subsidies have been almost completely abolished (representing only 1% of the current CAP budget). He finally emphasised the new role played by research and innovation in meeting future challenges, and called upon the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) to go beyond its current mandate to endorse a more important role and ensure a better coordination of agricultural policies around the world.