How safe is Europe’s access to food?

Everyone favours food security, but there are very different opinions about whether it is a problem for Europe and how to respond to it.

In the European Union, hunger is a subject for history books. Yet the issue of food security has become an increasingly live debate for Europe’s farm policy.

Securing adequate food supplies has always been a goal of the European project. The founding treaty of the European project set out that there would be a Common Agricultural Policy, which, among other goals, would “guarantee regular supplies”. The hunger and lost harvests wrought by the Second World War was still a recent memory for the men who wrote that treaty. More than 50 years later, the European Commission continues to view food security as a principal goal of the EU’s farm policy: a draft paper on the future of the CAP after 2013 states that guaranteeing “long-term food security for European citizens” and “contributing to growing world food demand” is one of the policy’s main aims. “Europe’s capacity to deliver food security is an important long-term choice for Europe which cannot be taken for granted,” it states.

Food-price riots

In the view of the Commission’s agriculture department, the 2008 food-price crisis and ensuing riots in developing countries demonstrated the case for a strong CAP. A similar case was put by France’s then agriculture minister, Michel Barnier. In an article for Project Syndicate he argued that Europe can and should be a regulator of global food markets, and warned: “If Europe cut back on its agricultural production, the increase in its own food imports would contribute significantly to a worldwide increase in food prices. This makes it imperative that EU food production levels be held steady.” Barnier added that Africa and Latin America should develop their own versions of the CAP to guarantee food production.

But the notion that food security should always mean enough domestically produced food to meet domestic needs has not gone unchallenged. Joe Dewbre, an economist in the trade and agriculture directorate of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), has argued that “the objective should be to ensure that people – and countries – can buy enough to eat, not necessarily that they become self-sufficient”.

Sceptics

On those grounds, and others, Valentin Zahrnt of the European Centre for International Political Economy has argued robustly that Europe’s food security is not at risk. In a paper published this month, he points out that EU food production per person has risen consistently and now exceeds dietary requirements. When the EU does import grains, meat, or other food products, they mostly come from reliable sources – stable, liberal traders such as the Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. Zahrnt concludes that there is “no reasonably discernible threat” to Europe’s food security and the argument is “spurious rhetoric” used to defend the CAP.

In contrast to the hypothetical threat posed to Europeans, hunger is a daily reality for 925 million people in developing countries, according to the most recent count by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Indeed, despite international undertakings to halve the number of people who suffer from hunger by 2015, the number increased in 2009. That rise, caused by higher food prices, has focused new attention on how to eradicate this scourge. The FAO recently called for $83 billion (€61bn) each year to be spent on agriculture in developing countries to ensure there is enough food for the 9.1 billion strong population predicted for 2050. This money would be spent on science and technology to increase crop yields, better transport and storage facilities to stop colossal amounts of food being thrown away because it cannot be kept.

Climate-change adaptation

The EU has pledged around €4bn for developing countries to improve their food security and adapt to climate change. But analysts think that the EU could do more. “One of the main roles is that it [the European Union] is well integrated into the international trading system; it plays by the rules and gives developing countries access to its markets,” says Johan Swinnen, a professor at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium.

He argues that, in addition, the EU could help poorer countries by developing, and then sharing, technologies to improve crop yields.