This year has seen a global food crisis lead to rising prices in North America and contribute to political turmoil around the world.

Speaking in Vancouver at the Wall Centre on Monday (June 23), the United Nations’ assistant secretary-general for economic development lashed out at a process that many world leaders have touted as a possible solution to skyrocketing food prices.

“They are claiming that what they are doing is going to address it. But I think that that is actually dishonest and misleading,” Jomo Sundaram told the Straight in an interview immediately following his lecture.

Jomo was speaking about the Doha round of World Trade Organization negotiations that began in 2001. The talks are mainly aimed at reducing global tariffs and subsidies.

Addressing to the WTO general council in May 2008, the organization’s director-general, Pascal Lamy said, “The reasons why we must conclude the [Doha] round this year are visible to all of us and they are becoming more critical by the day....Although the WTO cannot provide anything immediate to help solve the current [food] crisis, it can, through the Doha Round negotiations, provide medium to long term solutions.”

But Jomo claimed that it is an “uncomfortable truth” that the WTO is incapable of bringing down food prices. Touting the Doha round as a solution to the global food crisis is “more than a red herring; it is a deception”, Jomo said.

Jomo was repeatedly approached by well-wishers during his interview with the Straight, but never broke from a tone of impassioned frustration.

“I think the current director-general of the WTO sees it as a feather in his cap if he can get a deal done. So getting the deal has become an end in itself,” Jomo continued. “With the crisis happening halfway through negotiations, they just felt they had to give lip service to it.”

Jomo argued that to alleviate the global food crisis, it is necessary to significantly alter the world’s current trading systems.

“One of the big problems is you can’t have a level playing field,” he said.

Jomo outlined a “handicap system” envisioned by Nobel laureate and economist Joseph Stiglitz as a possible solution to the world’s maldistribution of wealth. The world’s most developed countries would fully liberalize their international trading practices by minimizing domestic agricultural subsides and removing tariffs, Jomo explained. Middle-income countries would fully open their markets to poorer countries, but not necessarily to richer countries. And the world’s least developed countries would be permitted to maintain or even selectively increase tariffs and subsidies, which could be partially paid for with aid from the most developed countries.

In Jomo’s speech at the Wall Centre, he argued for a reformed system of trade at several points.

But UBC professor James Brander, an expert in economics and government, argued that the rules of international trade are not to blame for the global food crisis. He told the Straight that more fundamental issues are behind rising prices.

“To put it pretty simply, there are more and more people who need to eat,” Brander said in a telephone interview.

He pointed to two of the world’s fastest growing economies as examples of the stresses population growth is placing on the world’s food system. “Given the income level that India and China started from, as incomes rise, they tend to want to shift to more resource-intensive types of food—in other words, more meat.”

Brander noted that it takes approximately 10 times the amount of resources to get the same amount of energy from meat that you obtain from a crop like soybeans.

Brander said that he was not optimistic about trade policies alleviating hunger and poverty in a place like sub-Saharan Africa.

“The trade policies of sub-Saharan Africa are not great but it is not as though they are closed economies,” he said. “The problem isn’t so much a lack of markets as just a lack of all the institutions that are important for economic progress.”

According to Brander, investment in education and agricultural infrastructure would do more good for the world’s poorest countries than trade talks in Rome.

Jomo also called for support for such crucial sectors of society.

In separate interviews, both Jomo and Brander noted that the Doha talks began years before food prices started their steep climb.

While Jomo maintained that international cooperation could alleviate the food crisis and Brander argued that underlying domestic conditions should be dealt with first, neither man was optimistic about the future.

Brander went so far as to describe the situation in the least-developed regions of Africa as Malthusian, in that population growth has outpaced agricultural progress to place populations in check. “We’re beginning to hit some of the world’s worldwide resource constraints,” he said.

Jomo also ended his interview with the Straight on a pessimistic note, expressing concern about a total lack of political will to reform trade to fix the world’s imbalance of wealth. “I think only a significant failure might actually force people back to the drawing board,” he said.

See also, Monocrops bring food crisis, by Straight contributor Alex Roslin.