The Institute for Progress and dwindling food stocks

A non-partisan research organisation called the Institute for Progress was set up last year (2022) based in Washington D.C. It declares that its mission is ‘to accelerate scientific, technological, and industrial progress while safeguarding humanity’s future.’ Its motto is that ‘progress is a policy choice.’ https://ifp.org/progress-is-a-policy-choice/

In December 2022, Adin Richards wrote an interesting article for the think tank entitled ‘Food Reserves, Global Food Security, and International Stability: Incentivizing farmers to hold food reserves would protect global food security.’ https://ifp.org/food-reserves-global-food-security/

Richards points out that ‘global reserves, with the very notable exception of those held by China, have fallen from their peak in the 1980s and have remained roughly steady, dipping in the run up to both the 2007 crisis as well as the current price spike.’ He points out that this is partly a result of the WTO (World Trade Organisation) Agreement on Agriculture (AoA), which ‘imposes constraints on using public food reserves to improve food security.’ He notes that ‘America has consistently sided against proposed amendments to the AoA that would allow for greater use of food reserves,’ and calls for it to endorse changes to the AoA by lifting restrictions on public food stockholding programmes, ‘facilitating larger reserves and greater price stability around the world.’ WTO negotiations on this issue have remained at a stalemate for the last decade.

Richards’ article is extremely interesting and contains important observations on the way the U.S. itself has moved away from the policy of food reserves that was so important to it in the earlier part of the last century when responding to the Great Depression and the demands of World War Two. By the 1970s the U.S. had decided that massive publicly-owned reserves were ‘unwieldy’ and moved away from holding large stocks. This has made it less able to move stocks abroad during a crisis or even to deal with emergencies at home, but the more important point made by Richards is that the U.S. is preventing other countries from building up their own stocks through the restrictions implicit in the AoA programme. His central message that ‘current trade rules limit the policy space countries have to build up reserves’ is crucial.

Some countries, notably China and India, between them containing something like one third of the world’s population, have been able to get round the WTO restrictions and build up reserves. In December 2022 Richards noted that China held ‘69% of the corn, 60% of the rice and 51% of the wheat stored worldwide. While having a population only 23% higher than sub-Saharan Africa, China holds more than 24 times as much grain, and India holds more than 3 times as much.’ But those figures alone show that countries with less clout than China and India, and who are far more dependent upon support programmes funnelled through international organisations like the WTO and the World Bank, may not be able to build up the reserves that would enable them to deal with price volatility and occasional crises.

Richards’ article is well worth close reading (it is helpful to pick up on the references underlined in the text) and the Institute for Progress is clearly a useful new research organisation whose interests extend well beyond the area of biosecurity to other areas, such as energy security, where progress can be made. But it also reminds us that progress is not just a matter of technological breakthroughs but of political will. As the Institute itself says, progress is a policy choice.