Understanding global security - Peter Hough

ECONOMIC THREATS TO SECURITY
Global policy on hunger
The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) is at the centre of UN policy with
regards to global food production. Its principal tasks have been to increase food
production in the world and create a framework of standards for the distribution of
this food. The FAO, while acknowledging the scale of global hunger, makes a case
for its contribution to tackling the problem: ‘Food production has increased at an
unprecedented rate since the FAO was founded in 1945, outpacing the doubling of
the world’s population over the same period’ (FAO 2002). The FAO has, nevertheless,
been the focus of much criticism in recent years. Uvin, in an angry polemical work
on global hunger in the mid-1990s, described the combined work of the FAO and its
offspring the WFP as amounting to an ‘international hunger regime’ (Uvin 1994:
73–74). Uvin contends that the FAO, in line with other UN agencies and IGOs, is
interested in facilitating greater international trade through mechanizing agricultural
production in LDCs rather than confronting the nutritional needs of people in poverty.
The Ecologist magazine in 1991 produced a special edition entitled ‘FAO – Promoting
World Hunger’ which focused specifically on the allegation that the FAO is unduly
influenced by lobbying from food and pesticide MNCs seeking favourable conditions
to extend their business opportunities in the South (Ecologist 1991). The FAO stands
accused of having undergone a value shift from its original aspirations and becoming
an agent of northern economic gain rather than that of relieving human suffering.
The FAO has, however, done much to achieve one of its central aims and undoubtedly
assisted in improving agricultural productivity over the last half-century. Its role in
food trading has possibly served northern interests more than those of the South
since the epistemic community on whose advice it draws is far more corporate
than other UN agencies. The FAO, however, cannot to be held responsible for the
persistence of the root cause of inequitable food trading, excessive government
protectionism. The fact that developed states have shown little enthusiasm for freeing
up agricultural trade in the same manner that has been achieved for industrial
produce has stifled a potential economic way out of the quagmire for many LDCs.
This problem, highlighted by the Brandt Reports, has yet to be addressed. Global
governance guided by more than the profit motive of wealthy states is needed to
ensure that the FAO’s success in promoting food production is put to best use.
The creation of the present global economic system at the Bretton Woods Conference
in 1944, and its persistence and growth ever since, was/is inspired by the desire to
safeguard economic security. The USA, finding itself in the position of global hegemon
in the wake of Europe’s devastation during the Second World War, bore the
burden of funding the new international financial institutions intended to stabilize
the world’s currencies and usher in free trade. To be sure, the US government were
inspired to take up the costly role of entrepreneur and manager of the new Liberal
International Economic Order (LIEO) by some more conventional political motivations.
Military security was seen as being enhanced by propping up the capitalist
world against the potential spread of Communism and it is customary for the world’s
Depression
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