Food experts at the Earth Summit today said billion-dollars-a-day subsidies that had transformed farming incomes in the developed world have crippled farming in poor countries.
Mr MS Swaminathan, who earned the first World Food Prize for his work in high-yield crops, said small-scale farmers in developing countries struggled with problems of access to credit and finding a secure market to sell their crops.
He said the farming world was being dangerously polarised into two cultures where the West had developed a mainly agribusiness model with access to lavish subsidies, technology and capital; while small-scale personal farms operated in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
"One is production by the masses, the other is mass production," Mr Swaminathan said. "Agricultural production is the best safety net against poverty and hunger in most developing countries," he said.
Payouts for food producers have been blamed for wrecking potential markets in North America, Europe and Japan for small farmers in Latin America, Africa and Asia. Subsidies to export big-grain crops such as wheat and corn can also destroy livelihoods in small countries because they are sometimes sold at below the local cost price.
According to the World Bank, the subsidies total nearly a billion dollars a day, a situation it blasts as "untenable" for rich and poor countries alike.
Mr Pedro Sanchez, an agriculture professor at Berkeley University, San Francisco, said the focus on hunger had to be on helping farmers in Africa, by promoting diversified crops "that rich people want to buy," reducing the costs of fertiliser and promoting root plants that take nitrogen from the air and fix it in the soil.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates $16 billion is needed annually to help farmers in developing countries. The burden could be shared equally by rich and poor nations, it suggested today.
- Talks at the Summit on improving water quality and sanitation for millions of the world's poorest broke up in the early hours of teh morning with a glimmer of hope agreement can be reached.
The goal of halving the number of people without access to safe drinking water by 2015 was set by world leaders in 2000 but no target was set for sanitation.
However, South Africa's minister of water affairs and forestry, Mr Ronnie Kasrils, said differences were narrowing. "We are making progress on the target for sanitation in the negotiations. Many countries want this and we won't back down from it," he said.
AFP