DA chief Yap renews call for a global food reserve

MANILA, Philippines - Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap has renewed his plea to various governments for the establishment of a global food reserve to stabilize supply and prices in the world market. Such food reserve, particularly for rice and other cereals, would also act as an emergency supply in case of production shortfalls. Speaking before world leaders at the United Nations High-Level Meeting on Food Security for All in Madrid last week, Yap said setting up a food reserve is urgent concern since there are indications that there would be another round of price spikes that would contribute to panic buying. He stressed the retreat of food prices at the moment is temporary. Backing up his view is the minimal increases in food production and global stocks-to-use ratios are now at 30-year lows. If China, India, Brazil and some other countries are removed from the list of food producers, production may have actually retreated in other nations, Yap argued. The Madrid meeting was a follow-up to the 2008 High Level Conference on World Food Security organized by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome, where Yap broached the food reserve proposal. Moreover, Yap said climatic shifts have led to altered cropping and harvesting patterns and expensive fertilizers and other inputs have forced farmers to plant other crops. The disastrous retreat in prices of such commodities impoverished many farmers. “Clearly, the calm is indeed before the storm," Yap warned during the Madrid meeting. “These factors, coupled with thin trading volumes, are clear recipes for price volatility, consumer panic and even sharper price spikes in the not so distant future." He noted that last year, the price volatility hiked the import bills of the world’s poorest nations by at least 40 percent and increased the number of malnourished people from 800 million to a billion people today. “The solution to this lingering woe," Yap said, “is to instill a level of certainty and stability in the market through the establishment of a global food reserve of stockpile." Yap noted that while the FAO had included his recommendation to set up a food reserve in the Comprehensive Framework for Action (CFA) of the High Level Task Force on the Global Food Security Crisis during last year’s Rome conference, his proposal to date, “continues to be nothing more than just that, a proposal." A food reserve would benefit both food deficit and surplus countries, he said, “because a price band would be maintained and, which, at the low end, would serve to protect producers in exporting countries from falling prices." “The high end of the band, in turn, would serve to shield consumers of importing countries from the impact of soaring prices," he added. When prices are too low, as it is today, he said the Reserve will buy rice stocks from producers to prevent the rice from being dumped into the market and depressing prices further, thus protecting the welfare of farmers. On the other hand, when prices are too high, the Reserve will protect consumers by releasing rice into the market, bought at a lower price, to stabilize supplies, he said. “These stocks can be pre-positioned around the globe to answer the call of the most vulnerable and operated by an existing organization like the World Food Programme, with a proven track record in food relief and management operations," Yap said. “This mechanism promotes certainty. And certainty dispels volatility." - GMANews.TV