In the area of food security, Apec will prove to be a boon rather than a bane for Filipino farmers and fishers. This will surely be the result if key recommendations made during the Apec Policy Partnership on Food Security (PPFS) are followed systematically. This was done during the PPFS meeting in Iloilo on Oct. 2-3.
The Filipino private sector representatives successfully argued for sustainable development as a guiding principle that was consistently brought up when trade liberalization was discussed.
If trade liberalization was made the main tool to attain food security without a sustainable development perspective, our farmers and fishers would become victims, rather than beneficiaries, of Apec. Credit should be given to Agriculture Secretary Proceso Alcala and Undersecretaries Fred Serrano and Asis Perez for their support of Filipino private sector involvement in this meeting of 21 economies.
The Alyansa Agrikultura, a coalition of 42 federations and organizations representing all agriculture sectors, contributed meaningfully in all four food security workshops. It should be noted that an Alyansa Agrikultura leader chaired the critical Workshop 1: “Food Security Roadmap towards 2020.” The discussions in this workshop suggested the priority actions to be taken for the next six years.
Recommendations
First, we recommended that sustainable development be given a very high priority when considering food security initiatives. Trade liberalization is helpful in that it encourages the economy with the most comparative advantage to provide the food item in question. However, this concept can be abused in its implementation.
We saw this abuse happen in the 1980s and 1990s with the too immediate and too expansive trade liberalization advocated by the World Trade Organization (WTO). Our farmers and fishers became more victims than beneficiaries. The concept was workable, but the promised competitive enhancing measures to enable us to participate in a level playing field was not provided by government. In retrospect, trade liberalization could have been beneficial if it had been done in a selective and properly phased manner. This should have been accompanied by the necessary support services in areas such as production assistance, technology, credit, and marketing.
Apec could have had the same dysfunctional consequences as the WTO with the over reliance on rapid trade liberalization for our farmers and fishers. Fortunately, former President Fidel Ramos changed the Apec theme from trade liberalization to sustainable development when the Philippines acted as host in 1996. The same initiative was successfully championed by the Philippine private sector in last week’s Apec food security discussions.
Second, a critical concept advocated by Alyansa Agrikultura’s Romeo Royandoyan was accepted. He argued that food security plans should focus more on people than on products. If we have more short-term trade and higher profits from products, but many of the producing sectors lose their livelihoods because of a too liberalized trade regime, we will have little food security in the long-term. Since climate change is the “new normal” today, we must understand how this impacts the farmers and fishers. This phenomenon, together with rapidly changing global events, necessitates the flexibility of modifying the normal trade practices to ensure that our food producers are protected from these unforeseen occurrences.
The third recommendation is that there should be more private sector participation in formulating and implementing the food security plan. The government representatives recognized the private sector’s valuable contributions during the two-day meeting. Suggestions were given to increase this participation, both within each country and in the PPFS. Special attention and incentives should be given to include more small farmers and fishers who produce the products, the MSMEs (Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises) which provide the business functions of consolidating, processing, and marketing them, and the women sector, which plays a critical role in the agricultural value chain.
The fourth recommendation is to launch a program to increase capacity building among these private sector participants. This will include orientation/seminars, sharing of best practices, and the appropriate training and technology transfer. The untapped great potential that can be provided by scientists connected to the food cluster should be systematically harnessed in order to attain food security in the quickest and most effective way.
Way forward
Aside from implementing these four recommendations, the PPFS should now translate the roadmap rhetoric into a realistic plan with priorities, objectives, targets, timetables, and accountabilities. This should be a living document that will have the flexibility to allow us to take the best action as we implement the Apec food security roadmap until 2020. We hope to see this started during the Apec Leaders Meeting next month.
If this is done systematically, the farmers, fishers, and all the consumers in the Asia-Pacific region will surely be the beneficiaries, rather than the victims, of Apec.
(The author is chair of Agriwatch, former Secretary for Presidential Flagship Programs and Projects and former Undersecretary for Agriculture, Trade and Industry. For inquiries and suggestions, e-mail agriwatch_phil@yahoo.com or telefax 8522112.)