This is a joint post with Connie Veillette
The G20 agriculture ministers seem to agree: they're all for food security, as long as it doesn't cost anything. The communiqué from last week's summit in Paris has lots of nice rhetoric and some good ideas, but no resources to implement them. In some cases, new priorities duplicate other efforts; in others, the ministers overlooked policy options that would have a big impact and cost little – or even save money – as with increased trade access or ending export restrictions and biofuel subsidies.
For example, take the proposed new Agricultural Market Information System (AMIS) “to improve the quality, reliability, accuracy, timeliness and comparability of data on agricultural markets (production, consumption and stocks);” who could disagree with that? But the UN Food and Agricultural Organization already collates and publishes much of the available data (as well as regularly reporting on the outlook for food and individual commodity markets), and USAID’s Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWSNET) reports on a wide range of conditions that could lead to famine. So is the need really for a new system to do pretty much the same thing or is the need for resources to help developing countries build the capacity to improve local data collection that can then be fed into the FAO system?
