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Trade and Environment Review 2013
Book Information UN Symbol: UNCTAD/DITC/TED/2012/3 Order from UN Publications Wake up before it is too late: Make agriculture truly sustainable now for food security in a changing Full Report ( 4979.96 KB ) Highlight Developing and developed countries alike need a paradigm shift in agricultural development: from a “green revolution” to a “truly ecological intensification” approach. This implies a rapid and significant shift from conventional, monoculture-based and high external-input-dependent industrial production towards mosaics of sustainable, regenerative production systems that also considerably improve the productivity of small-scale farmers. We need to see a move from a linear to a holistic approach in agricultural management, which recognizes that a farmer is not only a producer of agricultural goods, but also a manager of an agro-ecological system that provides quite a number of public goods and services (e.g. water, soil, landscape, energy, biodiversity, and recreation) UNCTAD’s Trade and Environment Review 2013 (TER13) contends. TER13 highlights that the required transformation is much more profound than simply tweaking the existing industrial agricultural system. Rather, what is called for is a better understanding of the multi-functionality of agriculture, its pivotal importance for pro-poor rural development and the significant role it can play in dealing with resource scarcities and in mitigating and adapting to climate change. However, the sheer scale at which modified production methods would have to be adopted, the significant governance issues, the power asymmetries’ problems in food input and output markets as well as the current trade rules for agriculture pose considerable challenges. TER13, entitled Wake up Before it is Too Late: Make Agriculture Truly Sustainable Now for Food Security in a Changing Climate was released on 18 September 2013. More than 60 international experts have contributed their views to a comprehensive analysis of the challenges and the most suitable strategic approaches for dealing holistically with the inter-related problems of hunger and poverty, rural livelihoods, social and gender inequity, poor health and nutrition, and climate change and environmental sustainability – one of the most interesting and challenging subjects of present development discourse. Agricultural development, the report underlines, is at a true crossroads. By way of illustration, food prices in the period 2011 to mid-2013 were almost 80% higher than for the period 2003-2008. Global fertilizer use increased by 8 times in the past 40 years, although global cereal production has scarcely doubled at the same time. The growth rates of agricultural productivity have recently declined from 2% to below 1% per annum. The two global environmental limits that have already been crossed (nitrogen contamination of soils and waters and biodiversity loss) were caused by agriculture. GHG emissions from agriculture are not only the single biggest source of global warming in the South, besides the transport sector, they are also the most dynamic. The scale of foreign land acquisitions (often also termed land grabbing) dwarfs the level of Official Development Assistance, the former being 5-10 times higher in value than the latter in recent years. Most important of all, despite the fact that the world currently already produces sufficient calories per head to feed a global population of 12-14 billion, hunger has remained a key challenge. Almost one billion people chronically suffer from starvation and another billion are mal-nourished. Some 70% of these people are themselves small farmers or agricultural laborers. Therefore, hunger and mal-nutrition are not phenomena of insufficient physical supply, but results of prevailing poverty, and above all problems of access to food. Enabling these people to become food self-sufficient or earn an appropriate income through agriculture to buy food needs to take center stage in future agricultural transformation. Furthermore, the current demand trends for excessive biofuel and concentrate animal feed use of cereals and oil seeds, much too high meat-based diets and post-harvest food waste are regarded as given, rather than challenging their rational. Questionably, priority in international policy discussions remains heavily focused on increasing industrial agricultural production, mostly under the slogan “growing more food at less cost to the environment”. The strategy recommended to developing countries of relying on international markets to meet staple food demand, while specializing in the production and export of ‘lucrative’ cash crops has not produced the intended results, because it relied on low staple food prices and no shortage of supply in international markets, conditions that have drastically changed since the turn of the century. Globalization has also encouraged excessive specialization, increasing scale of production of few crops and enormous cost pressure. All this has aggravated the environmental crisis of agriculture and reduced agricultural resilience. What is now required is a shift towards diverse production patterns that reflect the multi-functionality of agriculture and enhance close nutrient cycles. Moreover, as environmental externalities are mainly not internalized, carbon taxes are the rare exception rather than the rule and carbon-offset markets are largely dysfunctional – all factors that would prioritize regional/local food production through ‘logical’ market mechanisms – trade rules need to allow a higher regional focus of agriculture along the lines of “as much regionalized/localized food production as possible; as much traded food as necessary”. Climate change will drastically impact agriculture, primarily in those developing countries with the highest future population growth, i.e. in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Against this background, the fundamental transformation of agriculture may well turn out to be one of the biggest challenges, including for international security, of the 21st century. Much slower agricultural productivity growth in the future, a quickly rising population in the most resource-constrained and climate-change-exposed regions and a burgeoning environmental crises of agriculture are the seeds for mounting pressures on food security and the related access to land and water. This is bound to increase the frequency and severity of riots, caused by food-price hikes, with concomitant political instability, and international tension, linked to resource conflicts and migratory movements of staving populations. Downloads Trade and Environment Review 2013 – Wake up before it is too late: Make agriculture truly sustainable now for food security in a changing climate (UNCTAD/DITC/TED/2012/3) 18 Sep 2013, 4980.0 KB Continue reading
Business Focus 19th July 2013
Business Focus 19th July 2013 Watch KTN Streaming LIVE from Kenya 24/7 on http://www.ktnkenya.tv Follow us on http://www.twitter.com/ktnkenya Like us on http… Continue reading
Ethanol: Logic Of Circular Biofuel Trade Comes Into Question
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e4baefbe-b0d6-11e2-9f24-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz2TSTQBQ4m By Greg Meyer Despite having the world’s biggest ethanol industry, the US imported 9.6m barrels of the biofuel from Brazil last year. Brazil, the ethanol pioneer, imported 2m barrels from the US. The US and Brazil, the giants of the market, together produce 87 per cent of the world’s output, according to analysts FO Licht. The US product is largely distilled from corn, while Brazil makes ethanol from its sugar cane crop. For the engine of a car, the two vintages are virtually identical. Yet in the eyes of the law they are quite distinct. This helps explain why the US and Brazil are shipping one another ethanol at great expense rather than simply using it at home. Washington is weaning its domestic ethanol industry off subsidies. In 2011 a tax credit for ethanol blenders expired, as did a corresponding import tariff. But the industry still has the support of a government mandate requiring domestic ethanol consumption to grow each year. The mandate is indirectly helping to drive imports from Brazil. The mandate, known as the renewable fuel standard, is split between volumes for traditional corn-based ethanol and “advanced biofuels” whose production releases less greenhouse gas impacts than ploughing fields for grain. Corn ethanol has the biggest share, but the advanced biofuel requirement is growing more rapidly. US production of advanced biofuels has not matched government expectations. To meet the mandate, fuel companies are allowed to import sugar cane ethanol, mainly from Brazil. The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates about 15.9m barrels of sugar ethanol imports will be needed this year. “As the mandate grows, ethanol imports rise accordingly,” say economists at the University of Missouri’s Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute. Another US policy encouraging Brazil to export ethanol is set by California. The state, known for standard-setting vehicular pollution controls, welcomes the use of sugar cane ethanol to satisfy its low carbon fuel standard programme. In the reverse direction, US ethanol exports to Brazil are well below a peak of 9.4m barrels reached in 2011 when the South American country suffered poor sugar harvests. The Brazilian ethanol industry has also been hurt by domestic government policies that have kept petrol prices artificially low to fight inflation. This year, Brasilia raised the required ethanol blending rate to 25 per cent from 20 per cent of motor fuel in a bid to help the domestic biofuel industry. But imports from the US are expected to continue nonetheless. The US corn-based ethanol industry has more capacity than needed for a domestic fuel market where demand is weak and most fuel companies refuse to blend more than 10 per cent ethanol with petrol. Brazilian imports arriving under the advanced biofuels mandate further add to supplies. So a portion of the relatively cheap, unwanted corn ethanol barrels flows back to Brazil. The Energy Information Administration, in a note last year, called it a “complex environment” where blenders and ethanol producers “not only have to produce enough corn ethanol to meet the overall renewable fuels mandate, but … must also import significant volumes of sugar cane ethanol to meet the advanced biofuel mandate, all in the face of demand constraints”. The American and Brazilian ethanol industries are squaring off as regulators consider how to apportion this year’s US ethanol mandate. The Renewable Fuels Association, the main US corn-based ethanol lobby, argues the EPA should lower the advanced biofuels mandate to insure against unreliable supplies from Brazil. Furthermore, tight corn stocks and slowing output suggest the US may not be able to export as much ethanol as in years past, the association says. The circular trade between the companies is “economically absurd”, the RFA added. Unica, the Brazilian sugar cane industry group, contends that the US should uphold its advanced biofuel targets, which would support ethanol imports from Brazil. “The fact that there is two-way trade in ethanol between the US and Brazil demonstrates both the complexity and success of government intervention into fuel markets,” Unica wrote to the EPA in April. There is nonetheless an irony in the fact that biofuels promoted to reduce greenhouse gases are being ferried between the US and Brazil in ships belching petroleum exhaust. As the EPA notes: “This two-way trade of ethanol engenders additional transport-related emissions.” Continue reading