PM Lee on Food Security

The Singapore government appears to be well aware of the issues surrounding food security and the need to address how we will feed ourselves in the future.

The following is an excerpt of PM Lee's keynote address at the 7th IISS Asia Security Summit in 2008:

Besides a peaceful ordering of global power structures and institutions, countries must also work together to tackle trans-border common security challenges. One immediate issue of concern is food. People have long worried about food shortages, resulting from population growth outpacing food production. Human ingenuity has deferred this Malthusian prediction for more than 200 years, but it could still happen in the future. On the demand side, the world population is steadily increasing. Furthermore, with Asia’s rise, hundreds of millions of people are becoming more affluent and, as one minister put it to me, ‘They used to eat one meal a day. Now they eat two meals a day.’ That makes an enormous difference to their poorer compatriots and to poor people in many other countries in the third world. On the supply side, misconceived green policies to subsidise bio-fuels are encouraging farmers to grow corn for fuel instead of food, and squeeze the supply of food. In the longer term, gradually, climate change will lead to more extreme weather conditions, and likely reduce the supply of fresh water and arable land.

Over the next year or so, food prices may moderate with better harvests. In the longer term, the trends towards tighter supplies and higher prices will likely reassert themselves. This has serious security implications. The impact of a chronic food shortage will be felt especially by the poor countries. The stresses from hunger and famine can easily result in social upheaval and civil strife, exacerbating conditions that lead to failed states. Between countries, competition for food supplies and displacement of people across borders could deepen tensions and provoke conflict and wars. We are already experiencing a small foretaste of this today. The recent sharp rise in food prices, particularly rice prices, has led to riots and unrest in several developing countries. In vulnerable areas, such as in Darfur and Bangladesh, large numbers of people are moving across borders, often illegally, in search of food and water. It becomes part of the game. As one country says, ‘I am being blackmailed by my neighbours. They say, “Sell me one million tonnes at the friendship price or I will send you one million refugees”’. 

Even without a food crisis, movements of people like this have raised tensions and caused serious problems, as you can see in South Africa with the vicious xenophobic attacks on immigrants fleeing unstable regimes and desperate poverty in their home countries; from Lesotho, from Zimbabwe, and so on. They are now having to flee home because South Africans feel threatened and have viciously attacked them. In the event of a global food crisis, all of this will play out on a much bigger scale across the globe.

To avert a serious problem, we need a multilateral cooperative effort. Individual countries need to upgrade productivity and infrastructure in their farm sectors. International agencies like the World Bank and the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation need to promote research and development in agro-technologies to develop higher-yielding and climate-resistant crop varieties using the full power of modern bioscience, and, inevitably, using genetic modification techniques. Through the Doha Round, countries must work together to keep agricultural trade free and fair. Only then will farmers everywhere have the right market signals and incentives to produce more food to meet increased demand. If countries pursue greater self-sufficiency and try to keep food production and food output within their own borders, they will cause greater international tensions because the prices will become more unstable, food importers will scramble to secure their own supplies, and poor countries will suffer not just greater privation, but famine and starvation.

From this excerpt, we can see if the recent uprisings in North Africa and the Arab world would likely not have surprised our government, given that the link between food insecurity and social unrest.

Now I wonder what our government officials are thinking about the potential for instability in China. :)