FAO Offers Guide to Ease Impact of High Food Prices

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations published an updated guide to help policy-makers in developing country address the negative impacts of high food prices. The guide, “FAO’s Initiative on Soaring Food Prices: Guide for Policy and Programmatic Actions at Country Level to Address High Food Prices," advises countries to carefully examine the implications of high food prices and not to take any policy actions that might appear useful in the short term but could have harmful, longer-term effects or even aggravate the situation.

"The experience of the 2007-2008 food crisis shows that in some cases, hastily taken decisions by governments to mitigate the impact of the crisis, have actually contributed to or exacerbated the crisis and aggravated its impact on food insecurity," said Richard China, Director of FAO's Policy and Programme Development Support Division. "Export restrictions, for example, applied by some surplus food-producing countries, exacerbated the global food market situation during the 2007/2008 crisis. FAO strongly advises against such measures, as they often provoke more uncertainty and disruption on world markets and drive prices up further globally, while depressing prices domestically and hence curtailing incentives to produce more food."

The FAO guide emphasizes that there is no "one size fits all" solution that can be applied with the same chance of success in every country. The mix of policy and programmatic actions has to be specifically adapted to local conditions and agreed upon by key stakeholders in each country.

The report favors community seed production by farmer field schools, farmer groups or cooperatives, to enhance access to both traditional and improved seed varieties at the community level. The report urges countries to apply Integrated Pest Management, based on a thorough understanding of agro-ecosystems that will allow farmers to reduce the use of pesticides, as well as measures to reduce post-harvest losses and to adopt low-cost mechanical conservation agriculture.

The report also discusses instruments that can be used to target the food insecurity of the poor, such as safety net programmes based on food or cash transfers. The report mentions that it is extremely important to consider the interactions between safety nets and "development" interventions in order to build on potential synergies and to avoid having either type of intervention undermine the other.