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Global hunger and undernutrition could end by 2025

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Compact2025 is described as an inclusive global effort to support countries, institutions, and initiatives for the elimination of hunger and undernutrition by 2025. (Photo: World Bank/flickr/cc)

Compact2025 is described as an inclusive global effort to support countries, institutions, and initiatives for the elimination of hunger and undernutrition by 2025. (Photo: World Bank/flickr/cc)

by Thalif Deen, IPS News

The United Nations aims to help eliminate hunger and undernutrition – described as two of “greatest scourges” facing humankind — by the year 2030.

But the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) has launched an ambitious new initiative to help end global hunger by 2025 – five years ahead of the UN target.

IFPRI believes that its initiative, dubbed Compact2025, can help end global hunger by 2025 if countries replicate strategies that worked in places such as China, Brazil, and Thailand, where huge strides have been made toward reducing hunger.

“We can eliminate both hunger and undernutrition, and we can do so by 2025—which will also help end extreme poverty and will contribute to achieving multiple Sustainable Development Goals,” says IFPRI.

But there are significant knowledge gaps related to eliminating hunger and undernutrition that must first be filled for effective and cost-efficient action, IFPRI said.

Compact2025 is described as an inclusive global effort to support countries, institutions, and initiatives for the elimination of hunger and undernutrition by 2025.

It will work toward this goal by identifying pragmatic, innovative, and action-oriented strategies to address challenges on the ground while learning from stakeholders at all levels and from multiple sectors, including agriculture, nutrition, and health.

Compact2025 also plans to address these gaps by acting as a ‘Knowledge and Innovation Hub’ that will help guide countries in developing and implementing strategic actions for food security and nutrition.

Dr. Shenggen Fan, IFPRI’s director general, told IPS eliminating hunger and undernutrition in 10 years is a huge task, but it can be accomplished.

He pointed out that Brazil, China, Thailand, Peru, and Vietnam have each dramatically reduced hunger and undernutrition in a relatively short time.

At the Sixth Forum of the Parliamentary Front Against Hunger in Latin America and the Caribbean, held in the Peruvian capital of Lima last week, the final declaration adopted by over 60 legislators said Latin America and the Caribbean– of all of the world’s regions– had made the greatest progress in reducing hunger.

The region also reduced the proportion of hungry people by more than half, in the context of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which is fast moving towards its 2015 deadline by the end of December.

During the Nov. 15-17 Forum, delegates of the national chapters of the Parliamentary Front Against Hunger (PFH) also reasserted their determination to promote laws to “break the circle of poverty and enforce the right to food” in the region.

Dr Fan said learning from the experiences of the five Asian and Latin American countries, “and leveraging strong international and national commitments to end hunger and undernutrition, it is possible to accelerate progress even further, he added.

While not all the MDGs have been achieved, the world has made incredible progress in reducing extreme poverty and hunger, he noted.

In fact, he said, the target on reducing hunger was just narrowly missed, as the proportion of undernourished people in the developing regions has fallen by almost half since 1990, from 23.3 per cent in 1990–1992 to 12.9 per cent in 2014–2016.

IFPRI says Compact2025 will contribute to accelerating progress to end hunger and undernutrition and is fully supportive of SDG 2 (End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture).

Compact2025’s work will also support the achievement of many other SDGs (e.g. Goals 1: End poverty in all its forms everywhere, and Goal 3: Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages).

The 2025 target relates to many of the SDGs because ending hunger and undernutrition are stepping stones to ending extreme poverty, said Dr Fan, who received the Hunger Hero Award from the World Food Programme (WFP) in 2014 in recognition of his commitment to, and leadership in, fighting hunger worldwide.

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which were adopted by world leaders at a summit meeting in September, also include the eradication of poverty by 2030

To inform actions that lead to concrete results, Compact2025, through its Knowledge and Innovation (K&I) Hub, will provide policymakers and practitioners with context-specific, evidence-based advice on scaling up success stories to end hunger and undernutrition.

IFPRI said Compact2025 will also build the knowledge-base and promote innovations to help countries develop, scale up, and communicate policies and programmes for the biggest, most cost-effective impacts—and in doing so will help weed out ineffective or inefficient policies and prevent a duplication of efforts.

To build on existing momentum, Compact2025 will complement established networks such as Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) and initiatives such as the Zero Hunger Challenge.

Additionally, it will also work with those who are already dedicated to achieving this goal by 2025 such as Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Rwanda at the national level; the African Union at the regional level; and the European Commission, International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), and World Food Programme (WFP) at the institutional level.

Compact2025 will contribute with the following approaches and activities:

• Serving as a Knowledge and Innovation Hub for stakeholders at all levels. • Sharing experiences, problems, and solutions within and across countries. Supporting evidence-based policies and experiments • Using pilot projects and policy experiments to strengthen the design, sequencing, and scale-up of successful policies and strategies.

• Promoting monitoring and evaluation systems and regulatory mechanisms for effective impact. Mobilizing a data revolution • Providing reliable and timely data on relevant indicators for evidence-based policymaking. • Collaborating to significantly improve data collection and analytical capacity in developing countries. Facilitating country-led strategies and investments • Facilitating implementation of country policies and strategies at national and subnational levels.

• Adapting successful food security and nutrition policies to local contexts. Strengthening inclusive and accountable partnerships • Engaging with established and new players including emerging countries, the private sector, and philanthropic organizations. • Developing country and global level accountability mechanisms for tracking progress.

Asked how much of funding is needed to achieve the goal of eradicating hunger, Dr Fan said that according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), investing 50 billion dollars per year can end hunger by 2025 (Schmidhuber and Bruinsma 2011).

The World Bank et al. estimate that 50 billion dollars over the next 10 years for a package of micronutrient interventions can help meet global stunting targets by 2025.

Additionally, IFPRI research found that investing in 100 dollars per child, or 75 billion dollars per year, can help reduce child stunting in four years (Hoddinott 2013). These estimates are just a fraction of the annual SDG funding requirement of trillions of dollars.

Climate change ‘set to fuel global food crisis’

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Global food shortages to become three times more likely due to climate change, according to report by US and UK experts.

Global food

by Al Jazeera

Global food shortages will become three times more likely as a result of climate change according to a report by a joint US-British taskforce, which warned that the international community needs to be ready to respond to potentially dramatic future rises in prices.

Food shortages, market volatility and price spikes are likely to occur at an exponentially higher rate of every 30 years by 2040, said the Taskforce on Extreme Weather and Global Food System Resilience.

With the world’s population set to rise to nine billion by 2050 from 7.3 billion today, food production will need to increase by more than 60 percent and climate-linked market disruptions could lead to civil unrest, the report, published on Friday, said.

“The climate is changing and weather records are being broken all the time,” said David King, the UK foreign minister’s Special Representative for Climate Change.

“The risks of an event are growing, and it could be unprecedented in scale and extent.”

Globalisation and new technologies have made the world’s food system more efficient but it has also become less resilient to risks, said King.

Some of the major risks include a rapid rise in oil prices fuelling food costs, reduced export capacity in Brazil, the US or the Black Sea region due to infrastructure weakness, and the possible depreciation of the US dollar causing prices for dollar-listed commodities to spike.

Global food production is likely to be most impacted by extreme weather events in North and South America and Asia which produce most of the world’s four major crops – maize, soybean, wheat and rice, the report found.

Such shocks in production or price hikes are likely to hit some of the world’s poorest nations hardest such as import dependent countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the report found.

‘Violence or conflict’

“In fragile political contexts where household food insecurity is high, civil unrest might spill over into violence or conflict,” the report said.

“The Middle East and North Africa region is of particular systemic concern, given its exposure to international price volatility and risk of instability, its vulnerability to import disruption and the potential for interruption of energy exports.”

To ease the pain of increasingly likely shocks, the report urged countries not to impose export restrictions in the event of extreme weather, as Russia did following a poor harvest in 2010.

The researchers said agriculture itself needs to change to respond to global warming as international demand is already growing faster than agricultural yields and climate change will put further pressure on production.

“Increases in productivity, sustainability and resilience to climate change are required,” the report said.

This will require significant investment from the public and private sectors, as well as new cross-sector collaborations.”

Rich nations 'failing to help Syria refugees'

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Rights group says “pitiful” number taken in by wealthy countries, with burden placed mainly on ill-equipped neighbours.

A baby looks out from the window of a bus after disembarking from a crippled freighter carrying hundreds of refugees trying to migrate to Europe, at the coastal Cretan port of Ierapetra, Nov. 27. AP Photo

A baby looks out from the window of a bus after disembarking from a crippled freighter carrying hundreds of refugees trying to migrate to Europe, at the coastal Cretan port of Ierapetra, Nov. 27. AP Photo

by Al Jazeera

Affluent nations have taken in a “pitiful” number of the million of Syrian refugees uprooted by the country’s civil war, placing the burden on Syria’s ill-equipped neighbours, according to Amnesty International.

The London-based rights group, in advance of a December 9 donors’ conference in Geneva, deplored on Friday what it called the shocking failure of rich nations to host refugees.

“Around 3.8 million refugees from Syria are being hosted in five main countries within the region: Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt,” Amnesty International said in the statement.

Highlighting what it referred to as “the pitiful numbers of resettlement places offered by the international community”, the group said that Russia, China and the Gulf Arab states had not offered a single location for resettlement of refugees.

Meanwhile, the European Union as a whole, excluding Germany, has pledged to take in only 0.17 percent of refugees residing in countries bordering Syria.

“The shortfall … is truly shocking,” said Sherif Elsayed-Ali, Amnesty International’s head of refugee and migrants’ rights.

“The complete absence of resettlement pledges from the Gulf is particularly shameful. Linguistic and religious ties should place the Gulf states at the forefront of those offering safe shelter.”

The failure of wealthy nations to share the burden had placed a increasing strain on host countries, which were largely ill-equipped for the influx of people escaping violence in Syria.

Amnesty International said it was calling for the resettlement of five percent of Syria’s refugees by the end of 2015, and an additional five percent the following year.

The plan would accommodate approximately 380,000 refugees identified by the UN as being particularly vulnerable including lone children and torture survivors.

“Countries cannot ease their consciences with cash pay-outs then simply wash their hands of the matter,” Ali said.

“Those with the economic means to do so must play a greater role.”

In addition to those who fled the war-ravaged country as external refugees, the UN says more than seven million Syrians are internally displaced.

The refugees face poverty, illness and growing tensions with host communities in their already-impoverished temporary homes.

Syria’s civil war began in March 2011, escalating into a bloody civil war that has displaced around half the country’s population.

UNHCR: Aid cuts, cold weather to have “devastating impact” on Syrian refugees

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Syrian refugees in the northeastern town of Ersal, Lebanon. Photo / Marwan Tahtah

Syrian refugees in the northeastern town of Ersal, Lebanon. Photo / Marwan Tahtah

by Al Akhbar

Aid workers fear a major humanitarian crisis for millions of Syrian refugees in the Middle East, especially in Lebanon, after funding gaps forced the United Nations to cut food assistance for 1.7 million people.

Meanwhile, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said on Tuesday that the number of internally displaced Iraqis had surpassed two million in 2014.

The UN’s World Food Program said Monday it needed $64 million (51 million euros) to fund its food voucher program for December alone, and that “many donor commitments remain unfulfilled.”

The announcement came as aid groups struggle to prepare millions of refugees for the impending winter, particularly those living in informal camps in cold, mountainous areas.

“It’s going to be a devastating impact. This couldn’t come at a worse time,” said Ron Redman, regional spokesman for the UN refugee agency UNHCR, “but we’re trying to get everyone prepared for winter and if you look at the conditions particularly in Lebanon in some of these informal settlements, the conditions are already very bad.”

“We’re doing everything we can… to keep their shelters at least warm and as dry as possible. But you can be warm and dry, but if you don’t have food, you’re in big trouble.”

WFP’s food vouchers were helping nearly two million refugees scattered in countries around the Middle East as each registered refugee receives a card that is topped up with money each month.

The amount differs from country to country, but is intended to allow each refugee to buy food equivalent to 2,100 calories per day, but for most of the agency’s recipients, December’s top-up has not arrived.

A nightmare for refugees

Worst-hit in the region is Lebanon, where more than 800,000 of the 1.1 million Syrian refugees in the country were receiving WFP food voucher support.

Lebanon hosts the largest number of refugees from neighboring Syria and has this been the biggest challenge among recipient countries.

From 2011, beginning of the war in Syria, till 2015, the UNHCR budget allocated for the country has increased drastically from $13.7 million to a planned 556.8.

In Jordan, some 450,000 refugees will not benefit from food vouchers this month, though around 90,000 living in the UN’s Zaatari and Azraq camps will continue to receive assistance.

In Turkey and Egypt, there are sufficient funds to provide aid until December 13 but not beyond, said WFP’s Regional Emergency Coordinator Muhannad Hadi.

“It’s going to be a nightmare for refugees,” Hadi told AFP.

“Those people are depending on the WFP to feed them, most of them are totally dependent on us. They have no income.”

Many refugees struggle to make ends meet even with international aid, and in Lebanon and elsewhere they often live in squalid informal camps, exposed to the heat of summer and cold of winter.

Across the region, they also face increasing tension with host communities angry about the strain that the refugee influx has put on sparse local resources.

The lack of food will “potentially cause further tensions, instability and insecurity in the neighboring host countries,” WFP Executive Director Ertharin Cousin said in a statement.

“We are suffering more-and-more, day-by-day. The world is ignoring our misery,” Abu Yaman, a Syrian refugee living in Ramtha in north Jordan, told AFP.

“The Jordanian government helps us, but Jordan is already a poor country and we can’t expect a lot from a country that was already suffering a financial crisis before hosting hundreds of thousands of Syrians,” added the 30-year-old, from the southern Syrian province of Daraa.

Latest in string of cuts

The announcement from WFP is the latest in a series of cuts made by agencies and NGOs assisting more than three million Syrian refugees.

They say funding pledges have not materialized, and “donor fatigue” is beginning to set in, nearly four years after the conflict in Syria began with anti-government protests in March 2011.

Early October, WFP announced it will no longer be able to provide humanitarian aid for those stuck in Syria as well as Syrian refugees bordering the war-torn country.

Last year, UNHCR announced it was cutting some of its aid to more than a quarter of refugees in Lebanon, partly due to funding shortfalls.

The diminishing humanitarian assistance has created bitterness and disappointment among many refugees.

“They want us to go back and die in Syria,” 21-year-old Khaldun Kaddah, who lives in Jordan, said of WFP’s announcement.

“Shame on them… Western countries talk too much about human rights and the truth is that they do not care for our basic rights.”

A UN refugee agency (UNHCR) report published mid November shows that about 13.6 million people, equivalent to the population of London, have been displaced by conflicts in Syria and Iraq, many without food or shelter as winter starts.

The 13.6 million include 7.2 million displaced within Syria – an increase from a long-held UN estimate of 6.5 million, as well as 3.3 million Syrian refugees abroad, 1.9 million displaced in Iraq and 190,000 who have left to seek safety.

The case for Iraqi refugees

According to UNHCR, developments in Iraq have led to a significant increase in registration requests in Lebanon since June 2014.

Although Syrian refugees are the main concern in the country, an estimate of 6,100 Iraqi refugees are also present, forming an 87% of the 8,000 non-Syrian, non-Palestinian refugees.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) said on Tuesday that the number of Iraqis internally displaced nationwide to over 2 million in 2014.

Nineveh in northern Iraq has suffered the greatest population loss with more than 940,000 people fleeing the town due to clashes between the Iraqi army and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) group, IOM spokesperson Joel Millman told reporters in Geneva.

Iraq’s western province of Anbar has suffered the second largest displacement with more than 540,000 people, Millman said.

ISIS swept through Iraq’s heartland in June .

The Kurdish Regional Government is hosting the majority of the displaced, while the central region of Iraq is hosting around 45 percent of the displaced, he added.

The United States, backed by some Western and Arab allies, launched airstrikes against the group in Iraq in August, expanding operations to targets in Syria a month later.

However, the air campaign, which Washington says aims to degrade ISIS’ military capability, remains the subject of debate, with critics pointing to ISIS’ advances and battlefield successes despite the raids.

(AFP, Anadolu, Al-Akhbar)

'Devastating': Suspension of food assistance threatens 1.7 million Syrians with hunger

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‘This couldn’t come at a worse time’

Street art by Syrian refugees in Iraq. Mural reads: "Hope gives wings to humanity." (Photo: Samantha Robison/ European Commission DG ECHO/flickr/cc)

Street art by Syrian refugees in Iraq. Mural reads: “Hope gives wings to humanity.” (Photo: Samantha Robison/ European Commission DG ECHO/flickr/cc)

by Andrea Germanos, Common Dreams

“This couldn’t come at a worse time,” stated UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres.

Guterres’s comment is in response to the UN World Food Programme’s announcement Monday that it was suspending its food assistance to Syrian refugees as a result of a “funding crisis.”

The suspension of the program means that many of the over 1.7 million Syrian refugees in neighboring countries that had depended on the program’s food vouchers to buy food will now go hungry, the WFP states.

The suspension “will endanger the health and safety of these refugees and will potentially cause further tensions, instability and insecurity in the neighboring host countries,” stated WFP Executive Director Ertharin Cousin.

Many of the refugees are in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq and Egypt, and already faced lack of access to necessary hygiene, clothing, shelter, and more.

With the cold winter season about to hit, these refugees may find themselves further on the brink, the agencies warn.

“Winter is already an extremely difficult period for Syrian refugees, but the suspension of food assistance at this critical juncture is going to be devastating,” Guterres’s statement continued.

The conflict that has gripped the country since 2011 has created over 3 million refugees—roughly half the country’s population. The UN refugee office has called it “the biggest humanitarian emergency of our era.”

As Common Dreams reported last month,

According to [Raed Jarrar, expert on Middle East politics and Policy Impact Coordinator for the American Friends Service Committee], a “real solution” to the refugee crisis does not lie in the “charitable” responses proposed by the UN, but in a long-term political and social response which engages and empowers people who are directly impacted by the violence. “The solutions for the displaced people is not resettlement or to keep them in limbo where they live,” argues Jarrar. “The real solution is to create the conditions at home to allow for a voluntary repatriation and deal with the root causes that displace them. That is the most important thing to focus on with this humanitarian crisis.”

To End Hunger, Empower Women: Study

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We must not tolerate discrimination against women and instead, demand a comprehensive approach to women’s empowerment that includes applying a gender lens to all programs and policies.

Girls who receive quality education are more likely to work when they are adults, have fewer children, and exercise more decision-making power in their households, the Bread for the World Institute finds. Photo: Bread for the World

Girls who receive quality education are more likely to work when they are adults, have fewer children, and exercise more decision-making power in their households, the Bread for the World Institute finds. Photo: Bread for the World

by Deirdre Fulton, Common Dreams

Empowering women and girls is critical to ending hunger, extreme poverty, and malnutrition around the world—including in the United States—according to a new report released Monday by the Bread of the World Institute.

The report by the Institute, a non-partisan, Christian citizens’ movement aimed at educating policymakers, opinion leaders, and the public about hunger, shows that discrimination against women is a major cause of persistent hunger and that increasing women’s earning potential by boosting bargaining power, reducing gender inequality in unpaid work, increasing women’s political representation, and eliminating the wage gap between male and female labor could help stem the worldwide epidemic.

“Neither women nor men living in poverty have much economic bargaining power—that is, an ability to negotiate favorable economic outcomes for themselves—especially in developing countries, as the vast majority of people do low-paying, low-productivity work,” reads “When Women Flourish…We Can End Hunger” (pdf). “Even within the constraints of poverty, however, working conditions for men and women are far from equal: women suffer many more forms of discrimination, which worsen the effects of poverty on their lives. Discrimination that establishes and reinforces women’s lower status in society starts within the family and extends through community customs and national laws.”

“Discrimination,” the analysis continues, “is why women farmers labor with fewer productive resources than their male counterparts, why women in all sectors of the economy earn less than men, and why girls are pulled out of school to work or to marry.”

Yet women are the ones the world relies on to combat hunger and malnutrition. And when they are afforded more agency—when they are given control of their own earnings, allowed to participate in the development of agricultural programs, protected from domestic violence, or permitted to stay in school longer, for example—health outcomes improve.

“Eliminating barriers and empowering women around the world is key to ending hunger in our time,” said Asma Lateef, director of Bread for the World Institute. “We must not tolerate discrimination against women and instead, demand a comprehensive approach to women’s empowerment that includes applying a gender lens to all programs and policies.”

While the report examines hunger worldwide, it devotes an entire chapter to “The Feminization of Hunger and Poverty in the United States.” To reduce hunger and poverty in the U.S.—issues that are compounded by high levels of incarceration, a persistent wage gap, and insufficient childcare benefits—the report declares, “we must identify and adopt policies that help eliminate entrenched and interconnected sexism and racism.”

The report includes a joint statement from U.S. Representatives Kay Granger (R-Texas) and Nita Lowey (D-New York), urging policymakers at home and abroad to consider the implications of giving women the tools they need to survive and thrive.

“There is no greater force multiplier than empowered women,” they write. “In developed and developing countries alike, from conflict zones to refugee shelters, when we make women’s rights and opportunity top priorities, we stand a much better chance of defeating intolerance, poverty, disease, and even extremism.”

US/India WTO agreement: How corporate greed trumps needs of world's poor and hungry

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‘The big question is why do governments even need the WTO to decide whether they can guarantee the right to food to their people?

Farmers harvesting in India. (Photo: Asian Development Bank/Rakesh Sahai/flickr/cc)

Farmers harvesting in India. (Photo: Asian Development Bank/Rakesh Sahai/flickr/cc)

by Andrea Germanos, Common Dreams

The United States cheered on Thursday an agreement it reached with India as progress for the World Trade Organization (WTO). Critics, however, say deal is likely a win for corporations and economic loss for developing countries.

A fact sheet from the U.S. Trade Representative explains that there are two parts to the deal that broke what had been an impasse over agreements from Ministerial meeting last year in Bali. The first is that the two countries stated they would move forward on the Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA)—the WTO’s first multilateral trade agreement of the body’s two-decade existence. The second is an agreement on India’s food security program, which allows for domestic “food stockpiling.”

Begging WTO for Food Security

As the Associated Press summed up: “India had insisted on its right to subsidize grains under a national policy to support hundreds of millions of impoverished farmers and provide food security amid high inflation.”

Regarding that food security program, theNew York Times reports, “Indian and American officials agreed to a peace clause that protects India’s program from a legal challenge until W.T.O. members reach a permanent resolution of the dispute.” India had held out on this issue.

But as the Transnational Institute (TNI) pointed out in a report released this week: “The big question is why do governments even need the WTO to decide whether they can guarantee the right to food to their people? The right to food is a universal human right that should not be subject to trade rules.”

The report also notes that the need for such a peace clause highlights the “deep hypocrisy embedded within the WTO,” as the EU and the U.S., unlike India and other developing countries, are able to pour billions into their own agricultural subsidies.

Deborah James, Director of International Programs at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, echoed these points, explaining to Common Dreams: “The entire debate is outrageous.”

“The world has passed through multiple food crises since the WTO rules were written, and nearly every global agricultural agency now recognizes the dire need for developing countries to invest in agricultural production to promote food security, rather than relying on a global market rife with rich countries’ trade-distorting subsidies and speculative distortions. And due to a mass Right to Food movement, India now has a food security program that has been hailed as the most ambitious in the world,” James stated.

“It is beyond shameful that the United States blocked these negotiations all year in 2013, and that India and other developing countries were left with a peace clause as a consolation prize,” she continued.

Mary Louise Malig,  Researcher, Trade Analyst, and author new TNI report, stressed that the deal does not offer a permanent solution to food security,  and that it “is just a tiny step more than what is already agreed in the Bali Package.”

Yet, according to Timothy A. Wise, who directs the Research and Policy Program at Tufts University’s Global Development and Environment Institute, that India and the U.S. were able to reach an agreement on this issue could be positive.

“India was under enormous pressure to settle this, and its allies were under pressure to abandon India. The good news is that India’s firm stance exacted some concessions from the United States that may lead to good-faith negotiations on the food security issues. Time will tell,” Wise explained to Common Dreams.

The TFA as Corporate Win

The agreement also moves forward the WTO’s TFA, which is also problematic, critics charge.

As CEPR’s James wrote in July:

The new agreement on “Trade Facilitation” would set binding rules on customs procedures and trade operations that would demand huge investments from developing countries and Least Developed Countries (LDCs) to modernize and streamline – according to U.S. and EU standards — their port operations. This means that while we still don’t have binding international rules on, say, the right to water, corporations would have the “right” to have their products exported into developing countries quickly, easily, and cheaply. That’s why nearly 200 organizations around the world opposed the agreement when it was being negotiated last year.

The TFA would also divert limited resources away from priority development needs such as health, education, and domestic infrastructure investments in LDCs and developing countries. Developed countries refused to make binding commitments on financial support during the negotiations. The World Bank announced on July 17 that it would make available, through its Trade Facilitation Support Program (supported by Australia, the EU, the U.S., Canada, Norway and Switzerland) an embarrassingly paltry $30 million for over 100 developing countries to assist them in implementing the TFA.

As TNI’s new report puts bluntly, the TFA is a win for transnational corporations. As they “control the global supply chains across the world, [they] will gain the most from an Agreement that slashes costs and relaxes customs procedures, easing the flow of imports and exports,” the report states.

Malig added in a statement to Common Dreams:  “The clear winners of this break in the impasse are the Transnational Corporations, all poised to benefit from the implementation of the Trade Facilitation Agreement.”

While the WTO had touted the economic gains of the Bali deal, Wise stated: “The bad news is that trade facilitation remains a largely unfunded mandate that will not produce the laughable estimate of $1 trillion in economic gains for the world, as my colleague Jeronim Capaldo has shown. And it may well create economic losses for some least developed countries.”

The WTO said Friday that the U.S./India agreement will probably be implemented by the full 160-member body within two weeks.

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