Feeding the World in the New Millennium:
The Development of an Open Food system in the Asia Pacific
Ken Matchett
Chief Executive Officer
XCAN Grain
Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to today's session entitled - Feeding the World in the New Millennium: The Development of an Open Food System in the Asia Pacific.
As the synopsis in the conference material notes - "Few issues are more fundamental to human existence than food. Yet despite that fact that we produce more food than the world can consume, we know that areas of malnutrition and even starvation exist throughout the world. The food system - everything from farming techniques to health and safety standards, logistics, transportation, tariff and non-tariff barriers and distribution networks - is not nearly as efficient as it can be and should be."
Today, our speakers will address what are the best practices for an efficient food system and how we can develop a truly open food system in the Asia-Pacific.
The timing of this session is also of particular importance as we are on the eve of the start of a WTO round on Agriculture. The inclusion of agriculture for the first time was a major achievement for the Uruguay Round of GATT. A number of principles were established and some progress was made towards the liberalization of trade in agriculture during that Round. However, base levels agreed to, on which to measure trade liberalization steps and subsidy reductions, were in fact based on historically high production levels. With the dramatic decline use of subsidies by major producing countries to move surpluses, e.g. the EU, which have further pressed prices to 25-year lows.
The much anticipated beneficial effects of bio-technology are also being felt in the global agri-food industry - not all of it felt to be beneficial in certain quarters. While North American farmers have welcomed early bio-technology developments, such as Roundup tolerant varieties of soybeans and canola, organized consumer groups, particularly in Europe, have rejected these new natural and pro-environmental platforms and claims that these new GMO varieties "may" be unsafe.
Farmers in North America have responded to the new technology by swinging heavily to the new varieties, using much less pesticides and weed control products, thereby assisting them in their stewardship of their land, and improving yields, thus assisting in their economic independence. This has helped their economic survival as commodity prices have plummeted this past year.
The international community recently agreed to a new Biosafety Protocol in Montreal in January this year. This Protocol calls for specific standards and documentary requirements for the movement and handling of Living Modified Organisms (LMO's). The agreement will come into effect once 50 countries sign off on the agreement. This is expected to happen over the next year or two.
A number of you in the audience today may have been with me at the PBEC Biotechnology Forum held last week here in Honolulu. It is important that our agri-food industry, including producers, processors, scientists, crop protection companies and health and safety professionals, all take a more proactive role in the development of our industry involving this new science. Many of us feel that it is this new science that will lead to new methods of feeding the world in a healthy and environmentally friendly manner.
with the forecasted growth in the world's population and growing overall demand for more and better quality food as many developing economies improve their own economic conditions, food producers must respond accordingly. This as the same time as concern is expressed about the defoliage of the world's rain forests and the lack of additional arable land.
More awareness must be achieved about the potential positive aspects of this new science. For example, this new science has been used to encode enzymes and proteins in rice, which will produce beta carotene and increase the rice kernels ability to accumulate additional iron which will help address vitamin A and iron deficiencies currently experienced by much of the world's population.
Indeed, technology in general has allowed farm production to feed twice as many people in the world today as we did in 1950.
Food security is another issue which must be addressed before broad progress can be made on more liberalized trade in food products.
This has been a concern consistently expressed by economies such as Japan and South Korea - two economies very much dependent on the import of food and feed. If progress is ever to be made on free or freer trade in food, economies blessed with traditional surpluses, e.g. USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the EU, will have to provide assurances to economies like Japan and South Korea, that embargoes and export taxes will not be imposed in the event of production shortages. These trade disruptive techniques have been used in the past and place food/feed deficient economies in the unenviable position of being unable to source adequate supplies of food/feed for their own citizens.
Other less developed economies have expressed their concerns about disadvantaging their own producers as a result of opening up their markets to free trade in agriculture. Thus, while there has been a general acknowledgement over the overall benefits of freer trade, APEC economies have agreed to a phased move to free trade in the Pacific Basin region - free trade by 2010 for developed economies and 2020 for developing economies.
In 1999, APEC adopted a strategy of moving towards an "Open Food System in the Asia Pacific".
Against this background, PBEC released a study concluded about one year ago. The study on the Poultry Value Chain, puts forward 'best practices' followed in the poultry chain from production to consumption, and includes recommendations on tariff matters, logistics, transportation, production, handling, distribution, and finance.
It is extremely timely therefore, to have a panel of speakers of the quality we have today.
Our panelists timely therefore, to have a panel of speakers of the quality we have today.
I am going to ask each of them to present their remarks and I will entertain questions for each and all of them following the last presentation. I also invite each of them to participate in the question and answer period by asking each other questions as well.
I will refer you to the program material distributed with regard to the biographical information on each of the speakers rather than providing that information at the time of introduction.
Let's get on with the program.