Free trade is critical to food security

With inflation soaring around the world, people are noticing the rising price of food like never before. For some, it is small items like the price of bananas. For others, it is the ever-increasing price of meat, fruits, vegetables, and other everyday items that people buy and rely on to feed their families. As prices rise and supply chain and logistics challenges persist, coupled with the mass disruptions caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, warnings of food security are becoming real. This is free trade’s moment to shine once again.

Thankfully, leading proponents of trade liberalization are saying all the right things. Ambassador Gloria Abraham Peralta, the chair of the WTO’s agriculture negotiations, has stated clearly that there is real risk of a global food security crisis. She is urging WTO members to ensure ambitious outcomes are achieved at the upcoming 12th Ministerial Conference (MC12), which will take place in mid-June.

In trade-speak, ambitious outcomes mean lowering and eliminating barriers to trade. Ambassador Peralta recently said that “ensuring an outcome on agriculture at MC12 that would contribute towards the ending of hunger, achieving food security and improved nutrition” was badly needed, and that it was “even more true today, as we are now at risk of facing a major food security crisis.”

Similarly, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) is warning that the perfect storm of events threatening food security will hurt the world’s poorest the most.

These events include pandemic-related trade restrictions, geopolitical tensions over Ukraine and now rising prices for fuel and fertilizer, not to mention the overall disruption all these forces are having on global supply and value chains.

And while there’s no simplistic cure-all solution, we should remember a couple basic facts that recent and longer-term history have taught us.

First, we know that over the past couple of years, the early pandemic worries of rising prices and shortages of food didn’t materialize on a large scale. This is because governments around the world rightly ensured that essential industries kept trade flowing.

And we know that over the long run, trade liberalization has lifted people out of poverty around the world. Throughout the latter half of the 20th century and into this century, free and open trade has created a global middle class that was unthinkable a couple generations ago.

Yet despite the benefits, growth has been imperfect, inequality remains, and protectionism has crept its way back into fashion around the world including in the U.S., throughout Europe and across much of the developing world.

However, if protectionism and closed borders were key to food security, North Korea would be flourishing. Yet we know it has for decades been one of the least food secure countries in the world with over half of its population undernourished, including 1 in 5 children.

We simply need to look at the past to know what to do in the present and future. It is time to re-discover and re-embrace the proven benefits of globalization which include lowering and eliminating trade barriers in all their forms. This is the best way to ensure worries about food security are temporary.

In the 1930s, protectionism made the Great Depression even worse. As we contemplate the best way to ensure we remain food secure, these lessons need to be heeded today.