World Food Policy Volume/Issue 2-2/3-1 Fall 2015/Spring 2016 | Page 150

Food Security in an Age of Falling Commodity and Food Prices

Figure 15: Share of Assistance to Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries in Total Official
Development Assistance, 1967–2013
Source: OECD (2015)

appears to be fading away already. That
is a very sad story. When prices peaked
in 2007–2008 there were great words of
promises on the side of policy makers in
the G8, the G20, and in other places. But
the actual statistics regarding assistance
to agriculture in developing countries are
far less convincing.

Can one think of an approach
that would provide more reliable
assistance to agricultural development?
In an initiative in the framework of
the International Centre for Trade and
Sustainable Development and the World
Economic Forum we have come up
with one suggestion which is somewhat
original. It is a new instrument that
could be agreed at the international level,

establishing some sort of a link between
what governments in the better-off
countries do for their farmers and what
the international community does for
agricultural development in the poorer
countries.8 The approach proposed is
that as a first step one measures the level
of support provided to farmers in the
industrialized and emerging countries,
i.e., in the richer part of the world. Any
measure of support to agriculture in these
richer countries could be used, e.g., the
one that is being discussed in the Doha
Round negotiations of the WTO, i.e.,
the Overall Trade Distorting Support
(OTDS). And as a second step of the
proposal the countries in the richer part of
the world would provide their assistance

8

For more detail on this proposal and for a more general discussion of where international policies for
agriculture should go in the years to come, see Tangermann (2016).

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