Paré, Frédéric <br/><br/>
Food Security: Restoring State Responsibility 

 -  2013.<br/>							 
<br/><br/> 64 
<br/><br/> We do not ask a carpenter to cure people, or a dentist to build homes. What do we ask from states that we do not ask from business? We should read Jean-Jacques Rousseau for the answer, this year on the 300th anniversary of his birth. He wrote: “[T]he general will alone can direct the State according to the object for which it was instituted, i.e. the common good: for if the clashing of particular interests made the establishment of societies necessary, the agreement of these very interests made it possible. The common element in these different interests is what forms the social tie . . . It is solely on the basis of this common interest that every society should be governed .” It is uncontestable: food is mostly produced, processed, packaged, transported, or sold by business, and, furthermore, as this takes place in competition, sold more and more widely throughout the world. But does economical and physical access to adequate food from local producers, at any time—something normal, justifiable—not stem from a social contract? Food security, self-sufficiency, and food sovereignty are often confused. Coalition  therefore connects them together. Food self-sufficiency (the collective concept of the three) implies food from domestic producers consumed domestically. This does not mean an economic balance, which is the ratio in dollars of food domestically produced to food domestically consumed. If we do accept that food security is part of the common good, and thus appeal to the public interest, coalition holds that a legitimate state should not be satisfied with using an economic balance as the only indicator of its performance. It should also take into account and pursue the ambitious objective of collective self-sufficiency. But to reach this goal, states need to protect this normal link between food produced and food consumed, on a country basis. Do they still have enough power to do so? Do they still have enough sovereignty regarding their food policies, as in the WTO or other multilateral trade agreement forums? Why and for whom do they get all the food produced treated on a world trade basis (price), when from 2006 to 2008 only 18% of wheat, 7% of rice, 12% of maize, 5% of pork, 10% of poultry and 12% of beef was traded internationally? Retail food prices do not take into account environmental or social problems, any more than the important incontrollable physical differences between countries, such as climate, temperature, rainfall, soil quality, etc. Countries that have (rightly) decided to apply a minimum wage face farms or processors with costs that other food operators from other countries that do not have that kind of social security net do not have to face. When a small African farmer works for one hour, he produces 2,000 times less food than a Brazilian farmer, who works with tractors on large-scale farms. Food production is a non-equal economic activity. States must then make a choice: they could unleash the market, or regulate it to retain their national means of production while assuring adequate control of their food security. This becomes a social contract where the prices, quantities, and quality of food are monitored and controlled for the citizen’s benefit.