By Jonathan Lynn GENEVA, Dec 17 (Reuters) - International trade is failing to help feed the hungry and developing countries should focus on improving their ability to produce food rather than negotiating new trade deals, a U.N. independent expert said on Wednesday. Olivier De Schutter, United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food, said current agreements on agriculture at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) treated food like other commodities instead of respecting the human right to food. As a result the number of hungry people had risen to 963 million today from 852 million in 2005, he told a news conference on a report to be presented to the U.N. Human Rights Council in March next year. "Trade is not a substitute for building the capacity of each country to feed its population," said De Schutter, a human rights specialist and professor at Belgium's Louvain University. "We should not trust international trade to achieve food security in a sustainable manner," he said. Agriculture in many countries is not equipped to deal with global competition, he said. This was not just a question of the trade-distorting subsidies that rich countries use to dump their food on global markets, but reflected the lack of investment in recent years in the farm sector in many developing nations. Half of the 963 million hungry are small-scale farmers in developing countries, and in fact 80 percent of the hungry are food producers, with the remainder comprising landless labourers or pastoralists and fishermen, he said. WINNERS AND LOSERS Trade negotiators tend to look at the overall impact on their country, but should consider winners and losers within a country to ensure that trade policies do not favour agribusinesses and ignore poor rural inhabitants, he said. He said that much international trade exacerbated climate change problems which were threatening to reduce global food production by 8 percent by 2080, even as the population rises. Food traded internationally accounts for only 15 percent on average of food production, but international market prices have a disproportionate effect on domestic prices, he said. De Schutter said international trade carried hidden costs for developing countries, exposing countries that had specialised in cash crops to volatile markets for their produce, and hurting small farmers who could not compete with imports. Some countries had come to rely on cheap food imports, which created balance of payments problems when food prices rose as they did in 2007 and earlier this year. Global supply chains gave a disproportionate power to international retailers and other buyers and traders to set prices, resulting in a big gap between prices paid by consumers in rich countries and at the farm gate in developing countries. And as developing countries came to rely more on imports, they were facing health problems arising from poor diets associated with processed foods rich in salt and sugar. De Schutter said he was making four recommendations: - Countries should not agree to rules at the WTO which were incompatible with their right-to-food obligations; - Developing countries must have the right to safeguards to insulate fragile domestic farm markets from volatile global prices and import surges -- the issue which blocked a WTO agreement in July and helped block new talks this month; - Countries should build up their capacity to produce food, and support small-scale farmers, rather than rely on international trade for food security; - States must exercise stronger control of players in global food supply chains such as multinational food retailers. (Editing by Robert Evans)
