Agriculture trade: regional solutions for global challenges: Why achieving food security would be easier with a local approach.

• Author: Mukhtar, Ahmad
• Position: GLOBAL VIEW

While counting steps to achieve my daily walking goal in the corridors of trade-related organizations in Geneva, I have come across hundreds of negotiators, policymakers, experts and stakeholders on agriculture trade. In my encounters with this myriad of colleagues from across the world, I have come to conclude that we often share common challenges. Three challenges in particular stand out: how to achieve food security, how to move up in agriculture value chains, and how to get access to the global agriculture marketplace.

It is rare, however, that I find any common solutions among my colleagues. One solution I would suggest, which is also cross-cutting, is to go regional.

On food security, a shared global challenge manifested through the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 2, the regional approach may provide a solution by broadening the food-supply base through the formation of regional coalitions.

Regional coalitions--comprising a variety of actors such as agriculture producers, government agencies, and other agriculture --will help create synergies in production and ease pressure on policymakers regarding food availability and distribution. Due to similarities, though not in all cases, in agriculture endowments, production and consumption patterns, a regional marketplace happens to be more logical and practical than the global one. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Food Security Reserve Board and the ASEAN Rice Trade Platform are good examples. These aim at ensuring long-term food security and nutrition, to improve the livelihoods of farmers in the ASEAN region through intra-regional trade and sharing resources and exchanging information on production, stocks and utilization of food reserves.

Food security may also be enhanced through intraregional trade in general and agricultural trade in particular. To the extent that increased intraregional trade fosters economic growth and increases employment prospects and the income-earning capacities of the poor, it will enhance access to food.

VALUE ADDITION

The challenge of value-addition features in almost all sectors of the economy but probably the most pronounced in agriculture. This is down to low levels of investments in agribusiness and agro-industrialization at the macro level, and a lack of entrepreneurship, capital and even economies of scale at the farmer or micro level.

To help mitigate the investment and entrepreneurship gaps, a regional approach that...