By Andrew MacMillan and Peter Beeden in Agriculture for Development No. 23 | Winter, 2014

Most Tropical Agriculture Association members have, like us, worked to increase food production. We have been party to one of the modern world’s great successes – to have almost quadrupled food production since the end of World War II, enabling global average food availability per person to rise by 40 percent while the population has grown from 2.5 to over 7 billion.

However this amazing rise in food availability – which, strangely, attracts little comment – has not been translated as much as might have been expected into better human nutrition and health. It has also inflicted huge damage on the world’s natural resources and, in many countries, undermined the fabric of rural society.

We suggest that many of the negative effects of the growth in food production stem from the view, widely held by governments, that low retail food prices are a ‘good thing’. In the UK, for example, food is cheap, with the proportion of disposable income of the average person spent on food having fallen from about 55 percent in the early 1960s to 12 percent now. We think that it is time to propose fundamental shifts in food pricing, taxation and subsidy policies, centred on the principle that consumers should meet the full costs of producing their food, thereby assuring decent incomes for those involved in food production as well as covering the costs of collateral environmental damage. Low-income families, exposed to hunger and malnutrition, would receive income supplements to enable them to access adequate food under these new market conditions. To the extent that farm subsidies continue, these would be redirected at accelerating the necessary shift to more sustainable food production and consumption systems.

Andrew MacMillan is an agricultural economist, and was formerly the Director of FAO’s Field Operations Division. He has helped governments in more than 40 developing countries to prepare projects for international financing. Andrew is now retired in Tuscany, growing much of what he and his family eat. He spends quite a lot of time trying to convince people that the time has now come to put an end to hunger and encouraging them to invest in secondary education in rural Kenya.
Andrew is Honorary Member of the Instituto Fome Zero.

Peter Beeden has had four careers to-date: agricultural research entomologist in Africa; dairy farmer in South Wales; agronomy consultant involved with investment projects in some 30 countries of Africa and Asia; and adviser to Somerset farmers managing land with important wildlife habitat. Now ‘retired’, Peter and family manage their all-grass farm with cattle and traditional breeds of sheep and goats.

Read/Download here the integral article “Perhaps we all should pay more for our food“