I am whirring away on my Speechwriting book. It takes me back to this effort that I prepared back in 1986 for the then Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe.

The opulent surroundings and fine nourishment of the annual Lord mayor’s Diplomatic Banquet were not an obvious choice for a speech on this issue. Yet that is what he wanted to do. Food politics affected directly every country represented there, and Sir Geoffrey wanted to call on almost all of them to take bold decisions and abandon narrow policies.

He was right to do so. The speech helped nudge along reforms around the planet. The global food subsidy race has ended. The EU’s wine lakes and butter mountains have shrunk if not evaporated. Thanks to the end of communism and the rise of market forces, more people are eating well on Earth than at any time in human history. Famine when it occurs is overwhelmingly the result of massive (usually socialist) stupidity by local governments.

So, for the first time on the Internet as far as I know, this speech appears. It was probably my best effort as FCO Speechwriter, with quotes from it and discussion prompted by it appearing in the national media.

And it still reads nicely, I think, both as a speech presenting a wide range of challenging ideas in a light-touch way with lively examples and phrasing – and as a reminder of a world when the Cold War had not yet ended, there was a European Community not a European Union, and no-one could imagine an ‘Internet’.

The Politics of Food

The Right Honourable Sir Geoffrey Howe QC MP

Lord Mayor’s Easter Banquet, London 9 April 1986

 In previous years my predecessors and I have used this occasion to present a round-up of international developments. This year I want to try something different, to focus on one theme: the politics of food.

Food is a political issue of worldwide importance: so it is entirely appropriate for me to talk to this distinguished international audience about it.

The political and economic paradoxes of food today are extraordinary. There is no other word for it. And they derive – at least in part – from one simple but misguided idea. It is that sun, soil and rain are not sufficient: for modern agriculture to succeed, one extra vital fertiliser is essential – taxpayers’ money, liberally applied!

The figures speak for themselves. In 1986 taxpayers in Europe, United States and Japan will pay out in direct subsidies for food production no less than $40 billion, over three times the combined gross national products of Ethiopia and Sudan.

This intervention has been on an increasing scale. As a result, huge surpluses have developed.

Europe, for example, is currently storing, at public expense, half a million tonnes of beef, one million tonnes of butter, 18 million hectolitres of wine (enough to fill 64,000 Olympic-size swimming pools), and 16 million tonnes of grain.

But already the United States is storing over five times as much grain – 80 million tonnes. By the end of the season this is expected to double to 160 million tonnes, over 45% of last year’s output

What then do we do with all these surpluses? We cannot eat them. They are expensive to store. So we try to sell them or give them to those in need, but with perverse and paradoxical results.

The first paradox is this. More plus more can equal less. It is hard to accept, but true. Too much food in some parts of the world can simply aggravate food shortages in poorer countries. Why? Because subsidised food surpluses on world markets depress prices. They make local production uneconomic and they undermine self-reliance. And so they compound the dire effects of droughts and other disasters.

The second paradox is the way in which NATO taxpayers, who spend heavily on defence in response to the Soviet and Warsaw Pact arms build-up, simultaneously subsidise the Soviet Union and her allies by selling them surplus food and drink at knockdown prices. The diet of detente indeed!

The third paradox is that expensive producers growing more causes cheaper producers to sell less. Latin America, Asia and Australasia can grow food cheaply, but find their markets threatened by the sale of Western surpluses. So protectionist tendencies develop, despite an international recognition that freer trade is required.

The most distressing paradox of all is the fact that huge surpluses in some countries co-exist with terrible food shortages in others, particularly in parts of Africa. In 1984 one African in four owed his survival to food supplied from outside the continent.

These paradoxes are certainly not new. Let me offer you a quotation:

If grain is very expensive, consumers suffer. If grain is very cheap the producers suffer and the state is impoverished.

It neatly encapsulates a modern dilemma. But it was said 2,500 years ago, by the adviser to Duke Wen of Wei in China!

Politicians down the ages have been forced to grapple with two key problems.

First, the weather. How to produce and store food in good years to offset shortages in bad years. Remember the Bible story: Joseph persuaded Pharaoh to store food in the seven fat years to tide Egypt through the seven lean years. The world’s first buffer stock!

Second, the inherent conflict between the interests of farmers, traders and town-dwellers. It is a conflict that the market can, no doubt, resolve – eventually. But only, it is often thought, at too high a price in terms of economic and political order.

These key problems go to the heart of social stability itself. Food has dominated world history, sometimes because politicians intervened and sometimes because they did not.

There are plenty of examples. Consider, for instance, the impact of the Irish potato famine on Irish and American history.

Consider again the extent to which new European appetites for sugar and tea played a part in determining the scale and pattern of the slave trade – and the impact of that traffic in human misery on the populations and histories of many countries.

Nor are food trade wars are new developments. The opening-up of the prairies in the United States, Argentina and Australia in the last century prompted protectionism in Europe. Disputes have continued ever since.

So the link between food and politics is far from new. But what is new is the scale of the avalanche of surpluses, and their worldwide implications for farmers, consumers, traders and taxpayers alike.

How have these new surpluses come about? The reasons are similar in United States, Europe and elsewhere.

Today in the West we take for granted the amazing variety of food available in shops throughout the year. Look at tonight’s meal: melon, peas, ice-cream flavoured with apricots and strawberry, coffee – none of which is actually in season in Britain in April!

The Lord Mayor and the food processing industry have done us proud.

But this abundance of choice is a recent development. Senior policy-makers in Western countries well remember the painful food shortages and rationing caused by war, depression or poverty.

After the Second World War elaborate subsidy systems were set up in the United States and Europe alike to prevent such shortages – and to help the farming community. National self-sufficiency became the aim.

How times have changed! Improvements in technology, transportation and prosperity have undermined the concept of national food planning.

New technology has brought not only computers and robots but also better fertilisers, fatter cattle, and new types of grain and rice. Storage techniques have been revolutionised and generous subsidies added.

Production in developed countries has inevitably expanded ahead of available markets. Food stocks in some countries now far exceed any conceivable local needs. So other arguments for helping agriculture have assumed a greater importance. The need, for instance, to prevent rural depopulation or to protect the social or environmental fabric of the countryside. They are arguments that should not lightly be dismissed.

Agricultural progress has not, of course, been confined to the West. In recent years the countries of the Indian sub-continent and South-East Asia have almost all enjoyed surging food production. So indeed have countries in other parts of the world. That is good news for all of us. But this very success has itself still further reduced the market for Western surpluses.

These technical advances had been accentuated by major intellectual shift. There is now a widespread realisation that state-run agriculture is inefficient, that freer markets and individual initiative produce results – and quickly.

Since 1978 China, for example, has moved sharply in that direction – and its production of rice, wheat, meat and eggs has been soaring. The largest population in the world is now virtually self-sufficient.

Those responsible for agricultural policy in the remaining centrally planned economies, which are still some way short of self-sufficiency, will no doubt be drawing their own conclusions from that success.

If self-sufficiency became a worldwide achievement, the problems for the surplus producers would be even greater than they are today. But surpluses are still not universal.

Even at the best of times certain areas of Africa are particularly vulnerable to food shortages. The climate is harsh, the soil is poor and, as we all know, long droughts in recent years have reduced millions of people to a desperate, pitiful condition.

The world has responded generously to these dreadful famines. The British Government has given around £200 million of practical, well-directed emergency aid to Africa in the last two years. Some other Western governments have responded on the same scale. Voluntary agencies around the free world also deserve our thanks for the remarkable contribution that they have made to the fight against famine.

Starving people need our help. They can and must have it. This emergency aid will alleviate famine conditions, but massive food aid to get rid of unwanted surpluses is not the long-term answer.

It is not the best answer for the recipients and it’s bad for the donors. The food and its storage have already been paid for by Western taxpayers – with money that would far better be devoted to true development aid.

We are pressing this point with our European Community partners. We want Community food aid to be focused on famine relief or linked to strategies to increase local production.

So, food is an important factor in international politics. Some countries have far too much, some far too little. And the majority of countries, somewhere in between, find their trade prospects threatened.

What should be done?

We rightly devoted much time to thinking about the arms race, but the international community must think too about the reckless “subsidy race” in food.

Excessive protectionism, high support prices, export subsidies, tax rebates and subsidised export credits all damage world trade, hold back development and waste resources. Sooner or later this problem must be tackled head-on. At least it is now, for the first time, on the GATT agenda.

Given the enormous surpluses in some countries it may seem paradoxical to suggest that poorer countries should grow more. But this is of course happening in any event. Many countries have realised the danger of neglecting their farming sectors. So those countries that already produce excessive surpluses must realise that world markets are shrinking and cannot be used as a dumping ground.

We need farming policies, but they must be sensible. In Europe we do need some sort of “common” agricultural policy to prevent damaging competition between national agriculture policies.

Before the Community’s Common Agricultural Policy came into existence that kind of contest with a striking and damaging aspect of the European agricultural scene. Exactly the same kind of conflict is taking place today on a global scale.

I speak not just as British Foreign Secretary but as a Member of Parliament for one of the many British constituencies in which agriculture plays an important part. I readily acknowledge the case for taxpayers to help farmers cope with the vagaries of the weather and the market place. I recognise too the importance of a prospering rural community and a healthy countryside.

But achievement of that objective cannot be founded forever on a system that finances the production of ever-large crops for which there is no conceivable market. Sensible agricultural policies should help the laws of supply and demand work better, not subvert them.

The United Kingdom is taking a lead in the European Community to point all this out. Just as we needed, agricultural policy, so we need common solutions to common problems.

We well realise that changes in government support need careful, sensitive handling. But the sheer scale of the expenditure involved – which is, of course, at the expense of other very important objectives – and the sheer impossibility of continuing as we are will before long compel reform.

So change must come – and on both sides of the Atlantic. The longer it is put off, the more traumatic it will be. Prolonged economic mismanagement can ruin nations as effectively as wars.

But let me close on an optimistic note.

Twelve years ago, the “experts” predicted worldwide famine. Today the prospects for most of the world’s poorest countries are much better than that. There have been major improvements in food production.We are more aware of the key role of storage and transport. We realise that ecology is important, especially the need to preserve and expand forestry.

And finally, the dogmatic central-planning model is giving way to an approach based on individual initiative…