William the Conqueror’s survey known as the Domesday Book of 1085 included cadasters - registers of ownership and value of real property - but paid no heed to the number of human beings involved. *

Such has been a habit of rulers and other government for a very very long time - they reduce the multifaceted characteristics of the nation’s natural and human resources into simple, quantifiable units for calculation of wealth.  Quite some time after William’s cadasters, German rulers were seen busily trying to delineate the ‘normalbaum’ or ‘the typical tree’ in an effort to eliminate that age-old problem of not being able to see the trees for the forest.  More recent history has pitted no small number of stock market analysts against the myriad unpredictable actions of investors.  Their goal has been to reduce the stock market mess to assorted simple pick-n-choose measurements with fun names like ‘bollinger bands’ and the like.

Today, nearly one full millenium after William the Conqueror comes another William - William J. Clinton.  This latter William is looking to Asia with a perspective not too dis-similar from that of the other William C.’s - to expand the economic playing field of his nation.  Mr. Clinton even wields his own Domesday Book in the form of the World Trade Organization’s Uruguay Round of free trade agreements.  These WTO campaigns are trying to simplify the valuation of agriculture to nothing but food, food energy and profits while ‘paying no heed to the number of human beings involved’.

Many Asian and Western lives and livelihoods are at stake because of these efforts to simplify a multifaceted issue.  The issue is agriculture and food security.  In Western mainstream circles (trans-national institutions and corporations, government, popular media, etc.), the definition of food security is generally accepted as ‘nutritionally adequate food supplies for all people at all times’. With so many consumers and so few producers in the West, such a simple approach to food security might be acceptable in those countries - unfortunately this is yet another case of universalization of a Western perspective on a global issue.

Applying this simple approach to the complex issue of food security in Asia fails to consider the centrality of food production to the principal livelihood in South, Central and Southeast Asia.  It fails to recognize that in Asia food is not simply a means of living - but rather a way of life.  Many Asian non-governmental organizations, very aware of the concerns of the billions of Asian farmers have been very busy defining food security.

In essence, their definition of food security tries to recognize that which Western wordcrafters are unable to capture (or simply do not wish to recognize) - that agriculture is the way of life for the majority of Asia’s population and to take that away from them through imposition of various policies that put trade ahead of culture is to turn the majority of Asia’s population from free-living producers into market-serving consumers.

The approach of the present economic development paradigm is to achieve exactly that - to create a huge market for a narrowed/streamlined production industry.  It means to reduce the number of producers and increase the number of consumers to fuel economic growth.  All trade agreements and trade negotiating bodies including WTO and APEC as well as major financial institutions such as IMF, World Bank (WB), Asia Development Bank (ADB) are working together to cut a solid, profitable niche for agricultural small, medium and certainly large enterprise in Asia’s food production systems by arguing that agriculture and food security can be simplified into nothing more than food calories and money.

Governments refuse to incorporate the greater issues of livelihood and associated human rights; they want to keep it simple for the sake of business.  Government and business, however, have not survived the last millenium without having learned how to address intricate and bewildering problems.  If they can solve the Y2K computer oversight, if they can produce 500MHz computer chips, surely they can add a few more food security parameters to a trade equation?!
 

J.D. Comtois
April, 1999
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*Quoted from AGAINST THE GODS: THE REMARKABLE STORY OF RISK by Peter L. Bernstein, John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1998.  p. 77.