Liberalization of food trade, food markets and food supply chains is a very important point in terms of underwriting food security.

Rising food prices, extreme weather events and an increasing world population are key concerns that are prompting greater efforts to raise food production, increase the efficiency of markets and secure the region’s food supplies. These are some of the issues under consideration by APEC officials when they meet in Vladivostok, Russia for APEC Economic Leaders’ Week in September.

In 2012 improving food security is a top priority for APEC, which is working to reduce food loss, improve yields and open up supply chains. During the Second APEC Ministerial Meeting on Food Security, held in Kazan, Russia, in May, Ministers expanded on the 2010 Niigata Declaration by agreeing to focus on five priority areas, including increasing food production, reducing wastage, facilitating food trade, enhancing safety and improving access to food by the region’s most vulnerable groups.

The world’s population is expected to grow by nearly 30 percent, to 9 billion people, by 2050. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that a 70 percent increase in global food production and a 50 percent rise in investment in agriculture are needed to feed the demand from those extra 2 billion bellies.

At the same time that demand is rising, however, more land is being converted to housing and urban infrastructure or other non-agricultural purposes.

As a grouping that covers some of the world’s biggest economies and more than half its population, APEC has the ability to address these challenges by encouraging technology and information sharing and facilitating food trade across the region.

Bringing more food to market involves both improving yields and reducing post-harvest losses. Both require investment and the use of new agricultural technologies. They also require information sharing and cooperation to prevent the spread of plant and animal diseases.

APEC’s Agricultural Technical Cooperation Working Group (ATCWG) has been spearheading those efforts, along with the High Policy Dialogue of Biotechnology (HLPDAB). Last year APEC also formed the Policy Partnership on Food Security (PPFS) as the primary forum for discussing issues related to food security.

The partnership brings together the private and public sectors to help facilitate investment, liberalize trade and support sustainable development.

The PPFS held its first meeting in May, and is currently drafting a business plan that will define priorities and steps needed to build food security and outline the different tasks and responsibilities for businesses and private sector representatives. It will then work to encourage agricultural research, promote an open trading system and create multi-sector partnerships between agricultural organizations, businesses, non-profit groups and academia.

“Liberalization of food trade, food markets and food supply chains is a very important point in terms of underwriting food security,” said Tony Nowell, New Zealand’s APEC Business Advisory Council (ABAC) representative, which is backing the PPFS.

So far, trade liberalization has “focused mainly on products, not services,” Mr. Nowell explained. But things such as refrigeration, transportation and improved logistics capabilities are delivered as services that are still restricted in many markets.

As one example, Mr. Nowell said the private sector could work to increase “cold chain” capacity – meaning improved refrigeration in transport vehicles, at ports and in warehouses, to reduce food spoilage during the time it moves from farm to the consumer.

Another means of reducing food loss is through new technology, by, for example, switching from the manual harvesting of crops to using machines to increase production and productivity.

Dr. Tang Huajun, the Lead Shepherd of the ATCWG and Vice President of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) said China has been adapting modern agricultural technology to its farming traditions, including producing hybrid crops that are resistant to pests and disease.

“Many economies are using remote sensing logistics to do monitoring and provide early warning information,” he added.

China’s Crop Watch System (CWS), run by the CAAS, uses satellite-based imagery to monitor current crop conditions, drought, plantation structures and estimate overall crop production through vegetation indices, which identify areas where plants are flourishing and where they may be suffering.^[1]

The system, which updates information three times a month, allows for quick responses to areas in danger of production losses. It has also reduced the cost of maintaining agricultural research stations that do on-the-ground monitoring.

The CWS already observes the relationship between rainfall, production and temperature changes for 46 major grain-growing economies and shares that information. During a workshop at the APEC Agricultural Technology Transfer Forum in Beijing last November, delegates discussed how such data could be used to view crop production for the entire APEC region.

New crop varieties, including nutritionally enhanced plants, and improvements in farm management, such as pest control and post-harvest distribution, are also key to increasing yields.

At the technology transfer forum in November experts talked about the need to diversify food crops and strengthen crop germplasms so they could better respond to extreme weather conditions.

But that means overcoming one of the biggest challenges to increasing production, agricultural research investment.

The global financial crisis has dampened trade and economic growth, slowing individual economies’ ability to respond to the factors that drive production losses. And since agriculture R&D has a long gestation period, priority attention is being given to measures that stabilize the economy overall.

The ATCWG has been pushing for enhanced trade and technical cooperation, and encouraging the private sector to invest in farming.

While many important technologies have resulted from publicly funded research, the business sector can play a major role in supporting R&D activities with a commercial objective, said Dr. Tang.

The ATCWG and the PPFS are helping to support technology transfer so systems that work in one place can be adapted and adopted in another. They are also working to improve supply chains to ensure food gets from point A to point B. New technology have helped boost production in many parts of the world, but, as Mr. Nowell noted, trade barriers and lack of infrastructure can cause food surpluses to spoil on their way to market.

To achieve the goal of enhanced production and better supply chain management, stakeholders at all levels need to be involved, from small farmers to food scientists to port developers. The PPFS is getting all the players to sit around the same table to address the critical issue of food security and find lasting solutions to one of the world’s most pressing problems.