Editorial — Food security and challenges

The launching of a new food monitoring body for the Kingdom to tackle the issue of food security is highly welcome. However the work, which is being shared between the Ministry of Agriculture and the King Abdullah Chair for Food Security at King Saud University (KSU), is going to be highly challenging.
It is clear that ambitious plans for import substitution of crops such as cereals are not going to be achieved on the planned scale. First, there is the issue of the water required and secondly, the Kingdom’s population continues to grow. Nevertheless, the achievements in this area have been quite remarkable, as many of us will have seen when we fly, with the classic round crop areas, sustained by their slowly-moving irrigation arms.
The truth is that the Kingdom shares, with the rest of the world, the need to increase food production to feed an ever-growing number of mouths. Tastes and palates in countries such as India and China are changing. With growing wealth, families are no longer content with their meager traditional diet. They want the sort of food that we, in prosperous countries, are long-used to eating. Droughts in North America has seen a substantial drop in grain output. Other major producers, including Brazil have seen excellent harvests, but they are experiencing rising domestic demand, and are unlikely to have substantial surpluses for exports.
Another major distorting factor has been the dedication of great swathes of agricultural land to the growing of crops for bio-fuels. Political fascination with this most “renewable” of the green energies has completely obscured the judgment of many world leaders. The last thing a planet which is running short of food, should be doing is growing biomass to feed its cars rather than its people. If biomass can be produced with hydroponics, as is now being tried, then it may still be a viable alternative fuel. However fuel crops should never be using up prime agricultural land.
From the Kingdom’s point of view, the price is less important than the issue of food security. To ensure that, at its crudest, we do not suddenly find that as a result of some world crisis or natural disaster, we are running out of food, requires a great deal of planning, as well as risk analysis. Many governments already hold emergency basic food stocks. In the event of a disaster, these would be distributed to the population, either directly or given to the retail trade. The emergency supplies are often also drawn down and sent to parts of the world struck by earthquakes or flooding. This also helps rotate the provisions and make sure that they remain within their recommended “eat by” dates.
Within the Kingdom’s food sector, there is of course the question of inventory. For non-perishable food stuffs, modern business practice insists that no surplus stock be kept with a subsequent extra cost to the business. From automotive components to food stuffs, the world has become plugged into a “just-in-time” supply chain. This may be financially highly efficient. However, as the Japanese tsunami and the earlier flooding in Thailand demonstrated, when parts of the supply chain are knocked out unexpectedly, firms that have no spare inventory of those components or ingredients, are effectively brought to a halt. Thus with our own food manufacturing and retailing sector, wherever financially and technically feasible, extra inventory ought to be carried. It is for the business to assess the risks and the likely period of time that it will have to survive without fresh supplies.
There will, however, be businessmen who will recoil from spending money storing extra goods that they may never need. There is indeed a good argument that the cost of food security should fall on the government. Adroit management of state supplies might even be profitable, since as the supplier of last resort, the state food depository could sell to the market at premium prices, if it chose.
This will no doubt be one of the many issues to be examined by the new food security body. Their task is extremely challenging. If they seek to make the market take proper consideration of food security with the addition of extra capacity, they will probably meet dogged opposition. Yet if they seek to put the entire cost on the government, ministers will rightly ask why the private sector should not also be contributing. Besides risk analysis and planning, it looks as if the new food security body will also need formidable diplomatic skills as well.