CIt’s a pernicious gear that has been set in motion for several weeks. While food prices have increased by 30% in one year, according to the index of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), export restrictions are multiplying all over the world. world. Twenty countries have thus blocked around thirty basic products, which represent a fifth of the calories traded in the world.
The latest initiative to date is that of India, which has just decreed an embargo on its wheat sales, causing great tension in a market that has already been extremely chaotic since the start of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, two countries which before the conflict represented almost a third of world exports.
At the end of April, Indonesia had already significantly reduced its palm oil exports, following the disruption caused by the war in Ukraine on the sunflower market. Hungary and Serbia have imposed grain restrictions, as have Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. Argentina limits its beef exports, Iran those of potatoes. This every-man-for-himself threatens the global food balance. To let it prosper is to take the risk of seeing famines multiply.
The governments of these countries believe in this way to secure their supplies, while protecting their population from the rise in world prices. In the short term, the solution has the merit of costing nothing in budgetary terms, unlike more costly subsidy mechanisms.
An inflationary spiral
But this short-sighted strategy only encourages speculation. Global trade is an essential component of food security. Restricting them exacerbates tensions, maintains an inflationary spiral, without solving the problems of these countries.
First, blocking exports on one product does not protect against price increases on other foodstuffs which are not produced in the country and which will have to be imported. In the logic of the sprinkler sprinkled, India, a month before taking its decision on wheat, had been the first to protest against the Indonesian initiative to limit its palm oil exports. The reciprocity of exchanges is a fragile balance that does not support sprains badly.
Then, it is not because a country blocks food at home that it will be automatically distributed to its poorest population. Protectionism does not magically remove the logistical, storage and preservation obstacles that these countries are already struggling to overcome.
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