Swiss Food Security

Discussions about climate change mitigation and food security show many parallels. If we look at climate change everybody is responsible, emitting a certain amount of greenhouse gases. However, developed as well as transitional economies may be the main emitters of greenhouse gases. To the contrary, the negative impacts of climate change like adverse distribution of precipitation will mainly affect developing economies located around the equator or in the southern hemisphere. Globally we struggle with reducing pressure on climate because we fear the negative impact of such measures on economic growth.
The discussions on food security turn in a similar direction. The purchasing power of the northern countries allows them to implement market distorting measures in their agricultural policies and the same purchasing power lets them be relaxed in the face of tighter food balances. As with climate change, the market also does not distribute the global consequences according to the damage caused. In both cases we appear to transfer a part of our utility to the south. With respect to food security this could be addressed through the following commitments:
We use our resources efficiently and adapted to the local capacity,
We are competitive if the combination between location factors and the economic environment provides us with a comparative advantage; for products we do not have a comparative advantage we open our markets for imports,
We improve resource use efficiency from farm to table.

Such an approach would be designed to enhance global food security by strengthening its economic backbone. But what would be the implications for Swiss food-value chains? Which policy measures would have to be taken? Drawing on different studies the presentation will highlight some possible approaches and discuss them in the context of current and future Swiss agricultural policy.

Biography of the Speaker
Bernard Lehmann (1954) is a native of Vaud, where he grew up on a farm. His preference for agriculture and economics, he joined in the form of a study and a PhD in Agricultural Economics at ETH Zurich. After several years work as agronomist for the Swiss Farmers' Union, he was appointed in 1991 at ETH Zurich as Professor for Agricultural Economics, where he taught and made research at home and abroad for twenty years. His curiosity then drove him to follow a call to Bern as Director of the Federal Office for Agriculture. In this role, he leads the federal competence center for agriculture and the food sector, which is responsible for policy making in agriculture and the strategic direction of the research station Agroscope.