A/HRC/9/23 page 32 agribusiness firms and food retailers,59 traders and speculators, a small number of net-food-exporting countries and large agricultural producers, well connected to the international markets. 4. The responses 9. The global food crisis led to reactions in three, partly overlapping, phases. During the first phase of the crisis, a number of Governments adopted measures on a unilateral basis, without coordination. Some countries sought to lower domestic prices by lowering import tariffs or by imposing export restrictions, in the form of export taxes or even export bans on certain categories of food crops. The lowering of tariffs on imports provided temporary relief to consumers, albeit at a high fiscal cost in countries whose public budget is heavily dependent on such tariffs. While in certain cases necessary to respond the immediate needs of the population, export restrictions also provided such relief, but at the risk not only of penalizing local agricultural producers and creating the wrong incentives for them, but also of worsening the situation on the international markets. Some countries sought to rebuild largely depleted strategic reserves of grain, even though this might have contributed further to the price spikes. Some countries sought to strengthen support programmes for the poor, in the form of cash subsidies, vouchers, cash- or food-for-work programmes, health and nutrition programmes, or schoolfeeding programmes. 10. These reactions have been examined in detail elsewhere and shall not be recounted here. It should be noted however, that some of these measures (particularly trade policy measures) sought primarily to keep the prices low on domestic markets (or to limit their increase), for the benefit of all consumers including those who would have been able to support higher prices, although targeted measures, particularly social programmes aimed at the poor, would have been more efficient. It is also striking that these measures were adopted without consideration of their impact on the ability of other countries to feed their populations. This disregards every State’s obligation to uphold the right to food, not only of its own population, but also in other countries. It also shows a lack of consistency, since the imposition of export restrictions or the reconstitution of strategic reserves precisely when the prices on international markets are high have further exacerbated the tensions on the markets and further perpetuated the very developments such measures were seeking to react to. 59 It has been reported that: “Cargill, the world’s biggest grain trader, achieved an 86 per cent increase in profits from commodity trading in the first quarter of this year. Bunge, another huge food trader, had a 77 per cent increase in profits during the last quarter of last year. ADM, the second largest grain trader in the world, registered a 67 per cent increase in profits in 2007. Nor are retail giants taking the strain: profits at Tesco, the UK supermarket giant, rose by a record 11.8 per cent last year. Other major retailers, such as France’s Carrefour and Wal-Mart of the US, say that food sales are the main sector sustaining their profit increases” (GRAIN report, Making a killing from hunger, April 2008, available from: www.grain.org/articles/?id=39).