“Perfect Storm” or Manufactured Hunger? Understanding the Global Food Crisis
Author: Marco Ross
Originally Published at Peace and Conflict Monitor on: 05/09/2008
Category: Special Report II
An international consensus has formed that the world is in a
middle of a “perfect storm” of factors causing the price of food to
dramatically increase within a short period of the time. For some of the
world’s poorest, the price of food has increased 80% since the beginning of the
year. The World Bank has declared that 33 countries are facing political
instability due to food shortages and that without the addition of $500 million
to globe food aid organizations, another 100 million people will be added to
the list of 800 million who die every year of malnourishment and starvation.
Jean Ziegler, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food, has
referred to the crisis as a “silent mass murder.”
The willingness of international institutions to bring
attention to this extremely dire situation is commendable. However, there is an
inherent problem with referring to the crisis as a “perfect storm”: people
don’t make storms; they are phenomena of nature, not of society. The constants
reiteration of the crisis as a “perfect storm” has an ideological underpinning;
it serves to reinforce the “naturalness” of the globe food market, and frames
the debate about food cost in a manner that favors only two solutions: foreign
aid and trade liberalization. Economic sovereignty is still out of the
question. In reality, there is nothing “natural” about the global food market –
it is a highly constructed. And foreign aid, while offering some much needed
relief, won’t fix the underlining problems, while trade liberalization will not
only make it worse – but is one of the primary reasons as to how we got into
the crisis in the first place.
There are many reasons as to why the price of food is
rising, but the primary reasons all have to do with the energy industry and its
affects on the environment. Since the end of World War I the global economy has
existed as an oil economy. For the past year oil prices have increased
dramatically due to a lack of supply caused by the growing shortage of easily
accessibly crude. This shortage is worsened by an increase demand for oil from India and China, turmoil in Iraq, and the Bush administrations threats on Iran. Combined these factors have driven up the prices of oil to unbelievable amounts in a very short period of time; oil is currently just under $120 a barrel, this time last
year it was half that much. The rising cost of oil leads to an increase in the
cost of transportation, storage, agricultural inputs, and other factors which
directly affect the price of food. Oil is also affecting
the price of food by contributing to global climate change. Climate change
hasn’t deterred the overall production of food, but for key areas of the world
it is a major issue and is definitely having an impact on diminishing supply. Australia has been hit hard with two years of droughts back to back. Southeast Asia and Africa – the two areas of the world who suffer from the greatest percentage of malnourished
people – are also having troubles. The International Food Policy Research
Institute reported that Southeast Asia could lose up to 22%, of its cereal
production and Africa could lose all its wheat by 2080 due to climate change.
Unfortunately the alternative energy sources that are being
sought out to replace oil are also adding to the problem of high food prices.
Globally cereal crops actually increased this year – with a record of 1.66
billion tons! – but a greater portion of this crop is being used for ethanol
production. In the United States, 335 million tons of maize this year was
produced for ethanol. This is up by 25% from the previous year. Not only that,
but because of the high energy use of ethanol production, the alternative to
oil has been anything but. Since last year, the United States switched ¼ of its
total maize crop from food to ethanol, while its dependency on foreign oil only
decreased by one percent.
Rising food cost is also directly related to obesity through
the pitting of two types of food against each other; in this case it is grains
versus meat. Part of the “Cola-Colonization” of developing nations is changing
of traditional diets to meet those that are more common in the Western world.
This involves an increase demand for meat. This is especially the case for beef
and pork, which is seeing an increase in consumption in China, India, and Latin America. Cereals, that could be otherwise fed to humans directly, are fed to
livestock at a great lost of calories. Like with ethanol, the increase demand
for meat is causing the supply of cereals to shrink and thus driving up the
price. What this means is that while the rising bourgeoisie in China and India may be able to adopt the diet of their Western counterparts, they do so at the cost
of increasing starvation for people in rest of Asia.
All these factors are compounded by the world’s growing dependency
on (mostly) the United States to feed it. The United States alone provides 60%
of the world’s corn, and is the third largest wheat producer. This control over
the world’s stomach has been brought about – not “naturally” – by a history of
neo-liberal economics pressed upon countries by the World Bank and IMF. Developing
nations are compelled through loan conditions to remove tariffs, end subsidies,
and compete with the United States – which has tariffs and subsidizes its
agricultural industry at over $16 billion a year. Predictably, the cheap US agricultural products destroy other country’s economies and centralize the world food
source on a few key areas. This scenario leaves much of the world’s food
potential untapped, and makes the global food economy vulnerable to shortages,
high prices, and the political whims of a few countries.
There is no doubt that the main cause of hunger in the world
is the poverty. In certain areas of the world, mostly in rural Africa and the Asia Pacific region, people are caught in a poverty trap. The inability to
afford key resources, like fertilizers or farming equipment, makes it
impossible for the poor to compete in a global market; thus they fall behind
those who can; thus the gap between rich and poor widens; thus making it harder
and harder for the poor to get ahead. This
trap is politically created, through unequal distribution of wealth and
eschewed energy and agricultural policies, not naturally created through the
ups and downs of so-called market forces. If we are ever going to solve the
issue of global poverty then we must begin to understand economies in the terms
of sovereignty, equality, and human rights – and not just profits and growth.
Footnote:
Bio: Marco Rossi is a Master’s degree candidate at the UN UNiversity for Peace.
