Tired and Hungry
17 Oct 2008
By Hazel Mowbray for ISN
In spite of steep price hikes on many food items in the past year, most of us continue to take for granted a visit to the local supermarket. The aisles still overflow with newly stocked produce: butternut squash from Greece, mozzarella from Italy, fresh lamb from New Zealand. While we may have cut back on some excesses, we continue to rely on a wide-array of products to feed our international palate.
Many similarities existed between a busy Western supermarket and the local market I once frequented in southern Africa, including the hum of a bustling crowd who relied on the products available to feed their families.
But one thing has changed since I visited that local food market in Malawi. A global food crisis has led to scarcity, price hikes, hoarding and even riots throughout the African continent and around the world.
When we talk of a food crisis, it is not my neighbors in London who concern me most, it is my former neighbors in Malawi. In the UK, even the poorest household spends only about 15 percent of its budget on food, compared to nearly 80 percent in Malawi. For Malawians and those in a similar socio-economic position, higher prices mean smaller portions and fewer meals with less nutritional value.
Recently, a perfect storm has converged to create the food crisis we now face. Rising energy costs, changing demographic and land-use patterns and climate change-induced variations in weather have come together to drive prices up and productivity down.
Rising energy prices have resulted in increased transportation costs to bring agricultural products to market. Also, sharp increases in the cost of fertilizer have forced external pagefood prices to rise. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, fertilizer accounts for 25-30 percent of the overall cost of grain production in the US, which supplies 40 percent of all world grain exports.
Population growth and changing consumption patterns in some developing countries have also contributed to the growing food crisis. For example, although India contains the second largest amount of arable land in the world behind the US, increased demand spurred by external pagepopulation growth has recently outstripped supply. As a result, India has been forced to import many food staples, further exacerbating the crisis. Also, a growing middle class in countries like India and China has created increased demand for a greater diversity of foodstuffs, including animal protein, which requires large amounts of grain for animal feed.
Wealthy countries have exacerbated these demographic pressures through external pageincreased biofuel production. By placing greater demand on food crops for use in the production of corn-based ethanol, resources are diverted away from food production, increasing food scarcity and prices. In fact, the price of corn has gone up 60 percent in the last year. In response, many farmers who previously grew a variety of foodstuffs have decided to transition to the sole production of corn to meet increased demand and take advantage of higher corn prices. This, in turn, has led to decreased production of other food staples, causing greater scarcity and higher prices. For example, last year alone, the average price of soybeans increased by 76 percent, wheat by 54 percent and rice by 104 percent.
Finally, climate change-induced alterations in weather patterns and temperatures are contributing to reduced food stocks and price increases. For example, the six-year drought still gripping Australia has resulted in a catastrophic 98 percent reduction in the country’s rice production. The external pagecollapse of Australia’s rice industry has reverberated around the world, leading to a doubling of prices on the world market in the early months of this year. In response, major exporting countries decided to severely curtail exports, causing panicked food hoarding in Hong Kong and the Philippines and spurring violent protests from Thailand to Haiti.
Many scientists have cited the particularly long, severe Australian drought as an early sign of the impact of global warming on food production. It is a problem that climatologists predict will manifest with increasing frequency. Subsistence farmers in the developing world who rely on traditional agricultural practices and seasonal rains are especially vulnerable to disruptions in global weather patterns caused by climate change.
As a result, while increased agricultural productivity seems more important than ever given growing demands, climate change may contribute to productivity losses, further worsening the crisis.
As these factors converge in countries around the world, food insecurity mounts. And nowhere have the effects been more concentrated than Africa. For example, Malawi, termed the bread basket of southern Africa in 2007, accepted food assistance from the UN World Food Program (WFP) during its lean season (December-March) this year. The WFP provided supplementary food to approximately 25,000 women and children a month and therapeutic food to 1,500 children. However, by July, the WFP was so short of funding that efforts to expand some programs were postponed, and rations were subsequently distributed without oil, a most important staple.
The Malawian example reflects the problem confronting aid agencies time and again: Donor countries are often remiss to contribute adequate funds until a crisis has become so severe that its victims are paraded on television to elicit sympathy and money. But once the cameras are gone, donor countries often lose interest in the project. As a result, maintaining consistent, adequate funding proves a continual challenge.
To increase attention and funding, World Bank President Robert Zoellick presented a ten point plan to combat the crisis earlier this year. He calls for increased emergency funding for the WFP to meet the immediate need of those without food. Zoellick’s long-term plans include greater funding for programs that increase agricultural productivity.
However, industrial countries often prove reticent to follow through on their aid commitments. Last year, for example, foreign aid from rich countries fell 8.4 percent below 2006 levels, and the current financial crisis is only likely to result in a external pagefurther tightening of wealthy countries' purse strings.
However, as world leaders maintain focus on the global economic downturn, managing director of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, has sought to remind them of the significant political risks posed by the food crisis. "As we know, learning from the past, those kinds of questions sometimes end in war." He concluded that ensuring adequate and affordable food stocks to the most vulnerable "is not only a humanitarian question" but a political and national security one as well.
The urgency of the situation remains clear as does our obligation to combat it. The developed world has contributed in large part to the creation of the current food emergency, and we must meet the needs of those suffering from it.
While some causes of the food crisis are beyond our control, such as the growth of the middle class in China and India, others, like our increased production of biofuels, has led directly to a “21st century food-for-oil crisis,” according to Zoellick. Indeed, he called the current situation “not a natural catastrophe” but a “man-made” one.
If ‘man-made' actions took us into this crisis, it will require 'man-made' answers to get us out. Zoellick's plan is a good start, yet I fear global inaction may further widen the gap between the overfed and the malnourished.