What happened to the global food crisis? It was in the news and out again as quickly as a bad Hollywood movie. The media covered the alarming increase in food prices that have hit poor people so hard. Riots broke out in dozens of countries. Zimbabwe, Sudan, and North Korea are on the edge of severe hunger. Earlier this month, world leaders met in Rome to redirect global funds to meet the new problem.
There's nothing like a big meeting to signal to the news media that adult supervision has returned and everyone can safely focus on other matters.
But instead of addressing the underlying causes of the crisis, world leaders have largely engaged in a high-stakes game of finger-pointing. Everybody has identified a different culprit for the 83% spike in global food prices over the last three years. At the UN conference in Rome, Zimbabwe's not-for-long leader Robert Mugabe blamed colonialism. Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad argued that Western countries had deliberately devalued the dollar and driven up oil prices. Brazil blasted the United States for subsidizing corn-based ethanol; the United States blasted Brazil for diverting agricultural land for sugar-cane-based ethanol.
True, the crisis has generated a small bump up in humanitarian aid. But no one is challenging business as usual in the world of agriculture. Neither the United States nor the European Union has backtracked on their biofuel policies, which has siphoned food into the gas tanks of the wealthy world. Nor has the United States in particular addressed with any greater urgency the environmental constraints that are making food production harder and harder each year: global warming, water shortages, a declining per-capita percentage of arable land.
The bottom line: there are ever more people to feed and a declining ability to feed them all. We face a set of paralyzing trade-offs. Yes, we could bring more land into cultivation, but that would knock down the remaining rainforests and eliminate our carbon sinks. Yes, we could attempt another Green Revolution by imposing industrial agriculture on small farmers, but that requires cheap oil (for fertilizer) and plentiful water (for irrigation) that we simply don't have. Yes, we could launch a dramatic anti-poverty campaign -- think the UN Millennium Development Goals squared - that would eventually drive down population growth. But all those new entrants into the middle class would begin to consume a great deal more meat, and therefore grain, just as the no-longer-poor are doing in China and India.
Our basis for life on this planet has become tremendously fragile. Most of us are dependent on industrial agriculture -- which means cheap energy to run the machinery and produce the fertilizer, plentiful land and water, and a temperate climate. This system of industrial agriculture is now under threat. Energy is no longer cheap. We are approaching Peak Land and Peak Water. And the climate is getting seriously out of whack.
The current food crisis is an early warning, and it looks as though we're ignoring it. We dismissed an even earlier warning, when North Korea suffered a major famine in the late 1990s because of rising energy prices, limited land, and environmental stresses. "After the attacks of September 11, 2001, 'We are all Americans' briefly became a popular expression of solidarity around the world," I write in Mother Earth's Triple Whammy. "If we don't devise policy choices that address energy, agriculture, and climate, while replacing the idolatry of unrestrained growth at the heart of both capitalist and communist economies, the tagline for the 21st century may be: 'We are all North Koreans.'"
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Posted June 23, 2008 | 09:22 PM (EST)