If all goes as planned for the G-20 this year, leaders of the world's most powerful economies will convene to issue bold proclamations, talk past each other, and quietly agree to do virtually nothing. The stakes might be a little higher now, though, as the political poker table will be stacked with millions of the world's hungriest people. Guess who'll come away empty handed?
World Bank President Robert Zoellick warned at a recent World Bank-IMF meeting that the planet was hurtling toward a food crisis, akin to the chaos that erupted in 2007-2008 across the Global South. The context this time is in some ways more daunting: a perfect storm of social and economic upheaval in North Africa and the Middle East, natural and nuclear disasters in Japan, debt crises in Europe and the U.S., and epidemic unemployment worldwide.
In the past year, Zoellick said, soaring food prices have plunged some 44 million people into poverty. Another ten million would become impoverished with just a 10 percent further rise in the UN's food price index, which jumped by 25 percent last year. Poor regions hover on the brink of malnourishment due to depleted safety nets and broken emergency back-up resources.
Following the G20 meeting in Washington this month, Oxfam issued a statement criticizing the conference's failure to come up with meaningful ways to stave off the coming crisis:
Leaders today said the food crisis is desperately urgent, and that the G20 will act on it at its next meeting in June. That's 66 days away; nearly half a million children will have died of hunger by then.
The World Bank says we're one shock away from a full-blown crisis but makes no mention of the three things rich countries have done to cause it -- burning food for biofuels, gambling in commodity casinos, and subsidizing farmers in rich countries."
Indeed, even the World Bank's food fund, a stopgap measure, has been hobbled by underfunding, Oxfam noted.
This is an old story in many ways, one that may evoke more fatigue than sympathy from observers in relatively privileged regions. Hunger in sub-Saharan Africa has become chronic, punctuated regularly by an outbreak of conflict or disease. Intense poverty in India seems intractable despite ever-accelerating economic growth. Even the notoriously insular North Korean regime has admitted its people are close to starvation. Hunger is almost a banal fixture on the global economic landscape.
But it is not a natural disaster. Agricultural policies feed directly into the hunger crisis -- policies such as growing crops for fuel while neglecting crops that feed people.
The Times UK reports:
Among the many causes of high food prices are rules in countries, such as the United States, that require a certain percentage of petrol to come from corn-based ethanol.
Some 31 per cent of the corn produced in the US in 2008 was turned into ethanol, and government forecasts show that this will hit 40 per cent this year.Biofuels have been a cornerstone of American attempts to reduce its dependency on imports of oil from the Middle East and elsewhere.
The modern face of famine: A plan to cure a fuel crisis through industrial farming has potentially driven a humanitarian crisis of far greater proportions.
Princeton biofuels expert Tim Searchinger has argued that the government-subsidized expansion of biofuels, including corn-based ethanol in the U.S. and other plants like sugar cane elsewhere, cause displacement of food crops in the agricultural system. The exact impact of the food vs. fuel dilemma is unclear, but the fact that trends in energy markets are eating into the world's need for basic sustenance says a lot about the disconnect between economic priorities and human rights.
Meanwhile, there's a growing wariness that ethanol will do little to curb climate change and will prove to be environmentally unsustainable itself. As ethanol crops gobble up precious resources, both food prices and food supplies are taxed. Then there are the global stressors of climate change, population growth and urban migration, and a rising demand for meat. It adds up to a recipe for a collapse of the entire food system that would rival any financial bubble.
Speaking of which, speculation in commodities markets, which reduce critical stable crops to ticks on a stock exchange, are another factor that could drive poor, often aid-dependent countries into deeper hunger and instability.
Remarkably, the World Bank, a financial institution hardly known for putting a high premium on humanitarianism, seems to take a more humane position on the emerging food crisis than the G-20 leaders. Yet many of those leaders represent communities that are dealing with food insecurity and soaring prices within their own borders. Even U.S. farmers are suffering from the economic downturn despite a rise in crop prices, according to a new study by the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University. In other words, even those who should be benefiting from the volatile marketplace are still cheated by its structural inequities.
At the same time, food-justice advocates inform us that the fundamental crisis, which no policymakers wish to confront, is not one of supply, but of access, distribution, and the need for equity-minded agricultural methods that can truly sustain both producers and communities.
Despite poverty, desperation, and even revolt exploding around them, officials and finance ministers are gambling on putting off decisive action, maybe hoping the market will somehow correct itself. But as Zoellick cautioned, "In revolutionary moments, status quo is not the winning hand."
Cross-posted from Colorlines.comFollow Michelle Chen on Twitter: www.twitter.com/meeshellchen
That's the reality. When human populations return to where they should be, i.e. sustainable levels for their regions, this will be a non-issue. 'Till then we're in for some rough times, but that's just the reality of it.
http://www.youtube.com/thinknauts#p/u/0/U1iaKKyee8A
Obama put Goldman Sachs first and foremost...and he always will...
I don't want to eat it, or eat an animal that's be raised on it.
As food it's total garbage.
Food and water plus a large poor bulge in the population means unrest. The only new point in todays culture is instant communication. But today we talk on grain prices, oil prices, medical and births, live births leading up to mew babies. All are entwined in PAX AMERICANA that has for sixty years brought about a peace threw out the world. This is the only time in World History no wars killing twenty to fifty million have not happened every twenty to thirty years. The outcome is people, lots of people and now a failure in rain, oil and transportation.
Food will drive people to war. They will use religion to justify it, but it comes down to I will protect my family by killing yours for food. It mat take another ten years, but the writing is on the walls in Egypt and across the world. As food prices rise, problems will explode and radical actions will entail.
Your article touches on so many aspects of this issue that I'm sure it just gets dispersed in the ether. Why don't you push on the ethanol issue? It truly is a disaster in so many ways-- gobbles quality agricultural resources, consumes at least as much fuel as it produces, etc. A horrible example of a "solution" to a problem that is false, but paved a way for many people to make a lot of money. It also attracted a lot of consumers who never got past the talking point that it was good for the environment.
There are a broad coalition of people across the political spectrum who detest this unwarranted subsidy. Why not do something concrete and develop that line of action?
Cutting Debt is another reason
As the few move from 50% ownership to 90% there will be mass starvation. As the world gains more energy world populations will gorw and more starvation.
Suppliers cutting supply dirving the price up and more world demand in time creating more Mammon fo the rich
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090906_food_is_power_and_the_powerful_are_poisoning_us/
Wendell Berry has been writing about his whole adult life. I highly recommend reading Berry's essays, prose and poetry.
What the entire planet (except for a few honest souls) do not wish to confront is the FACT that we live on a planet with finite borders and resources. We can only continue to make the water, food, shelter and space problems on planet Earth worse if everyone neglects the REAL causes: Uncontrolled human reproduction.
The real tragedy is that Mother Nature will have the final word in this matter, and it ain't going to be pretty.
Third World, stop having babies that you can't feed. Don't expect me to feed you. I had one child. Try it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico_City_Policy
The Mexico City Policy, also known by critics as the Mexico City Gag Rule and the Global Gag Rule,[1] was an intermittent United States government policy that required all non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that receive federal funding to refrain from performing or promoting abortion services, as a method of family planning, in other countries.
In other words, they took away funding for any kind of family planning if abortion was mentioned as an option, even if it was legal in their country.
Additionally, the most effective way to reduce family size in the developing world is to give the women more economic opportunities. This is a more complex solution, obviously, than just handing out condoms, but there have been many studies confirming this phenomenon.
Don't worrry it is driving the price of for Americans not Mexicans today. Isn't that great
How will you get cheap labor if the world stops having babies. Abortion is pro-lower wages and higher profits especially since there is no offsetting income stream gains like MIC of WAR to offset deaths
Nobile Lies to the public. And the public cheers for Patriotism and Popularity of the Canidate while the furture of the children disappears in the BOTTOM LINE of income streams.