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2008: Year of the Global Food Crisis
It is the new face of hunger. A perfect storm of food scarcity, global warming, rocketing oil prices and the world population explosion is plunging humanity into the biggest crisis of the 21st century by pushing up food prices and spreading hunger and poverty from rural areas into cities.
Millions more of the world's most vulnerable people are facing starvation as food shortages loom and crop prices spiral ever upwards.
And for the first time in history, say experts, the impact is spreading from the developing to the developed world.
More than 73 million people in 78 countries that depend on food handouts from the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) are facing reduced rations this year. The increasing scarcity of food is the biggest crisis looming for the world'', according to WFP officials.
At the same time, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation has warned that rising prices have triggered a food crisis in 36 countries, all of which will need extra help. The threat of malnutrition is the world's forgotten problem'', says the World Bank as it demands urgent action.
The bank points out that global food prices have risen by 75% since 2000, while wheat prices have increased by 200%. The cost of other staples such as rice and soya bean have also hit record highs, while corn is at its most expensive in 12 years.
The increasing cost of grains is also pushing up the price of meat, poultry, eggs and dairy products. And there is every likelihood prices will continue their relentless rise, according to expert predictions by the UN and developed countries.
High prices have already prompted a string of food protests around the world, with tortilla riots in Mexico, disputes over food rationing in West Bengal and protests over grain prices in Senegal, Mauritania and other parts of Africa. In Yemen, children have marched to highlight their hunger, while in London last week hundreds of pig farmers protested outside Downing Street.
If prices keep rising, more and more people around the globe will be unable to afford the food they need to stay alive, and without help they will become desperate. More food riots will flare up, governments will totter and millions could die.
Food scarcity means a big increase in the number of people going hungry,'' says the WFP's Greg Barrow. Without doubt, we are passing through a difficult period for the world's hungry poor.'' The WFP estimates it needs an additional $500 million to keep feeding the 73 million people in Africa, Asia and central America who require its help. We need extra money by the middle of 2008 so we don't have to reduce rations,'' says Barrow.
He also points out that age-old patterns of famine are changing. "We are feeding communities of people we didn't expect to feed," he explains.
As well as being rural, the profile of the new hungry poor is also urban, which is new. There is food available in the markets and shops - it's just that these people can't afford to buy it. This is the new face of hunger.'' The food shortages will also affect western industrialised nations such as Scotland, Barrow says. Scarcity means that some foods will get very expensive, or disappear from supermarkets altogether, meaning a move to seasonal, indigenous vegetables.'' Of the 36 countries named last month as currently facing a food crisis, 21 are in Africa. Lesotho and Swaziland have been afflicted by droughts, Sierra Leone lacks widespread access to food markets because of low incomes and high prices, and Ghana, Kenya and Chad among others are enduring "severe localised food insecurity".
In India last year, more than 25,000 farmers took their own lives, driven to despair by grain shortages and farming debts. "The spectre of food grain imports stares India in the face as agricultural growth plunges to an all-time low," warns India Today magazine.
The World Bank predicts global demand for food will double by 2030. This is partly because the world's population is expected to grow by three billion by 2050, but that is only one of many interlocking causes.
The rise in global temperatures caused by pollution is also beginning to disrupt food production in many countries. According to the UN, an area of fertile soil the size of Ukraine is lost every year because of drought, deforestation and climate instability.
Last year Australia experienced its worst drought for over a century, and saw its wheat crop shrink by 60%. China's grain harvest has also fallen by 10% over the past seven years.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has predicted that, over the next 100 years, a one-metre rise in sea levels would flood almost a third of the world's crop-growing land.
A recent analysis by the Conservative Party leader, David Cameron, also pinned blame for the global food crunch'' on the accelerating demand for allegedly green biofuels and the world's growing appetite for meat.
Meat is a very inefficient way of utilising land to produce food, delivering far fewer calories, acre for acre, than grain. But the amount of meat eaten by the average Chinese consumer has increased from 20 kilograms a year in 1985 to over 50 kilograms today. The demand for meat from across all developing countries has doubled since 1980.
The world's grain stocks are at their lowest for 30 years, Cameron warns. "Some analysts are beginning to make some very worrying, very stark predictions. And these analysts say politicians should start to rank the issue of food security alongside energy security and even national security."
Another key driver is the soaring cost of oil, which last week topped $105 a barrel for the first time. As well as increasing transport costs, oil makes crop fertilisers more expensive.
According to the World Bank, fertiliser prices have risen 150% in the past five years. This has had a major impact on food prices, as the cost of fertiliser contributes over a quarter of the overall cost of grain production in the US, which is responsible for 40% of world grain exports.
Tackling hunger has become a "forgotten" UN millennium development goal, says the bank's president, Robert Zoellick.
But increased food prices and their threat - not only to people but also to political stability - have made it a matter of urgency," he says.
Scottish farmers warn that food security is becoming an issue for the first time since the second world war. This is a perfect storm and the effects are being felt right now," says James Withers, the acting chief executive of the National Farmers' Union in Scotland.
"At the same time as demand for food increases, the amount of land we have available to grow food on is reducing," he adds. "An area twice the size of Scotland's entire agricultural area has been swallowed up by Chinese towns and cities in the last 10 years.'' John Scott, a Scottish Conservative MSP who farms in Ayrshire, goes further. "It's almost biblical," he says. "With all the wine lakes and butter mountains, we've had our 20 years of plenty since 1986.'' The prospect of global food shortages is now Malthusian, he suggests. One response from the UK and Scotland should be to grow more of our own food, and to try to reverse the decline in self-sufficiency from 75% in 1986 to 60% now.
It is possible for the UK, and the world, to feed itself, argues Robin Maynard from the Soil Association, but it will require big changes. He invokes the wartime spirit that saw gardens turned into allotments, and 50 mixed farms feeding Britain.
This is a wake-up call,'' he says. The choices we make now will determine whether we can feed ourselves in the future. If we get it right we can have a thriving food economy.'' Richard Lochhead, the Scottish government's environment secretary, has launched a public discussion to develop Scotland's first food policy. "I am conscious our generation has not experienced food shortages, but we should never take food for granted," he says.
"That is why the Scottish government will never allow food security to fall off the national agenda. We recognise the vital role of our primary producers in ensuring the long-term capacity and capability of our food supply."
Why are we growing food to feed cars instead of people?
The global drive for a new green fuel to power cars, lorries and planes is worsening world food shortages and threatening to make billions go hungry. Biofuels, enthusiastically backed by the US, UK and other European governments, have been sold as the solution to global warming. Making fuels from growing crops has been marketed as the way to cut climate pollution while continuing to drive.
But now experts are warning that this could all be a disastrous mistake. Converting large amounts of land to crops for biofuels is reducing food production just when the world needs to increase it.
Last year a quarter of the US maize crop was turned into ethanol to fuel vehicles - and the US supplies more than 60% of the world's maize exports. According to the World Bank, this is putting pressure on countries' precarious food supplies.
"The biofuels surge makes things worse by adding high demand on top of already high prices and low stocks," said one of the bank's leading economists, Don Mitchell. "Ethanol and biodiesel produced in the US and European Union don't appear to be delivering on green promises either, making them very controversial."
There are plans by more than 20 countries to boost production of biofuels over the next decade. The US is talking about trebling maize production for ethanol, while the European Union is aiming to make biofuels 10% of all transport fuels by 2020.
The dash for biofuels came under fire last week from the UK government's newly appointed chief scientific adviser, Professor John Beddington. In a speech in London on Thursday, he said that world food prices had already suffered a "major shock" as a result.
Biofuels were often unsustainable, he argued. "It's very hard to imagine how we can see the world growing enough crops to produce renewable energy and at the same time meet the enormous demand for food."
Some of the proposed biofuels schemes were "hopeless", warned Beddington, formerly professor of applied population biology at Imperial College, London. "The idea that you cut down rainforest to actually grow biofuels seems profoundly stupid."
The Conservative Party leader, David Cameron, has also weighed into the attack on biofuels. "They are not a panacea," he told the National Farmers' Union last month. "Unless they are truly sustainable, they may well harm the environment more than protect it."
Like environmentalists and organic food experts, Cameron latched on to one of the most telling statistics highlighting the competition between food and fuel. "You could feed a person for a whole year from the grain that produces just one tank of fuel for a sports utility vehicle (SUV)," he said.
The same figure was used by Robin Maynard, from the Soil Association, which certifies organic food. "The US currently grows one-sixth of its grain harvest for cars, which is madness," he told the Sunday Herald.
"It is perfectly possible for the world to feed itself, but it depends on how we are growing food. If we continue to grow crops to feed cars rather than people, we're in trouble."
It is the new face of hunger. A perfect storm of food scarcity, global warming, rocketing oil prices and the world population explosion is plunging humanity into the biggest crisis of the 21st century by pushing up food prices and spreading hunger and poverty from rural areas into cities.
13 Comments so far
Show AllKate and Rob:
If you think that global warming has shrunk the supply of food, you are totally wrong. The world has produced more tons of food each year for 30 years. That is a fact.
The reason for any hunger is the lack of funds to buy said food. The reason for the lack of funds is because governments have put too many restrictions on the free flow of capital to developing nations.
Provide economic activety...and you will have less hunger. India is a case in point.
Also, I see you are on the oil co's dole in providing information that is totally false as far as bio fuels are concerned.
Amazing how they fund and get their retoric out by pretending to be honest.
I’m confused, in the British version of the English language what we yanks call corn they call maize, what we call wheat they sometimes call corn and the word corn is sometimes substituted for the word grain. Since this article mentions corn, maize, wheat and grain I haven’t a clue on what’s what.
Also the price statistics in this article seem to be about 6 months out of date, in the U.S. corn prices are down 50% from their peak last summer and crude oil prices are down over 70% from their peak.
VeraSun, the largest publicly traded producer of ethanol from corn in the U.S. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy the last week of October 2008. (The largest ethanol producer in the U.S. is POET) I think nearly all of the VeraSun ethanol plants are currently idle. With crude oil below $40.00 a barrel ethanol is no longer nearly as profitable as it was when oil was over $50.00, let alone over $100.00 a barrel.
Wikipedia says corn means grain. I've heard that corn is the main grain of a country, and that wheat, barley etc. were the corn of countries like Wales, Scotland, England.
There is so much mis informatin in this op-ed piece that I don't even know how it got published. The Oil co's must have paid the paper to publish this as it totally berift of actual truth.
I strongly agree that there is a tremendous amount of false and missing (half truths) information in this article. It is no wonder that it angers farmers, who know better on a number of key issues.
1. Ok, how do we feed these people, paying fair trade prices to LDC farmers to buy the food? Where do I send my money so it will work in this way? The heifer project at least goes to farmers and helps them eat. But we need something more immediate for the non farm hungry.
2. How do we get accurate information out on these issues, instead of the false paradigm that is predominant? Noam Chomsky has a lot to say about the role of mainstream media, but we also need to educate progressives.
I don't doubt " a food crisis in 36 countries," "21 ... in Africa." But there is NO mention that low farm prices, not high farm prices, are the long term cause (while the spike in prices, IN THIS CONTEXT, is the short term cause. NO mention of dumping and all the dumping related scandals at WTO related, supposedly, to farm subsidies. "In India last year, more than 25,000 farmers took their own lives, driven to despair by grain shortages and farming debts." Ok, grain shortages means higher prices for these farmers. But Devinder Sharma, in 2003 for example, wrote about a lack of "remunerative price," about the problem of trade liberalization (neoconservativism for US readers, allowing prices to fall), and other financial helps in "Feeding the farmers," about the suicides. "Trade liberalization has already exposed developing country farmers to ruinous competition, driving down prices, undermining rural wages and exacerbating unemployment," he wrote in "WTO and agriculture: The great trade robbery."
Ok, "Lesotho and Swaziland ... Sierra Leone ... Ghana, Kenya and Chad," for example: what's wrong with their economic engines? Why the poverty behind the hunger? 1980 & 2005: Lesotho 88.8 & 76.7% rural, Swaziland 82.2 & 75.9% rural, Sierra Leone 70.9% & 60.2% rural, Ghana 68.8% & 52.2% rural, Kenya 84.3% & 79.3% rural, Chad 81.2% & 74.7% rural: LDCs 82.7& 73.0% rural, respectively. Over the period of extreme US dumping and oversupply (1981-2006) rural populations declined, but they remain high. No mention of low prices hurting these rural countries. And yes, without the powerful rural economic multipliers as engines of wealth creation, it goes from farms through rural regions and into cities.
Higher prices helped end dumping. Ethanol had some role, so it helped end dumping. Who chose ethanol? ADM and U.S. farmers. We exported at a loss by lowering and eliminating (nonsubsidy) price floors and supply management, so farmers themselves invested in ethanol as insurance against below cost corn (ie. as we usually had 1981-2006 and again today). But many farmer invested plants are in trouble with falling oil prices and higher corn costs. Yes fertilizer cost shot up in the price spike.
But thanks Madhoosier, vs. "oil, which last week topped $105 a barrel for the first time." In Brigadoon? And yes, you say, "There are plans by more than 20 countries to boost production of biofuels over the next decade?" Not anymore. Failed Verasun and its (antidumping) types are the huge news all over the farm press. They're starving from oversupply over more than a quarter century, not the reverse.
World Bank: "global food prices have risen by 75% since 2000, while wheat prices have increased by 200%. The cost of other staples such as rice and soya bean have also hit record highs, while corn is at its most expensive in 12 years." But 9/25 parity was 25% and 26% for corn and rice, 32% for soybeans. Let's not be relativists. We needed 4 fold or 3 fold increases to stop dumping and have fair trade.
In real terms we're did not likely hit record highs, if you look at US farm prices and apply a GDP deflator.
""Some analysts are beginning to make some very worrying, very stark predictions." Yes, about how prices have fallen below costs AGAIN, and oversupply may loom ahead AGAIN! See headlines at IATP agobservatory.org, "Wheat, Corn, Soybeans Plummet as U.S. Predicts Larger Supplies," BLOOMBERG, 1/14/09, BY JEFF WILSON AND TONY C. DREIBUS or "Corn Prices May Enter Decade-Long Slump, Agency Says," BLOOMBER, 1/7/09, BY ALAN BJERGA. Let's keep up folks. We must not return to dumping on LDCs as a solution to the food crisis! And read IATP tradeobservatory.org! Don't listen to Robert Zoellick's call for dumping! What a bunch of suckers....Geeeeeeez.
The world desperately needs nffc.net Food from Family Farms Act: price floors and ceilings, price floors and strategic grain reserves. Enough already of the progressive praise for Bush on the farm bill. He opposed all of this. Hey progressives, switch back from the dumping (Bush, subsidy smokescreen) side to the antidumping side. Smokescreen? Listen to African American farmers: "Ensure That Farmers Have Fair Living Wage," http://lists dot iatp dot org/listarchive/archive dot cfm?id=121152
"If we continue to grow crops to feed cars rather than people, we're in trouble?" Not if biofuels continuously bring profitability to LDC farmers, stimulating living wage hiring throughout these regions.
Lets get sensible with nffc.net. Price floors with supply management (to save our soil) on the bottom, and price ceilings with strategic grain reserves (to save for seven years and prevent disaster on the eighth year) on top.
No we don't ever want to run out of food. Let's learn how to organize to get our democracy back. Read Shel Trapp and Roger Fisher, or google their names and my name.
3. Ok, for me to be positive? Well, to be fair, at least the article didn't specifically claim salvation through the smokescreen of subsidy reduction/elimination. (ok, google my name and subsidies if you haven't heard those documented answers yet)
4. Read #1 again. Lets do it. How do we do it?
Nonsense panicking. The food crisis started when meat and diary production was switched from grass fed pasture raised to corn fed shit through RIGGING the market and small farms were shut down and taken over by Big Agri. Demand for food will decrease as the population kills each other off and later realizes that it's the way food has been improperly produced that's causing this mess. The author is just another useless UN spokesperson supporting Big Agri and trying to beg us to shut up and cry.
As oil and natural gas are depleted food will become more expensive. When these are too expensive to use for making fertilizer or transporting food from one side of the world to the other there will be a radical shift in how many people many places can sustain. When we are past the oil age the earth may only be able to sustain one or two billion people. We are also using up ground water in some aquifers which took tens of thousands of years to fill. Depleted soils will not be able to grow even as much as they did in the nineteenth century and certainly only a fraction of what they could grow with manufactured fertilizers and pumped groundwater. Bursting of the tech stock bubble followed by bursting of the housing bubble followed by bursting of the credit bubble and soon to come is the bursting of the human population bubble. Peak population is just ahead.
And yet some organic farmers, without "manufactured fertilizers" are getting comparable yields (ie. 180 bu. on good Iowa soils), and at lower costs. And that's grounded upon many billions of dollars less of research money.
A set of 2008 organic crop budgets from Iowa State University (a land grant, agricultural university) has corn costing $3.47 and soybeans $10.49 (add fixed and variable). Market prices listed are $9.25 for corn and $18.00 (screened) or $24.00 (cleaned) for soybeans. Prices are likely lower now and costs have gone up, as we've had a conventional price spike. Land costs used are $225 per acre, which represented the top third for 2008. Corn was figured at 150 bushels, soybeans 40 bushels (4 bu screened out and 36 bushels cleaned). Harvest costs used seem low, and probably some others.
Conventional (corn/soybean rotation) costs, (also top third, $225/acre land costs) 2008 from IS and figured similarly (but not directly comparable and not with all the same assumptions), were $3.43 and $7.84, with yields of 180 bu. and 55. Then these costs rose 25% for 2009 or 45% over two years for the middle third of land quality.
The organic rotation used is oats/alfalfa/corn/soybeans. The low corn costs are helped a lot by following alfalfa. They wouldn't be so low if the rotation was expanded to 5 years, with corn following soybeans. It doesn't say if the soybeans are feed grade or food grade.
I believe 2006 was the first year ISU gave organic enterprise budgets. That year organic corn was cheaper to raise per bushel than conventional, but organic soybeans were more expensive per bushel, (but a $5/acre lower land cost was used for organic). That meant that the organic corn was more profitable to raise per bushel, even without premium prices. In each case, the entire crop rotation must be considered (all 4 or 2 years) to determine farm profitability.
The Rodale Institute has found over several decades that organic crops are affected much less than "conventional" (ie. in yield) on drought years and perhaps on wet years. That's where they they gain some significant ground on yield comparisons. Iowa State University is a late comer and has been doing organic research for a much shorter period, probably less than 10 years as of 2008, not since 1981 like Rodale (28 years), in spite of pressure on ISU from organic farmers since the 1980s. Rodale found that organic yields were eventually HIGHER than conventional. "Decades of soil improvements produce better soil quality and allow organic corn production to move beyond yield parity, while providing better resilience in drought and wet years." http://newfarm dot rodaleinstitute dot org/columns/research_paul/2007/0207/fst.shtml
Sigurdur says the world has produced more food each year for the last thirty years. And we have produced more and more people in those thirty years. Billions more. More food has been made a necessity, and more people means more everything.
Well, that has come at a cost to nature. The global fisheries are collapsing, the aquifers are depleting, desertification is spreading, and pesticide- and machine-based agriculture relies on past-peak oil for production and transportation. Overpopulation has placed severe strains on natural life support systems. Natural places are being decimated by slash/burn agriculture. The trees that help slow global warming are being chopped down for charcoal(so instead contribute to global pollution), and for clearing new crop land in a self-defeating subsistence manner, by nations without true governmental control on, and real aid for, agriculture. See Haiti.
Global warming is changing weather patterns in rain and snow and heat. This does not bode well for the future. For example, when the Himalayan glaciers melt down through global warming, billions will die, by thirst, famine, pestilence, violence and war. Especially in your 'success story' of India. Some success.
See THE REVENGE OF GAIA, by James Lovelock, the man who can actually be said to have saved life on Earth from destruction (by solar ultraviolet radiation, some years back.) Or read THE LONG EMERGENCY, on the powering-down of the planet. Agriculture must become localized and actively supported by every government, not commoditized to the highest bidder and then transported vast distances using more energy than the foodstuff intrinsically bears. According to Lovelock and Kunstler, it will be necessary for every nation to go it alone as much as possible now. Localized agriculture must be a priority... for government action, not 'free' market action.
The reason for any hunger is the lack of funds to buy said food, you say? Zimbabwe just printed up hundred-Billion-dollar notes, to buy an egg with. So aren't the farmers rich, and aren't the people well-fed? Lots of 'funds' with which to buy food! And then you blame governments for restrictions on the free flow of capital? Provide economic activity? I grant you that giving farmers everywhere incentives to produce food through a living wage is important. Our own government provides farmers with the policies that create a real livlihood for them, as opposed to a free-for-all wherein one year of overproduction for the market bankrupts them all, so that the next year there is nothing, and food skyrockets in price. Like the free-for-all in much of the developing world.
Food sources must be localized as far as possible. To ship food across half the globe is foolish, in a time of fuel scarcity and overpollution. Small Mexican family farmers were wiped out of economic existence by 'the free flow of capital across borders' - i.e. NAFTA - leading to 'the free flow of destitute farmers' across the US border. But now that US farmers have found a more 'lucrative market' for their grains, and have cut off the US-subsidized supply to Mexico, Mexico needs the farmers and farms not there now becuase they were deemed uneconomical by the 'free flow of capital'... thus the tortilla riots. So much for 'the free flow of capital'.
And when there is no food, it does not matter how much cash or gold you have... no food to buy with it. It is not the past that needs worrying about, it is the stark future. But on a positive note, at least for now, thank goodness for the UN; whipping boy for the rabid right-wingers and NeoCons. How wrong the Right is about the UN, in every way.
In support of a Sigurdur point: The U.S. has long produced a market depressing oversupply of food, while not keeping strategic reserves for times of shortage. This is what NAFTA and the farm bill commodity title did to Mexico. As the IATP "Todays Headlines" articles show, this may continue long into the future.
But against Sigurder that's free trade and bad business policy, and mere "free flow of capital" isn't a solution.
It is false that "Our own government provides farmers with the policies that create a real livlihood for them, as opposed to a free-for-all wherein one year of overproduction for the market bankrupts them all, so that the next year there is nothing, and food skyrockets in price. Like the free-for-all in much of the developing world." We no longer provide either a floor or a ceiling for farm prices, neither supply management or commodity reserves through the commodity title. We do compensate our farmers for part of the massive losses of these policies. These policies have strongly impacted the developing world, as we have had 40% or more of world export market share.
"Another key driver is the soaring cost of oil, which last week topped $105 a barrel for the first time."
That's all wrong. Oil's at US $ 42 now 01/29/09 - but reached ca. $ 150 last year.
That article's a mess.