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Solving the Global Food Crisis: The Case for a "Poverty Czar"
This past week, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) convened an international panel on food security at which FAO chief Jacques Diouf argued that global food production will have to double by 2050 simply to prevent another billion people from starving. At the same time, two new scientific reports-one from the hunger relief charity Oxfam International and one from international affairs think-tank Chatham House-predicted that global food prices will rise sharply over the next 20 years. And in 2008 alone, the number of people in dire poverty-individuals not consuming enough calories for their basic sustenance-increased by 4 percent (that's an additional 40 million starving individuals) to a staggering 973 million, according to the U.N.
Already, there have been riots over food in Haiti, Bangladesh, and Egypt as well as unrest in dozens of other countries. And as Obama has rightly noted-as has his transition team chief, John Podesta, in his must-read book The Power of Progress-global poverty is at the root of global security: Dire poverty breeds war, failed states, and terrorism. This is an uncontroversial though strangely neglected fact. It happened in Afghanistan. It happened in Iraq. It's happening in the Horn of Africa. Even beyond the moral imperative of preventing a billion people from starving, for basic security reasons, we can't afford to ignore a billion starving human beings.
But what is the reason for this festering crisis? And more critically, can we solve it?
One obvious reason for this problem is that the U.S. government spends well under one-quarter of 1 percent of our gross national income on aid, placing us dead last among the 22 countries tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Most Americans believe that we should spend about 10 times more on aid than we do, and 60 percent of Americans want to triple aid immediately, from about $25 billion to $75 billion. Simply convincing Congress to do what its constituents already desire would move us from the bottom to the top and would encourage other countries to follow our lead. For an idea of how much money we're talking about, remember that the justly lauded Gates Foundation-the world's largest private charity-spent $3.3 billion last year on all its programs.
Increasing aid from the U.S. is just one part of the solution, and it must be coupled with improved aid allocation, as New York Times. columnist Nicholas Kristof discussed in his devastating case-in-point, "Year After Year, Grave After Grave". (please read the article)
The Obama administration is off to a good start on this issue. It has pledged to double development aid, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a commitment at the U.N. conference in Madrid this week to "[build] a new partnership among donor states, developing nations, U.N. agencies, NGOs, the private sector and others to better coordinate policies to achieve the Millennium Development Goals [of halving global poverty by 2015]."
But more must be done. In his book, Podesta proposes the appointment of a cabinet-level "poverty czar"; such a move could not come too soon. With nearly a billion people starving worldwide, having one person dedicated to overseeing the allocation of U.S. aid makes perfect sense. Obama and Clinton have laid out their priorities with the Middle East, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. How about a George Mitchell or Richard Holbrooke to deal with global poverty?
In addition to overseeing U.S. aid, a new poverty czar could also work to address global poverty at its roots. This means digging past the superficial reason conventionally offered for why there is growing poverty ("food costs are rising") and recognizing that the most significant factors driving up food costs are the diversion of crops to biofuels and the growing demand for meat in developing countries, especially China and India.
Last year's Nobel laureate in economics, Paul Krugman, lays out the problem: "Over the past few years the prices of wheat, corn, rice and other basic foodstuffs have doubled or tripled .... High food prices dismay even relatively well-off Americans-but they're truly devastating in poor countries, where food often accounts for more than half a family's spending." And the causes for the price spike? Some of the most important causes Krugman identifies are also the most obvious (and correctable): "the march of the meat-eating Chinese-that is, the growing number of people in emerging economies who are, for the first time, rich enough to start eating like Westerners" and biofuels, because "land used to grow biofuel feedstock is land not available to grow food, so subsidies to biofuels are a major factor in the food crisis." He adds, "We also need a pushback against biofuels, which turn out to have been a terrible mistake."
World Bank president Robert Zoellick backed Krugman's analysis in a National Public Radio interview in which he explained, "You have some of those countries moving to a different diet. So more meats require more grains. You have the biofuels expansion, which is a big source of demand." He added, "Biofuels is no doubt a significant contributor. It is clearly the case that programs in Europe and the United States that have increased biofuel production have contributed to the added demand for food."
Indeed, according to a World Bank report released last year, biofuel production has driven global food prices up 75 percent, dwarfing the effect of weather changes, drought, and other factors. The impact is so severe that the U.N. special rapporteur on food policy called the diversion of crops to biofuels "a crime against humanity."
According to a U.N. report last April, about 100 million tons of grain and corn were turned into biofuels last year, and 758 million tons were fed to chickens, pigs, and other farmed animals. So obviously, an increase in either of those uses will drive up food costs, as noted by Krugman, Zoellick, and others. And if diverting 100 million tons of grain and corn to biofuels is a crime against humanity, how should we characterize the diversion of 758 million tons to feed chickens and other farmed animals, considering the vast inefficiency of cycling crops through animals, compared to eating those crops directly?
It is important for those of us in the West to remember that although we can't do much to stop the Chinese and Indians from eating more meat, we can do a lot about our own diets. Eating less meat would push food prices down, just as growing consumption in developing countries pushes them up. As Krugman and Zoellick suggest, we should be worried about the increase in meat consumption in China and India. We should be more worried, however, about what is on our own plates.
A poverty czar could and should use the position to rally the American public to support greater food aid, more efficient food aid, and a change in policies away from the promotion of biofuels and the highly inefficient meat industry. She or he could also use the bully pulpit of the position to encourage Americans to donate more to private charities and to lead by example on the issue of meat consumption.
Yes, we can solve the global food crisis-if we have the will.
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Show All"Yes, we can solve the global food crisis-if we have the will."
How many more decades will we be saying this before the humane part of the will kicks-in and begins to solve the poverty, food and other equally devastating problems around the globe?
We also need the know how, so we advocate for things that will work. So far we mostly don't have the know how, we have false understandings of the problems and the causes. So we must start by educating the progressive community, those already working, to start advocating for the correct things. See my other posts here.
Brad,
Have you read "The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order" by Michel Chossudovsky? There's more truth in that book than any of us want to know.
The book can be ordered at: http://www.globalresearch.ca/
The "food problem" will be solved when the big die-off that all the other problems are leading to kicks in, which shouldn't be long now.
The U.S. could definitely use a poverty czar--an entire poverty-focused department is more like it... Great piece. Thanks Common Dreams!
That Kristof article is devastating:
http://select.nytimes.com/2005/10/11/opinion/11kristof.html?_r=1
Year After Year, Grave After Grave
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Gouré, Niger
Welcome to the most wretched country in the world.
Niger is dead last of the 177 nations ranked in the latest U.N. Human Development Report, based on its heartbreaking rates of poverty, illiteracy and mortality. On a 650-mile drive across the country from the Niger capital, Niamey, to this eastern city of Gouré, I stopped in village after village where peasants told of young children dying of starvation in the last few months. One man named Haroun Mani had just buried three of his eight children.
"They didn't have enough to eat, and then they got diarrhea and weakened and died," he explained. None had seen a doctor; in Niger, there is one doctor for every 33,000 people.
Granted, it's difficult for Western readers who are dieting to comprehend people who are starving. But Niger seems a good place to ponder the failings of a system of international aid that is often irrational and catastrophically inept, leading to the deaths of those children, Suraj, 5, Barida, 3, and Hawau, 2 - along with millions more across the continent.
A crucial mistake is our refusal to provide substantial agricultural assistance to increase African food production. Instead, we ship tons of food in emergency aid after people have already started dying. It's like a policy of scrimping on manhole covers because we're too busy rescuing people who fall into manholes.
In Niger, it has been apparent since the beginning of this year that a food crisis was coming, but the world ignored a U.N. emergency appeal for $3 million in aid in February. Then in July, BBC television showed wrenching images of children dying. Niger promptly received more aid in the last 10 days of July than it had received in the previous eight months.
In fact, the situation is more complex than the television images suggest. The reality is that people in Niger are always starving.
"There was a crisis last year, and there'll be a crisis next year," said Claude Dunn, who runs the World Food Program office in Maradi. This year's crisis was especially bad, but year in, year out, 160,000 children under the age of 5 die in Niger - one child in four never reaches 5. In other words, every single week this small country faces a 9/11-sized toll, composed entirely of dead children. And yet no one is declaring: We are all Nigeriens.
One problem is that U.S. law generally requires our food aid to be purchased in American markets and transported on American ships. The upshot is that much of the donation is wasted on shipping costs, the aid is delayed, and when it arrives our grain risks depressing local prices and long-term production incentives. To his credit, President Bush has pushed to ease this requirement, but members of Congress are blocking him, because they value farmers' votes more than African lives.
Above all, we need a major new international initiative to extend the green revolution to Africa. Farmers in tropical Africa get only 1,500 pounds of cereal grain per acre, compared with 4,900 pounds in China. Pedro Sanchez, an agricultural expert at Columbia University, has estimated that Africans could triple food production if they used modern seeds and methods.
In the village of Angaual Goge Haouna, where seven children died in the last few months of starvation, villagers said they wanted more fertilizer above all, as well as better seeds and help exploiting a nearby lake for irrigation.
"I'm not only using the same techniques as my grandfather, I'm actually using the same implements," said Momom Bukhary, a 63-year-old man. "And this land used to be far more productive than it is now. When I was young, the annual harvest would last a full year, longer in good times. Now it only lasts three months, and then we run out of food."
A major reason is that the soil has been depleted of nutrients. But in sub-Saharan Africa, farmers apply an average of 9 kilograms of fertilizer per hectare, compared with 206 kilos in industrialized countries.
In the news business, we don't lead with headlines like "Millions of Children Dying in Africa," because that's not actually news. It's the wallpaper.
Yet realities like that should inspire our priorities. And we're not even using our aid money wisely. Unless we help start a green revolution in Africa, we'll be back in Niger year after year - and every village will be surrounded by more tiny graves.
There's NO mention here of DUMPING! Low farm prices! Clearly, Kristof fails to grasp this massive cause of the problem. Only a few years ago everything was about dumping. Since the food crisis it's been forgotten in the media, and among progressives.
Ok, Niger is, what, a whopping 83.7% rural as of 2005! We in the U.S. chose to lose money on farm exports for a quarter century, pouring out our wealth to foreign processors and livestock interests. (For secret, nongovernmental subsidization of corporate agribusiness output sector, the buyers (CAFOs, feed and cereal mills, ethanol and other processors, exporters). Our dumping lowered world prices hurting rural countries most, and few countries are as rural as Niger!
See USDA ERS: "Commodity Costs and Returns: U.S. and Regional Cost and Return Data" on our net losses vs full costs 1981-2006, at http://www dot ers.usda.gov/Data/CostsAndReturns/testpick.htm. Could someone pass this on to Kristof! And PETA!
Ok, yes, Kristof understands that Niger's hunger isn't just during the farm price spike of fall 2006-summer 2008. He just doesn't get why.
Without correcting dumping, without correcting Niger's farm economy (wealth creation, money to stimlulate agriculture's powerful economic multipliers), other solutions can't work. We need all of these corrective solutions too, of course, because dumping has devastated countries like Niger for so long, especially back to 1980.
Brad's point is spot on. For an example closer to home, think MExico, where NAFTA-favored corn imports from the US have driven over a million farmers out of business an off the land.
Another thing that Kristof "doesn't get" is the fact that those miracle fertilizers upon which the green revolution was based are petrochemicals, environmentally catastrophic and rapidly reaching peak supply and effectiveness.
The only answer to the global food crisis (coming soon to your neighborhood, too) is a sustainable, largely organic, labor intensive agricultural system.
There just isnt the will. Frances Moore Lappe talked about saving crops for humans in the late 60s-no one cared.
For the chinese and indians eating meat isnt about tradition or even taste--its because they see it in the West which they emulate so they have to do it.
Like the 8 year old Indian playing a WW2 video game and when asked what side he would want to fight on-he said the Americans. Not India.
I guess we should applaud his lack of nationalistic favoritism.
Hey Bruce! LBJ already tried to declare war on poverty 44 years ago and it lost out to the Vietnam war. But if it were possible, could we puleeeze find something else to call the head of such a program besides "Czar" which is the Russian word for "Ceaser" (in German it is "Kaiser"). The very word reeks of royalist and heirarchial privilige and is hardly a fitting title for any US government official in charge of anything.
Poet
A better Czar title might be the Czar of Hogging Nations. OR the "Food CHN."
What happens when snowflakes stick together?...............friends come together and have snow ball fights. :)
Leea
Sioux Rose
In addition to the points raised about aid, the conversion of edible grains into combustible fuels, is also the issue of Wall St. I can't remember which economist pointed to the links between betting on "futures" of corn, wheat, barley, etc and how these artificial instruments of "the market" also act to boost prices. In America, the recent doubling of the price of rice is something most of us can absorb. In nations where populations subsist on pennies such increments become a death sentence. I'd like to see some regulation of this manipulation of food prices starting on our home turf.
Check out "Commodities Market Speculation: the Risk to Food Security and Agriculture," NOVEMBER 13, 2008 BY IATP | PDF: http://www dot iatp.org/iatp/publications.cfm?accountID=451&refID=104414
Instead of eating less meat (so we can eat more grain?) why not feed our animals more grass?
It's not rocket science.
Yes, and end the Republican "Freedom to Farm" era (since 1996) by getting Senate Ag Chair Tom Harkin to reintroduce the Harkin-Gephardt farm bill of the 1990s. Harkin and the Democrats have introduced "green" versions of Freedom to Farm in 2002 and 2008. But now Bush is out. Vilsack will follow Harkin.
Ok, so this means, not mainly the false issue of subsidies, but restoring price floors and supply management, so grass doesn't compete with half priced corn. Subsidies don't cause that. They're not needed with price floors anyway.
OPEC has just cut back on production. And with the economic crisis, it's time for price floors so we don't export at a loss, pouring our wealth out to other countries and dumping cheap commodities on other countries.
Ok, this is PETA, Bruce Friedrich of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. He's making the case against hunger within a PETA framework. By PETA's criteria he probably did a great job.
PETA is wrong about ethanol and livestock. It's not so simple. Ethanol has been built on way below cost prices, often half price. Corporate ethanol interests (ADM dominates) advocate for export dumping (ie. on Niger and the world). Farmers themselves invested in ethanol after losing on price floors (1953-2008, without adequate urban support) against dumping. If you have to lose on one end, take advantage on the other. But with the corn price spike many ethanol plants went broke. It's constant front page news in the ag press. Oil spiked, which saved some ethanol, but then fell back, hurting ethanol. Ethanol, to the extent it raised world prices, helped end dumping for 2008. For countries like Niger, in the Kristof article, it's 83.7% rural as of 2005! It's all about the farm economy, Niger's poverty that is. A quarter century of dumping, 1981-2006. They can't even afford below cost food, so devastated are they.
Livestock, to the extent that they raised grain prices, also helped end dumping, the #1 issue for a quarter century for places like Niger. And LDC farmers like those in Niger need the value added income of livestock. And so does the land, it needs pastures and hay fields, not just "vegetarian" row crops, on highly erodible land and dry. Organic farmers need diversified resource conserving crop rotations.
Ok, how bad was dumping versus a fair trade price? Here too PETA gets it wrong. Paul Krugman, lays out the problem: "Over the past few years the prices of wheat, corn, rice and other basic foodstuffs have doubled or tripled." But Friedrich here advocates relativism, with no standard of a fair trade, living wage farm price for LDC farmers (LDCs are 73% rural as of 2005). So he has no standard against dumping. Well I offer a standard, parity, the traditional U.S. standard. Look here: http://www dot nfu.org/documents/nfunews/2005/1105_nfunews_wb.pdf, on page 2, for USDA NASS data for September 2005. Corn is 25% of parity. Cotton and Rice are 26%. Wheat and Soybeans are 32%. "Doubled or tripled"? In 2005 these prices were in need of tripling or quadrupling by this fair trade, living wage standard (100% of parity)! We had 100% or more of parity every year 1942-1952 under the New Deal and the Steagall Amendment (Banking committees) economic stimulus.
By the way, farm share of the food dollar in the US is probably below 8% (Stewart Smith). For corn flakes and wheat bread it's much smaller. Smith estimates that farming was largest share in 1900. Agribusiness gets the lions share (input complex, 20%, output complex, 73%). That's where the U.S. food dollar goes. But yes, farm prices affect food costs much more in LDCs, and that's an enormous problem. But no solution that causes poverty for LDC farmers (ie. low farm prices, losing value added of livestock) makes sense. Correctives to fix the devastation from decades of dumping and feed people should not add to the poverty by buying farm crops and livestock at below cost from LDC farmers. We must feed the hungry, all of them, but with fair trade, living wage prices, paid to LDC farmers.
When USDA examined "Effects of Government Programs on Costs and Returns," (http://www dot ers.usda.gov/Data/CostsAndReturns/testpick.htm, scroll down,) for corn, rice, grain sorghum and barley (and cotton), overall, farmers lost money on each even with subsidies! So the net result is that farmers subsidized consumers, even counting subsidy income, not the other way around.
Agribusiness fought for an end to true price floor, nonsubsidy programs. See Mark Ritchie, "Crisis by Design," http://www dot iatp.org/iatp/publications.cfm?accountID=258&refID=48644; George Naylor, "Legacy of Crisis." http://www dot inmotionmagazine.com/ra07/crisis_86.html. A Reagan/Block era USDA staff person tells a story of a meeting to set price support levels for the 1985 farm bill. They called ADM head Duane Andreas to get the OK for the level. (Source, John Ford, the staff person, who later worked for the American Corn Growers Association.)
It's a devastatingly important issue. Friedrich deserves credit for raising it, but his pro-PETA arguments are weak, false, and misleading. To be fair, I've seen no other recent article by progressives on this that is much better. Most make the same errors. Both the Kristof link (I discuss elsewhere below) in the article and the Krugman link fail to provide the crucial facts I've added. They make the same mistakes of ignoring decades of dumping, and arguing a relativization of market prices instead of a fair trade standard. And they don't see U.S. farm share issues. Ditto for Robert Zoellick on the NPR link, and NPR, and hundreds of mainstream media articles, and so many progressive articles.
The damage has been done over decades. The U.S. chose to lose money for decades on farm exports to provide below cost raw materials to (domestic and international) agribusiness. There are no easy solutions.
Hey, anybody listening. We must get this right. Enough of the half truths reversing the conclusions. Don't listen to the agribusiness call for more dumping, as all of the sources linked here are (unintentionally) advocating. Hello.... Hello.... LDCs are calling us to account. Enough of false hopes and false analyses! Let's get to work and bring the progressive community on board, factually, with the world's farmers and their rural communities, and rural countries where these people are hungry.
Nobody needs a czar of any kind. It's just more big government and if you think I'm nuts, tell me just what the drug czars have accomplished for nearly a century ? Banning hemp while "legalizing" petro-pharmaceuticals ? Yeah, that's "progress" ! NOT !!
I found Brad's post especially interesting, although Brad, you oddly suggest that Bruce and PETA get it wrong, and then later suggests that everyone on the left gets it wrong. You write:
"It's a devastatingly important issue. Friedrich deserves credit for raising it... To be fair, I've seen no other recent article by progressives on this that is much better. Most make the same errors. Both the Kristof link (I discuss elsewhere below) in the article and the Krugman link fail to provide the crucial facts I've added... Ditto for Robert Zoellick on the NPR link, and NPR, and hundreds of mainstream media articles, and so many progressive articles."
So perhaps in advocating your position, you would consider simply advocating your position, rather than impugning just about everyone who is not you--I'll bet you'd find a more sympathetic audience!
Personally, I was impressed to see a PETA rep writing about something that is only tangentially related to their mission (as I understand it anyway--I guess humans are animals and this impacts on billions of humans).
And of course, even if some of the prescriptions are wrong, surely we can all support (if we seriously care about this issue) creating a cabinet-level position to address it. The new Secretary of Global Poverty (or whatever) would be able to pull together the best minds and figure out precisely how to deal with the myriad issues of global poverty.
Maybe you'd be an advisor, Brad!
Unfortunately the "best minds" are those who are starving to deathA staring African does not need one more western solution piled on top of all the other problems of daily survival.
There have been few systematic studies of poverty and famine. One of the best by Seaman, Holt and Rivers in Ethiopia is 1973 allowed for the establishment of a low cost monitoring system which forecast drought and famine, allows positioning of relief in the areas of greatest need and is low cost. It saved millions of lives in the 1985/86 Ethipian Famine. This system can be stablished in any African country for the cost of a team of experts who can't make it out of the capital city.
The information that developed this syetm came from Ethipian and Somali villagers who knew the real costs of everything. Very few western experts can tell you the normal versus famine costs of a camel in a regional market. Every self-respecting Somali can. The cost of this camel, by the way, is a leading indicator in predicting drought and famine.
We need less committees, fewer experts, fewer academics (the worst of all)and more real people. And these people, by the way, do not care about the price of steak or shrimp in the capital city or in western countries. They have a different reality to deal with.