The Year of Global Food Crisis Hits Home

Last weekend I discovered that Costco members have begun hoarding bags of rice. The entire rice section of the warehouse was stripped bare. There’s no reason why Americans need to act like this except out of fear and greed. Costco has placed a limit on the amount of rice people can buy, but their family and friends can double, triple, quadruple the amount purchased. This is just the beginning, folks.

While we drink our lattes and eat our muffins on the run, people are literally starving to death all over the planet. While the media bombards us with the phrase “financial crisis” and faced by the growing blight of abandoned homes from mortgage default, the poor everywhere face a life and death struggle in the dire and growing crisis of mass starvation and disease. We get trickles of this news in gaps between the wearisome campaign bloodfight and the incessant roar of the bank and airline consolidation, and whatever else concerns Wall Street. Even U.S.-backed genocide in Iraq, Palestine, Rowanda, Darfur and other places have been relegated somewhere on A16 in the Sunday paper.

What we aren’t getting is that this looming global food crisis has already begun to hit home. We’ve already begun to see critical shortages at food banks in Amarillo, Texas, southern Minnesota, New York City, Los Angeles, California, eastern Texas, and Manchester, New Hampshire, among a growing number of other cities.

What all of this amounts to is a world-wide depression on steroids. Forget the docile bread line imagery recalled in the last depression at the close of the second decade of the last century. Already there are food riots in more than a dozen countries. I don’t care how educated you are or where you live. When you are starving, nothing else matters except food. Most Americans are clueless about starvation. We’re too busy going to concerts, sunbathing, watching movies, and partaking in a million other distractions after a hard week’s work.

America is still the world’s largest food donor in the world. But American food aid is expected to drop from 2.6 million tons last year to about 2.2 million this year. That means that people are going to starve to death.

Germany’s Der Speigel reports the insufferably grim conditions in Haiti and elsewhere and outlines some of the root causes of the crisis. The graphic above illustrates which countries so far have banned exports (the red dots) and which countries have begun rioting for food (the clenched fists).

Around the world, rising food prices have made basic staples like rice and corn unaffordable for many people, pushing the poor to the barricades because they can no longer get enough to eat. But the worst is yet to come.

Fort Dimanche, a former prison in the hills above the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, is a hell on earth. In the past, it was home to the torture chambers of former dictator “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s death squads, the Tontons Macoutes. Today thousands of impoverished Haitians live in the prison’s grounds, digging through piles of garbage for food. But even dogs find little to eat there.

On the roof of the former prison, enterprising women prepare something that looks like biscuits and is even called by that name. The key ingredient, yellow clay, is trucked in from the nearby mountains. The clay is combined with salt and vegetable fat to make dough, which is then dried in the sun.

For many Haitians, the mud biscuits are their only food. They taste of fat, suck the moisture out of the mouth and leave behind an aftertaste of dirt. They often cause diarrhea, but they help to numb the pangs of hunger. “I’m hoping one day I’ll have enough food to eat, so I can stop eating these,” Marie Noël, who survives with her seven children on the dirt cakes, told the Associated Press.

The clay to make 100 of the biscuits costs $5 (€3.15) and has risen by $1.50 (€0.95), or about 40 percent, within one year. The same is true of staple foods. Nevertheless, the same amount of money buys more of the mud cakes than bread or corn tortillas. A daily bowl of rice is almost unaffordable.

The shortages triggered revolts in Haiti last week. A crowd of hungry citizens marched through Port-au-Prince, throwing stones and bottles and chanting, “We are hungry!” in front of the presidential palace. Tires were burned, and people died. It was yet another of the rebellions that are beginning to occur with increasing frequency worldwide, but which are still only a harbinger of what is yet to come.

Food is become increasingly scarce and expensive, and it is already unaffordable for many people. The world’s 200 wealthiest people have as much money as about 40 percent of the global population, and yet 850 million people have to go to bed hungry every night. This calamity is “one of the worst violations of human dignity,” says former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Read the rest>>>

And this, “2008: The Year of Global Food Crisis” from Scotland’s Sunday Herald:

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. Read the rest>>

I wanted to know the causes behind this crisis, and this is the toxic cocktail that I found:

• The increase in the price of oil due to the accelerated depletion of natural energy sources
• The diversion of agricultural resources from food to energy production
• Global trade regulations that favor Western nations by relegating developing countries to the periphery of the global market (the globalised free trade model).
• The double-edged sword of the Green Revolution
• The world population is growing constantly, while the amount of arable land is declining.
• Climate change is causing a loss of agricultural land, irreversible in some cases, as a result of droughts, floods, storms and erosion.
• Because of changing eating habits, more and more arable land and virgin forests are being turned into pasture for livestock. The yield per acre in calories of land given over to pasture is substantially lower than that of arable land.
• The World Bank wants developing countries to introduce market reforms, including the abolition of protective tariffs, a move that often causes massive damage to local agriculture.
• Speculators are driving up the prices of raw materials. The resulting high oil price leads to “energy crops” being cultivated instead of grain for food or animal feed.
• Millions of people displaced by civil wars need food, and yet they themselves are no longer capable of producing food.

What will turn this unprecedented situation around? Not the stupid, stupid politicians and their lackluster or do-nothing policies. Not big business which is only interested in turning profits. Not Joe Blow who’s too wrapped up in Nascar and ball games. Who, then?

Like everything else in this era of globalization and ruthless labor cuts while the top 1/10 of 1 percent pops champagne corks, I want to know what it is that will tip the balance, what will drive pampered and lulled consumers in industrialized nations over the edge of tolerance and complacency and into the necessary zone of anger rather than cling to business as usual. My guess is that first meal missed because food costs too damn much.

The old model of “me me me, forever me” is dying; it just doesn’t work any more.

Ronin of the Spirit offers an excellent analysis.

Can organic farming solve this crisis? Some, like Per Pinstrup-Andersen, a Cornell professor of food, say no. Others, like the UK’s Institute of Science in Society say yes.