25 March 2008
The Coming Food Catastrophe
By Gwynne Dyer
"This is the new face of hunger," said Josetta Sheeran, director of
the World Food Programme, launching an appeal for an extra $500 million so
it could continue supplying food aid to 73 million hungry people this year.
"People are simply being priced out of food markets....We have never before
had a situation where aggressive rises in food prices keep pricing our
operations out of our reach."
The WFP decided on a public appeal three weeks ago because the
price of the food it buys to feed some of the world's poorest people had
risen by 55 percent since last June. By the time it actually launched the
appeal this week, prices had risen a further 20 percent, so now it needs
$700 million to bridge the gap between last year's budget and this year's
prices.
In Thailand, farmers are sleeping in their fields after reports
that thieves are stealing the rice, now worth $600 a tonne, straight out of
the fields. Four people have died in Egypt in clashes over subsidised flour
that was being sold for profit on the black market. There have been food
riots in Morocco, Senegal and Cameroon.
Last year it became clear that the era of cheap food was over: food
costs world-wide rose by 23 percent between 2006 and 2007. This year, what
is becoming clear is the impact of this change on ordinary people's lives.
For consumers in Japan, France or the United States, the relentless
price rises for food are an unwelcome extra pressure on an already
stretched household budget. For less fortunate people in other places, they
can mean less protein in the diet, or choosing between feeding the kids
breakfast and paying their school fees, or even, in the poorest
communities, starvation. And the crisis is only getting started.
It is the perfect storm: everything is going wrong at once. To
begin with, the world's population has continued to grow while its food
production has not. For the fifty years between 1945 and 1995, as the
world's population more than doubled, grain production kept pace -- but
then it stalled. In six of the past seven years, the human race has
consumed more grain than it grew. World grain reserves last year were only
57 days, down from 180 days a decade ago.
To make matters worse, demand for food is growing faster than
population. As incomes rise in China, India and other countries with
fast-growing economies, consumers include more and more meat in their diet:
the average Chinese citizen now eats 50 kilos (110 lbs) of meat a year, up
from 20 kilos (44 lbs) in the mid-1980s. Producing meat consumes enormous
quantities of grain.
Then there is global warming, which is probably already cutting
into food production. Many people in Australia, formerly the world's
second-largest wheat exporter, suspect that climate change is the real
reason for the prolonged drought that is destroying the country's ability
to export food.
But the worst damage is being done by the rage for "bio-fuels" that
supposedly reduce carbon dioxide emissions and fight climate change. (But
they don't, really -- at least, not in their present form.) Thirty percent
of this year's US grain harvest will go straight to an ethanol distillery,
and the European Union is aiming to provide 10 percent of the fuel used for
transport from bio-fuels by 2010. A huge amount of the world's farmland is
being diverted to feed cars, not people.
Worse yet, rainforest is being cleared, especially in Brazil and
Indonesia, to grow more bio-fuels. A recent study in the US journal
"Science" calculated that destroying natural ecosystems to grow corn
(maize, mealies) or sugar cane for ethanol, or oil palms or soybeans for
bio-diesel, releases between 17 and 420 times more carbon dioxide than is
saved annually by burning the bio-fuel grown on that land instead of fossil
fuel. It's all justified in the name of fighting climate change, but the
numbers just don't add up.
"It would obviously be insane if we had a policy to try and reduce
greenhouse gas emissions through the use of bio-fuels that's actually
leading to an increase in greenhouse gases," said Professor Robert Watson,
former chief scientific adviser to the World Bank and now filling the same
role at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in London.
But that is the policy, both in Europe and in the United States.
This is the one element in the "perfect storm" that is completely
under human control. Governments can simply stop creating artificial demand
for the current generation of bio-fuels (and often directly subsidising
them). That land goes back to growing food instead, and prices fall.
Climate change is a real threat, but we don't have to have this crisis now.
"If...more and more land (is) diverted for industrial bio-fuels to
keep cars running, we have two years before a food catastrophe breaks out
world-wide," said Vandana Shiva, director of the India-based Research
Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy, in an
interview last week. "It'll be twenty years before climate catastrophe
breaks out, but the false solutions to climate change are creating
catastrophes that will be much more rapid than the climate change itself."
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 10 and 11. ("Worse...States")
Gwynne Dyer's new book, "After Iraq", has just been published in
London by Yale University Press.
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