The world food crisis: a 'silent tsunami'?

World Food Day (16 October) has come and gone, completely overshadowed by the global financial crisis. Banks crashing are a priority over escalating food prices and hunger. Only the banks got the 700 billion cash injection to get bailed out; the World Food Programme is still appealing for an extra 700 million to feed the poor and starving. This does not include all those 'normally' underweight children and malnourished anaemic young women. Both cash and food crises are blamed on the poor: there are too many of them, and they can't pay their debts.

The compelling metaphor to describe the global food crisis is as a 'silent tsunami'.(1) This suggests it's a sudden-onset disaster with an indiscriminate impact on all of us, an act of unpredictable and hostile nature that turns into a catastrophe which outstrips our ability to cope and deal with it. If it's a tsunami, a natural hazard, we cannot hold anybody or anything responsible for the crisis and the attention is diverted from discernable decisions and actions taken by real people with identifiable interests. Calling the food crisis a silent tsunami allows us to blame seemingly angry god like forces that punish the world with tidal waves, and the response can be an appeal to some higher order, rather than a confrontation of human failure and action to address the root causes of hunger. While humanitarian emergency food aid bestowed on victims will be necessary in the short term it is clearly not a long-term solution to a food crisis that is not just about rising prices.

The World Bank has warned of political destabilisation, and the World Food Programme is concerned about 'civil strife.' Indeed, people are angry and organising, and the suggestion that this crisis is 'silent' (or sudden) covers up the fact that for the last decade farmers have protested vigorously about the take-overs from agribusinesses that threaten their livelihoods and turn them from stewards of the land into servants. There has been nothing silent about environmentalists' and farmers' vigorous protests against the 'green revolution' with its dwindling of crop-biodiversity, against corporate agriculture based on GM technologies that prevent farmers from saving seeds for future years, against the partnership of Monsanto and Cargill as they began to control seed, fertiliser, pesticides, farm finance, grain collection, grain processing and livestock production. This year alone, poor people and increasingly the middle-classes in many parts of the world have been vociferous as the food riots in Haiti, the protests over food price hikes in Egypt, the strike of bread manufacturers in Sierra Leone have shown. While they may experience the crisis as a disaster they know there is nothing 'natural' about it, and their actions address the perceived culprits behind the misery: agribusinesses, neoliberal policies enforced by governments, and commodity markets.

CROPS FOR CARS AND CATTLE, NOT PEOPLE

And what of those who can afford to grudgingly pay increased prices? Explanations given about recurrent droughts, wars, floods and ensuing food shortages, and the argument that there are simply too many people, seem plausible. The old myths around competition for scarce resources are still peddled and accepted: it's overpopulation and underproduction and hence new technologies and investment into infrastructures are a good idea! Yet in 2007 grain harvests outstripped all previous records and there was at least one and a half times more food available than there was demand for it, and the rate of population growth has actually dropped. (My cynical self mutters about how the surplus of grain in some parts of the world will come in handy and generate a neat profit for corporate farmers when there is a need for food aid elsewhere).

A look at consumption gives a much clearer picture of the truth: some 80% of the world's production is consumed by the wealthiest 20% of the world. In contrast with under-nutrition in the Global South there is obesity: in the USA alone 60% of the population is overweight. When those 20% consumers fill up their sports utility vehicles with bio-fuel it's useful to remember that just to produce 100 litres of ethanol requires more than 240 kilograms of corn, enough to feed a person for a year. Not to mention the large tracts of land used to grow cattle feed so the 20% (and the new rising middle-classes with their appetites for meat) can eat their juicy steaks, and forgetting the land exploited for sugarcane and tobacco so the wealthy few can enjoy their treats. 91% of the planet's 1.5 billion hectares of agricultural land are increasingly being devoted to agro-export crops, biofuels and transgenic soybean to feed cars and cattle.(2)

According to a confidential World Bank report, bio-fuels have forced global food prices up by 75% – far more than previously estimated. This is what metaphors of 'silent tsunamis' hide.
Understanding the food crisis demands a look at issues of unequal distribution, of land-use, of greed, gluttony and deprivation of the basic right to life. Food is not just a commodity to purchase – it is an attitude to each other, the environment, and to our world.

* Astrid von Kotze is the author of Living with Drought: Drought Mitigation for Sustainable Livelihoods (1999).
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

References:
(1) Originally attributed to World Food programme's executive director Josette Sheeran
(2) www.FoodFirst.org