POLITICS OF THE GLOBAL FOOD CRISIS

The world, particularly Africa, is witnessing the eternal truism in the saying: “A hungry man is an angry man” as high food prices have caused anti-government demonstrations and protests in Tunisia, Algeria, Sudan, Egypt, Jordan, Yemen and other countries. The political turmoil in these countries underscores the inextricable nexus between food and politics.

Historians recorded that the French Revolution was partly incarnated because the people were hungry and desired bread which was unavailable. When the masses were rioting in the streets, the queen, alienated from the realities of the time, said they should be given cakes which abound in the palace for the consumption of the royals. In biblical times, it was food shortage and famine that shaped the politics of Ancient Israel in Egypt as Joseph's father and brothers came to settle there.

You can deny a person his freedom and get away with it. But when you oppress people with hunger, then they would say "come what may" and rebel. Hunger is a basic human need and no one can escape its call, except Franz Kafka's “hunger artist.”

It has been established that about 1.1 billion people were living on less than a dollar per day and over 923 million people were under-nourished before the food, fuel and financial crises hit the world.

The global food price hikes caused crisis in food supply in 2007, and this crisis has worsened since the 2008 fuel price increases and the credit crunch. With food accounting for a large and volatile share of shoe-string family budgets in the developing countries, rising food prices are posing a threat to global economic growth and stability.

In response to the food crisis, the World Bank established the Global Food Response Programme (GFRP) in May 2008 to provide immediate relief to countries much buffeted by the food price hikes. The GFRP was allocated a budget of $1.1 billion to alleviate hunger and poverty in affected countries in the so-called Third world.

The World Bank was assisted by the United Nations' High-Level Task Force on food security. To augment its support system, the World Bank is assisting in the implementation of the joint Comprehensive Framework for Action. In April, 2009, the World Bank increased the GFRP budget to $2 billion to help countries hard hit by the food crisis.

In June, 2010, the World Bank gave Bangladesh, Haiti, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Togo about $224 million to combat hunger and poverty. Last November, the Bank offered Ethiopia, Mongolia and Niger a total $97 million to improve agricultural production and solve food security problems.

Since mid-June, 2010, global grain prices have been sky-rocketing, with a 56 per cent rise in world wheat prices. By last December, the World Bank food price index rose by 17 per cent between August and November, 2010. According to an Associated Press report, the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) has stated that world food prices rose to a record high in January, 2011. “These high prices are likely to persist in the months to come,” predicts FAO economist Abdolreza Abbassian.

What is to be done to reverse the aggravation of the rising price trend? Instead of holding the bull by the horn, World Bank chief Robert Zoellick, in an op-ed in the Financial Times of January 5, 2011, believes free markets can feed the world. It is archaic neo-liberal thinking like this that is not helping to solve the global food crisis despite the billions of dollars that the World Bank has invested in helping hunger-ridden and poverty-laden countries through its GFRP.

Instead of digging the roots of the world food crisis, the World Bank offers what can best be termed as a placebo to tame the hunger of millions of souls. Campaign groups like Fairtrade, Oxfam and Save the Children's Fund have long argued that one of the root-causes of the current food crisis is the unfair prices that the developed countries pay for the primary products from impoverished developing countries. But has the imbalance in world commodity trade changed for the better? Can the lobe-sided and uneven international trade system help solve the food crisis?

Apart from low prices for exports from developing countries, increasing high fertilizer prices, depleting fertility of soils, destructive and outmoded agricultural practices like bush burning and shifting cultivation, dependence on peasant agriculture, rural-urban migration, use of food-crop lands for production of bio-fuels, the negative effects of structural adjustment programmes on agriculture, concentration on the production of export crops, use of food-crops to produce bio-fuels, climate change-induced drought, desertification and unattractiveness of agriculture to the youth are among the myriad of the causes of food scarcity and insecurity in developing countries.

These causal factors must be tackled head on and the World Bank needs to do a lot to lift up the poor developing world from the abyss of hunger and famine. The World Bank cannot afford to keep ignoring the shrill, hunger-filled cries of millions of children, women, the aged and other vulnerable people across the global South. Mr. Zoellick, free market forces alone cannot feed the world's hungry. Remember what Mahatma Gandhi said: “The world has enough for everyone's need but not enough for everyone's greed.”

by Ayuureyisiya Kapini Atafori, Media Practitioner/Consultant