Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

livingontheland - [Livingontheland] The fight for the world's food

livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] The fight for the world's food
  • Date: Sat, 30 Jun 2007 22:52:54 -0600


http://www.independent.co.uk/incoming/article2697804.ece
The Independent (UK)
June 23, 2007

The fight for the world's food

Population is growing. Supply is falling. Prices are
rising. What will be the cost to the planet's poorest?

By Daniel Howden

Most people in Britain won't have noticed. On the
supermarket shelves the signs are still subtle. But the
onset of a major change will be sitting in front of
many people this morning in their breakfast bowl. The
price of cereals in this country has jumped by 12 per
cent in the past year. And the cost of milk on the
global market has leapt by nearly 60 per cent. In short
we may be reaching the end of cheap food.

For those of us who have grown up in post-war Britain
food prices have gone only one way, and that is down.
Sixty years ago an average British family spent more
than one-third of its income on food. Today, that
figure has dropped to one-tenth. But for the first time
in generations agricultural commodity prices are
surging with what analysts warn will be unpredictable
consequences.

Like any other self-respecting trend this one now has
its own name: agflation. Beneath this harmless-sounding
piece of jargon - the conflation of agriculture and
inflation - lie two main drivers that suggest that
cheap food is about to become a thing of the past.
Agflation, to those that believe that it is really
happening, is an increase in the price of food that
occurs as a result of increased demand from human
consumption and the diversion of crops into usage as an
alternative energy resource.

On the one hand the growing affluence of millions of
people in China and India is creating a surge in demand
for food - the rising populations are not content with
their parents' diet and demand more meat. On the other,
is the use of food crops as a source of energy in place
of oil, the so-called bio-fuels boom.

As these two forces combine they are setting off
warning bells around the world.

Rice prices are climbing worldwide. Butter prices in
Europe have spiked by 40 per cent in the past year.
Wheat futures are trading at their highest level for a
decade. Global soybean prices have risen by a half.
Pork prices in China are up 20 per cent on last year
and the food price index in India was up by 11 per cent
year on year. In Mexico there have been riots in
response to a 60 per cent rise in the cost of
tortillas.

It has even revived discussion of the work of the 18th-
century British thinker Robert Malthus. He predicted
that the growth of the world's population would
outstrip its ability to produce food, leading to mass
starvation.

So far in Britain we have been insulated from the early
effects of these price rises by the competitive nature
of our retail system. But the supermarkets cannot
shield us for long. The European Commission no longer
has reserves to help cushion its citizens. Its
mountains of unsold butter and meat and its lake of
powdered milk have disappeared after reforms to the
Common Agricultural Policy.

Then there is corn. While relatively little corn is
eaten directly it is of pivotal importance to the food
economy as so much of it is consumed indirectly. The
milk, eggs, cheese, butter, chicken, beef, ice cream
and yoghurt in the average fridge is all produced using
corn and the price of every one of these is influenced
by the price of corn. In effect, our fridges are full
of corn.

In the past 12 months the global corn price has
doubled. The constant aim of agriculture is to produce
enough food to carry us over to the next harvest. In
six of the past seven years, we have used more grain
worldwide than we have produced. As a result world
grain reserves - or carryover stocks - have dwindled to
57 days. This is the lowest level of grain reserves in
34 years.

The reason for the price surge is the wholesale
diversion of grain crops into the production of
ethanol. Thirty per cent of next year's grain harvest
in the US will go straight to an ethanol distillery. As
the US supplies more than two-thirds of the world's
grain imports this unprecedented move will affect food
prices everywhere. In Europe farmers are switching en
masse to fuel crops to meet the EU requirement that
bio-fuels account for 20 per cent of the energy mix.

Ethanol is almost universally popular with politicians
as it allows them to tell voters to keep on motoring,
while bio-fuels will fix the problem of harmful
greenhouse gas emissions. But bio-fuels are not a green
panacea, as the influential economist Lester Brown from
the Earth Policy Institute explained in a briefing to
the US Senate last week. He said: "The stage is now set
for direct competition for grain between the 800
million people who own automobiles, and the world's 2
billion poorest people."

Already there are signs that the food economy is
merging with the fuel economy. The ethanol boom has
seen sugar prices track oil prices and now the same is
set to happen with grain, Mr Brown argues. "As the
price of oil climbs so will the price of food," he
says. "If oil jumps from $60 a barrel to $80, you can
bet that your supermarket bills will also go up."

In the developed world this could mean a change of
lifestyle. Elsewhere it could cost lives. Soaring food
prices have already sparked riots in poor countries
that depend on grain imports. More will follow. After
decades of decline in the number of starving people
worldwide the numbers are starting to rise. The UN
lists 34 countries as needing food aid. Since feeding
programmes tend to have fixed budgets, a doubling in
the price of grain halves food aid.

Anger boiled over this week as Jean Ziegler, the UN
special rapporteur on the right to food, accused the US
and EU of "total hypocrisy" for promoting ethanol
production in order to reduce their dependence on
imported oil. He said producing ethanol instead of food
would condemn hundreds of thousands of people to death
from hunger.

Population and starvation

* Robert Thomas Malthus was a political economist who
shot to prominence in late 18th century Britain. His
Essay on the Principle of Population influenced
generations of thinkers with its prediction that the
world's population would outgrow its food supply,
prompting starvation on an epic scale. "The power of
population is so superior to the power of the earth to
produce subsistence for man, that premature death must
in some shape or other visit the human race," he wrote.
"Gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear." But
Malthus predicted disaster to strike in the mid-19th
century.






  • [Livingontheland] The fight for the world's food, TradingPostPaul, 07/01/2007

Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page