permaculture

[Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network <lakinroe@silcom.com>]

Africa: Global Hot Spots of Hunger Set to Explode
http://allafrica.com/stories/200804150015.html?page=2
Inter Press Service (Johannesburg)

14 April 2008
Posted to the web 15 April 2008

Thalif Deen

As food prices continue to escalate worldwide, some of the poorest 
nations in the developing world are in danger of social and political 
upheavals.

The unrest, which is likely to spread to nearly 40 countries, has 
been triggered largely by a sharp increase in the prices of staple 
commodities, including wheat, rice, sorghum, maize and soybeans, 
according to the United Nations.


Following last week's food riots in Haiti, which claimed the lives of 
four people, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has appealed to 
international donors for urgent assistance to one of the poorest 
countries in the Caribbean.

A meeting of the world's finance ministers in Washington over the 
weekend warned that rising food prices were more of a threat to 
political and social stability than the current crisis in global 
capital markets.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has singled out six 
countries with an "exceptional shortfall in aggregate food production 
and supplies": Lesotho, Somalia, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Iraq and Moldova.

An additional six countries with "widespread lack of access" to food 
include Eritrea, Liberia, Mauritania, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and 
North Korea.

The steep rise in basic foodstuffs has already sparked demonstrations 
and/or riots in Egypt, Cameroon, Haiti and Burkina Faso, while an 
increase in both fuel and food prices has triggered unrest in 
Indonesia, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Mozambique and Senegal.

The FAO has also warned of impending political and social unrest, 
specifically in countries where 50 to 60 percent of a family's income 
is spent on food.

"If the basic food requirements of vast numbers of the poor remain 
beyond them, with a broad range of consequences to their well-being, 
they will probably have no alternative than to make themselves 
'heard' by taking to the streets," says Ernest Corea, until recently 
a senior consultant with the Consultative Group on International 
Agricultural Research (CGIAR) at the World Bank.

This has happened in history, and food riots of varying intensity 
have already taken place in several countries, he told IPS.

It was the U.S. civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. who said 
that "violence is the voice of the unheard", said Corea, co-author of 
"Revolutionising the Evolution of the CGIAR".

Anuradha Mittal, executive director of the San Francisco-based 
Oakland Institute, which has done exhaustive studies on issues 
relating to food trade and agriculture, told IPS that various causes 
for the current crisis are being cited in policy circles, including 
increased demand from China, India and other emerging economies.

The high per capita income growth of some of these countries has 
resulted in changing appetites.

Additionally, she noted, the price increases are also attributed to 
rising fuel and fertiliser costs, climate change, and the new 
emphasis on converting crops to biofuels, which are being held 
responsible for almost half the increase in the consumption of major 
food crops in 2006-07.

"What is not being mentioned is that in the last few decades 
liberalisation of agriculture, dismantling of state-run institutions 
like marketing boards, and specialisation of developing countries in 
exportable cash crops such as coffee, cocoa, cotton, and even flowers 
has been encouraged by international financial institutions backed by 
rich countries like the United States, and also by the European 
Union," she pointed out.

Mittal said these reforms have driven the poorest countries into a 
downward spiral. "Removal of tariff barriers has allowed a handful of 
Northern countries to capture Third World markets by dumping heavily 
subsidised commodities while undermining local food production," she said.

This has resulted in developing countries turning from net exporters 
to large importers of food, with a food trade surplus of about 1.0 
billion dollars in the 1970s transforming into an 11-billion-dollar 
deficit in 2001.

She also said the situation has been worsened by the dismantling of 
marketing boards that kept commodities in a rolling stock to be 
released in event of a bad harvest, thus protecting both producers 
and consumers against sharp rises or drops in prices.

Corea blamed the crisis on inadequate investment in agriculture and 
the sharp decline in official development assistance (ODA) for 
agricultural development over several years.

Additionally, he said, there were also natural disasters and 
human-made impediments to agricultural development, which is the 
basis of food security. He pointed out that 21 of the 37 countries 
listed by FAO as "food crisis" countries requiring assistance have 
suffered from floods, droughts, and other adverse weather conditions.

And 20 of them are the scene of continuing, current or recent 
internal conflicts, civil strife, and large scale internal 
displacement of people.

Moreover, he said, there has been an increased demand for food as a 
result of both increased population and increased income.


Additionally, as incomes increase, the pattern of food consumption 
usually changes. For example, higher income earners tend to consume 
more meats than the poor. One consequence of this trend, he argued, 
is that some food stocks are diverted for processing as animal feed.

He also blamed rising food prices on subsidies to U.S. farmers for 
growing crops for energy, in response to the high price of oil and 
by-products. In 2008, a third of the country's maize output will be 
used in the production of ethanol and not for food production. Rising 
fuel prices have also increased the price of some agricultural inputs 
like fertiliser, and transport.

The diversion from food to fuel has already been described by some 
developing nations as "a crime against humanity".

Corea said there is also a lack of major agricultural research 
breakthroughs at the level of Nobel Laureate Norman Borlaug's 
research triumphs that led to massive increases of cereal production 
in Asia and Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s.

Also, there has been inadequate attention to the so-called "orphan" 
crops -- such as millets, indigenous vegetables, local roots and 
tubers -- which are not commercially as important as rice, wheat and 
maize/corn but are essential items in the diet of the poor in 26 of 
the 37 "food crisis" countries.

Asked if she expects the crisis to escalate, Mittal told IPS: "The 
situation will get worse if the diagnosis of the problem continues to 
ignore the underlying causes of this crisis and fails to ask what 
made developing countries vulnerable in the first place.'

Asked how best the food crisis can be resolved, Mittal identified 
several measures, both nationally and internationally.

Firstly, it is essential to have safety nets and public distribution 
systems put in place to prevent widespread hunger.

The poorest countries lacking resources should call for and be 
provided emergency aid to set up such systems.

And donor countries should commit and provide more aid immediately to 
support government efforts in poor countries and respond to appeals 
from the U.N. agencies, she added.

Additionally, development policies should promote consumption and 
production of local crops raised by small, sustainable farms rather 
than encouraging poor nations to specialise in cash crops for western markets.

National policies involving the management of stocks and pricing, 
which limit the volatility of food prices, are vital for protection 
against such food crisis.

Lastly, she said, there is a need to adopt the principle of food 
sovereignty by developing countries to protect their poorest farmers 
and consumers.