Massive post alert, Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog, because believe it or not, there is other stuff going on in the world besides tomorrow's much anticipated coronation.
I read all these articles and reports so you don't have to.
Weeks after the food riots spread around the world, a flurry of articles have been published all over the place, taking stock of what is happening, providing analysis and critique as well as prospects on global food production and policy. So let's review.
Who's To Blame for Food Prices?
Speculators
According to the BBC, financial speculation has a lot to do with the soaring food prices:
"It is inevitable that financial investors are going to latch onto any cyclical commodity that's seeing sharp price rises. Property may have bombed, demand for industrial raw materials may be peaking. Yet everyone has to pay more for food, so why not invest in farm products?
Right now, everything seems to be conspiring to push up basic food prices. From drought to poor crops, from high fuel prices to explosive demand, and changing diets in China and the Far East. And most of all, precious farmland being switched to crops for biofuels.
Small wonder that in their quest for investments to beat inflation, even some traditional pension funds are trading in the likes of wheat, soya beans and livestock."
Colonialism and Neocolonialism
However, according to the President of Senegal, Abdoulaye Wade (via Liberation), the current food crisis has a lot to do with the colonial past of Africa. First, Senegal was not as negatively affected by the food crisis because the government acted proactively to subsidize food crops and lower their consumer price. It is not a perfect or long-term solution but it has spared the country the worst of the crisis.
But in the case of Senegal, rice is at the heart of the matter. During the colonial era, the French exported the rice that was produced in Indochina into Senegal and progressively, the diet then switched to rice. To pay for the rice, Senegal then turned to the monoculture of groundnut production for oil. At the independence, this monoculture stopped but the dependency on rice remained, to the tune of 600,000 tons a year. Senegal did try to produce its own rice locally, but because the rice coming in, now from Thailand, is of lower quality, local production ended up being more expensive. But then, things changed.
President Wade decided to diversify its rice imports rather than rely exclusively on Thailand. Senegal now receives a lot of rice from India. So now, Indian experts have come to Senegal to train them to produce their own rice at low cost. What is the benefit for India? According to President Wade, there is no quid pro quo because Senegal has no natural resources that India (or China, for that matter) is interested in. So, for him, it's just developing countries solidarity.
And then, for President Wade, there is a form of neocolonialism at work. He blames the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) for some of the problems. As he states, the FAO spends 80% of its budget on operating costs, paying mostly European experts to implement policies that don't work in developing countries. And the cost of all this is counted as aid to Africa even though the Africans see very little benefit from it. In a sense, as he puts it, aid to Africa is a lucrative business for a lot of people, but not Africans.
So, Senegal will turn to GMOs and corn, which is, of course, in high demand especially in the US. As President Wade says, Senegal is not in charge of world health.
Agricultural Subsidies
Especially from the US, and that's not likely to change anytime soon (via the Guardian):
"Despite pleas from humanitarian groups to focus on the global food crisis, the US Congress today approved a $290bn bill that gives lucrative subsidies to farmers and cuts international aid programmes.
The bill won such broad support that the veto threatened by George Bush is almost certain to be overridden, turning the bill into law. Most of its money goes to food aid for needy Americans and payments that farmers receive whether they grow crops or not.
Less than one per cent of the bill goes to food aid for foreign nations, according to an Associated Press tally.
"Pandering to wealthy farmers and special interests at the expense of women and children who face malnutrition is not what Americans expect of their elected officials," the leaders of Oxfam America, Mercy Corps and the International Medical Corps said in a letter released last week."
Two major international aid provisions were eliminated: one that would have stopped making aid conditional upon developing countries buying their food from US producers, undercutting their own food producers. The second provision initially increased the budget for food programs for schoolchildren in impoverished areas. This provision would have doubled the budget to $200m, not it has been slashed at $40m. Too bad, kids.
And then, it's all $$$$ to Big Corn, Big Sugar, Big Dairy, etc. Bipartisanship at its best.
An Additional Aspect of the Feminization of Poverty
Anyone who reads this blog on a regular basis is being bombarded by the reports on the gendered nature of globalization. Food production is no exception. Via the UN News Center, reporting on an FAO paper written by Andrea Rossi and Yianna Lambrou, Gender Equity Issues in Liquid Biofuels Production.
"Converting agricultural lands for biofuel production could force women out of the lands used for farming, and harm their ability to provide food, the report states. In addition, the increased use of natural resources such as water and firewood for biofuel production means less of those resources will be available for use by women, who already have to travel long distances for collecting such materials. Therefore, FAO calls for further examining the socio-economic effects of liquid biofuel production on men and women. It also urges biofuel development strategy that is both environmentally sustainable and pro-poor, and which will protect the agricultural activities of small farmers, especially women."
Other agencies have also called for specifically pro-poor policies on food production. So, where do we go from here in terms of global food production policies? After all, let me be Durkheimian here: this crisis has shown us where we have a BIG problem. Now that we have identified it, let's go solve it.
The Road Ahead
On April 23rd, World Bank President Robert Zoellick called for a New Deal for Global Food Policy (full text of the op-ed).
"This New Deal should focus not only on hunger and malnutrition, access to food and its supply, but also the interconnections with energy, yields, climate change, investment, the marginalization of women and others, and economic resiliency and growth."
Along with a series of emergency, short-term and long-term measures, Zoellick concludes:
"This New Deal should focus not only on hunger and malnutrition, access to food and its supply, but also the interconnections with energy, yields, climate change, investment, the marginalization of women and others, and economic resiliency and growth."
Fair enough but considering my usual skepticism vis--vis the World Bank, I'd like to know what this all means concretely.
According to the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), in a report backed by the UNESCO (via the UN News Center),
"Modern agricultural practices have exhausted land and water resources, squelched diversity and left poor people vulnerable to high food prices, even though they are also highly productive. (...) The report’s authors recommend that agricultural science place greater emphasis on safeguarding natural resources and on ‘agro-ecological’ practices, including the use of natural fertilizers, traditional seeds and intensified natural practices, and reducing the distance between production and the consumer."
As the report states, business as usual is no longer an option. So, back to the basics then, something that environmentalists and numerous scientists like Vandana Shiva have been clamoring in vain for years as they battled the likes of Monsanto.
What Works - The Case of Malawi
Malawi deserves to receive media coverage for more than Madonna's adoption. It went from starvation to becoming a food exporter. How was that achieved (since there are no such things as miracles). The Independent tells the story:
"A green revolution taking place in the fields of Malawi has, in three years, turned a nation that was once reliant on international aid to feed half its population into a food exporter.
In doing so, it has set an example for other developing countries struggling to feed themselves. But it has done it all against the express wishes of Britain, the United States and the World Bank – its largest donors.
Malawi suffered a catastrophic drought in 2005. The World Food Programme estimated that five million people – out of a population of 12 million – needed food aid and many villages reported people dying of starvation.
A new government, led by Bingu wa Mutharika, believed the problem was straightforward. Farmers were using seeds that were highly susceptible to disease and weevils, and too few were using fertiliser. If farmers could afford high-yield maize seeds and fertiliser, the government argued, they would be able to grow enough food. At a cost of £30m, the government launched a subsidisation scheme. With a state coupon, the price of a bag of fertiliser fell from 6,500 kwacha (£23) to 900, while a 2kg bag of hybrid maize seed dropped from 600 kwacha to 30.
Malawi's donors refused to fund the programme, arguing that subsidising farmers would not bring the desired results. They were wrong. Malawi needs about 2.2 million tonnes of maize a year to feed itself and from a low of 1.2 million tonnes in 2005, national maize production rose to 3.2 million tonnes in 2007, according to the Ministry of Agriculture."
Now, this is not a perfect program but any program implemented without the explicit permission of the Western Overlords is always swiftly criticized and dismissed, but the results are there. As Madeleine Bunting puts it in her Guardian column,
"Malawi's story has helped challenge three decades of priorities driven by free-market fundamentalism. There is a realisation that growth in agricultural productivity is pivotal to the achievement of the millennium development goals for 2015. About 70% of sub-Saharan Africa depends on agriculture, so small increases in productivity have a dramatic impact on health and education. The development agenda takes a long time to shift course, but this year's world development report on agriculture was the closest the World Bank gets to a mea culpa - "Oops, we've left out agriculture.""
Yeah. Who pays for the World Bank's mistakes?
- FrenchDoc's blog
- Login or register to post comments
Front page
Comments
Hey, maybe the Malawi farmers...
.. can move on to ethanol. [rimshot, hollow laughter]
[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] ?????. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.
"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi
FrenchDoc,
Thank you.
Why does the FAO mishandle funds countries could use to be self-sufficient, then go begging for food and resources through its WFP arm?
cg, it's not the FAO per se that's the problem
What matters is that for decades now, the IMF and the World Bank have been burying developing countries under massive loans that they can't repay. As a result, both the IMF and the World Bank impose conditions to these countries. Among the conditions are liberalization of trade, privatization, but also a general economic position of "comparative advantage" (translate: grow / produce what you have that will carry value on the world market). For agriculture, that has meant growing cash crops to be exported to rich countries rather than subsistence agriculture (grow for local consumption).
The problem is then obvious: one year of bad crop + use of land for export production = no food available for the local population or it has to be imported and it's too expensive.
Does that make sense? (I often confuse myself with my own explanations.)
Go Global!
Yes, it does.
I'm just wondering why the FAO starts advocating for people to grow their own food with the money they get for aid, instead of participating in the world ag market.
The FAO can advocate what it wants
but the real power rests with the IMF, the World Bank, and I should have added the World Trade Organization.
The current role of the FAO, especially the World Food Program (a sub-branch of the FAO) is to provide food aid (not $$). Often, it tries to buy food locally so as to stimulate the local markets and producers. But now that food prices are through the roof and the WFP's budget is the same, it cannot provide enough food aid. An aggravating factor in the context of food scarcity... hence the food riots.
Bottom line: the FAO has no real enforcement power.
Go Global!