feeding the world

President Bush in an interactive business session had argued that while prosperity in countries like India is good, it triggers increased demand for better nutrition, which in turn leads to higher food prices.The comments came close on the heels of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's controversial statement that 'apparent improvement' in the diets of people in India and China is among the causes of the current global food crisis.

The Truth

Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75% - far more than previously estimated - according to a confidential World Bank report

The figure emphatically contradicts the US government's claims that plant-derived fuels contribute less than 3% to food-price rises. It will add to pressure on governments in Washington and across Europe, which have turned to plant-derived fuels to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and reduce their dependence on imported oil. Senior development sources believe the report, completed in April, has not been published to avoid embarrassing President George Bush. The report confirms a British finding that t the rush to develop biofuels has played a "significant" role in the dramatic rise in global food prices. And an estimates their impact as 20-30% rise .

"Political leaders seem intent on suppressing and ignoring the strong evidence that biofuels are a major factor in recent food price rises," said Robert Bailey, policy adviser at Oxfam.

Production of biofuels has distorted food markets in three main ways. First, it has diverted grain away from food for fuel, with over a third of US corn now used to produce ethanol and about half of vegetable oils in the EU going towards the production of biodiesel. Second, farmers have been encouraged to set land aside for biofuel production. Third, it has sparked financial speculation in grains, driving prices up higher.

"It is clear that some biofuels have huge impacts on food prices," said Dr David King, the government's former chief scientific adviser.

However , the Indian apologists for capitalism should not feel too smug .

More than 1,300,000 tonnes of food grain rotted in storage stock-piles over the last decade in India according to a recent report .

"This amount of food grain could have fed over 10 million people in a year," said activist Dev Ashish Bhattacharya.

A waste of good food

The Independent on Sunday reported that Britain is throwing away half of all the food produced on farms.

About 20 million tons of food is thrown out each year: equivalent to half of the food import needs for the whole of Africa. Some 16 million tons of this is wasted in homes, shops, restaurants, hotels and food manufacturing. Much of the rest is thought to be destroyed between the farm field and the shop shelf.

Japan pledged more than 300 million yen in food aid for Burundi, in Africa, where malnutrition runs at 44 per cent. The food thrown away in the UK last year would meet the equivalent of Burundi's shortages more than 40 times over.
The United Nation's World Food Programme has admitted it might have to ration food aid in response to rocketing global food prices that have soared by more than 75 per cent since their lows of 2000, jumping by more than a fifth last year alone, prompting riots in some countries.

The chief executive of FareShare, the national food charity, said:

"Unfortunately, we live in a world where many people do not have access to food in general, and good-quality food specifically, while at the same time millions of tons of perfectly fine food are being disposed of. In the UK alone, the extent of food poverty is staggering, as millions of people with low or no income find it harder to access affordable, nutritious food."

Estimates that the world's population will rise by 30 per cent over the next 50 years to around 8.5 billion have raised the spectre of a global food shortage too big for farmers to meet, Lord Haskins , a former government adviser on rural affairs and chairman of Northern Foods , said:

"If consumers ate a bit less and wasted a bit less you'd help to solve the problem. If the world was vegetarian then you'd solve the problem completely."

One-third of wheat grown globally is fed to livestock reared to end up on the dinner table.

More importantly though was the comment from a food policy professor at City University , Tim Lang , who said:

"Waste is a fundamental part of the food economy and it will be hard to get rid of. I do not see how simply appealing to morals will do it."

It is the economics of capitalism that places the need for profit before the needs of people .

The Future is Famine

From IRIN

Global food prices continue to soar to new highs despite a record world harvest last season . Realising the urgency of the situation, the three food agencies of the UN - the FAO, the World Food Programme (WFP) and the International Fund for Agriculture development (IFAD) - are organising a High-Level Conference on World Food Security and the Challenges of Climate Change and Bioenergy from 3 to 5 June 2008 in Rome.

International wheat prices in January 2008 were 83 percent higher than a year earlier.

"Wheat prices are up because it is being used as animal feed instead of maize, stocks of which are running low partly as a result of the increase in demand for making biofuel," said Liliana Balbi, senior economist at the FAO's Commodities and Trade Division .

According to the FAO, climate change and the demand for agricultural commodities for biofuels production required complex trade-offs and economic, social and environmental policy decisions that would have important repercussions on world agricultural production, access to food and the incomes of rural populations.

"We are facing a crisis triggered by several factors: more intense weather events as result of climate change, the global economic crisis, fuel prices and the pressures brought on by biofuel. ..." said Kanayo Nwanze, Vice-President of IFAD.

Food Inflation and Food Shortages

According to Sue Fisher, an economics analyst at the Meat and Livestock Commission world food prices, as measured by the UN's Food and Agricultural Organisation, rose by at least one-third in the first nine months of 2007.

Last season resulted in a fall in production of wheat and maize in the UK, Canada and Australia by as much as 60 million tonnes. World stocks are now at the lowest level for almost 40 years . U.S. wheat stocks in 2008 will hit a 60-year low and world barley stocks a 42-year low. Global oilseed stocks are projected down 22 percent in one year.

In 2007, Chicago Board of Trade prices -- world benchmarks for wheat, corn, rice and soybeans -- soared despite big U.S. harvests. Wheat prices rose 90 percent, soybeans 80 percent, corn 20 percent. U.S. prices are key because America is still the world's breadbasket, the single biggest grain exporter.

"The fact we're having higher commodity prices here will have an impact around the world on food prices," Lapp , president of consultancy Advanced Economic Solutions , said. "We've only started to see the impact of higher costs translate into higher consumer prices,"

"Things are really getting tight now and the importing countries are getting worried and some of them may even be panicking a bit because they need to import grain and are not sure if there will be enough," Lester Brown , president of the Earth Policy Institute and author of the 1995 book, "Who Will Feed China?", said, noting that world grain stocks have fallen in seven of the last eight years. "There is going to be continued upward pressure on prices. One of my concerns is that this will lead to social unrest and growing political instability in the low- and middle-income countries that import a large share of their grain supply."

The Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome on December 17 said 37 countries are facing food crises and called for aid.
"High international cereal prices have already sparked food riots in several countries," the FAO said.

FAO chief Jacques Diouf pointed to political unrest over food markets in countries like Yemen and Senegal."There is a very serious risk that there will be less people able to get access to food because of prices," Diouf said.

The reasons apart from bad weather and the suspected climate change , income growth and population growth in China and India -- they are westernizing their diets . Moving up the food chain to meat has a built-in accelerator for draining grain supplies . Chinese consumers ate an average of 20 kilograms (44 lb) of meat a year in 1985, but this shot up to 50 kg in 2007. This reduces the amount of grain available because one kg of beef can take as much as eight kg of grain to produce.

And then there is the effect of the new darling of farmers, politicians and agribusiness: biofuels.

About 24 percent of a record U.S. corn crop in 2007 will be diverted to ethanol , a percentage that could shoot well past 30 percent within two years after President George W. Bush signed the new U.S. energy bill into law on December 19.

"If we convert our entire grain harvest into fuel for cars, it may satisfy 16 percent of our total automotive fuel needs. So it's not really a solution," Brown said. At a time when more than 800 million people go to bed hungry every night, history will judge the U.S. energy bill as "one of the great tragedies," he added.

So importer and biofuels demand look set to continue to shrink world grain stocks, even without major weather or climate shocks. It all adds up to rising U.S. food price inflation with knock-on effects for the world.

A Very Happy New Year

Famine and Hunger

A while back i came across a BBC inteview that was particularly insightful about the causes of famine so i think i'll post it main points on here .

Scottish Oxfam worker David Crawford :-

" As a member of Oxfam's humanitarian support team, I can be deployed globally at short notice. My job is to provide short-term leadership or support in emergencies or humanitarian situations. From last October, I have been based in West Africa as the senior humanitarian adviser for the Sahel region - Mauritania, Mali and Niger...

...The food crisis was widely perceived in the media to relate to food shortages which then caused widespread hunger and malnutrition...

...Although this played an important role at a local level, it wasn't the main cause as the following example illustrates. During the crisis, Niger was still exporting food and staple cereals were available in the markets. The problem, however, was the poorest and most vulnerable people hadn't produced enough grain to survive and couldn't afford to buy it in the markets.
Once people run out of money they turn to "coping strategies", for instance getting into debt or selling off their assets including their valuable animals...

....For the poorest people who are vulnerable to food crisis, the main problem is access to food, not availability of food - food is usually available but they can't get it..."

The truth is out there about the effects of Capitalism , but it is a pity those involved in combatting food shortages don't recognise Socialism as a viable solution and continue with their palliatives , over and over and over again , without ever learning the lessons of their own experences .