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Mutiny Shakes US Food Aid Industry
Ellen Massey, Inter Press Service
WASHINGTON – One of the largest international aid organizations in the world turned the food aid industry on its head recently by declaring that they will turn down 46 million dollars in food subsidies from the U.S. government.The United States budgets 2 billion dollars a year in food aid, which buys U.S. crops to feed populations facing starvation amidst crisis or those that endure chronic hunger.
But the U.S.-based CARE International has forfeited its substantial slice of the food aid pie that is the U.S. “Food for Peace” program, claiming that the way the U.S. government distributes food hurts small poor farmers in the very communities and countries the program is supposed to help.
CARE has been one of the largest suppliers of food aid around the world for the past 50 years so its shift in policy could have a dramatic effect on the food aid industry.
The reasoning behind CARE’s decision is part of a years-long debate that has influenced everything from U.S. trade and domestic legislation to the Doha Round of the World Trade Organization talks.
The objection to the current system is that the donation and sale of U.S.-subsidized crops in developing countries where people regularly go hungry actually weakens local farming. “We are not against emergency food aid for things like drought and famine,” CARE spokeswoman Alina Labrada said last week, but local farmers are “being hurt instead of helped by this mechanism”.
(24 August 2007)
To eat . . . . or to drive?
Leo Lewis,, UK Times
Farmers all over the world are finding a sudden boom in demand for their crops – but as fuel for cars rather than as food
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…The economics of food – what is affordable, what it costs, and what that money buys – are creating unprecedented waves through all continents. From nut plantations in Indonesia to barley fields along the Rhine, farmers are all adjusting to this new world.
Part of the result is tortilla riots in Mexico, the astonishing leap in Brazilian chicken leg prices and mayonnaise price spikes in Western Europe.
These, say industry insiders, are the first skirmishes of a conflict that could soon dominate geopolitics: the war for resources between the world’s 800 million cars and its six billion stomachs. In the developed world, the war will come down to price and choice; in the developing world it could come down to survival.
The war centres largely on global demand for biofuels – “green” replacements for petrol, such as ethanol, that can be produced from sugar, corn and other agricultural products rather than fossil fuels.
Farmers are making a perfectly rational economic choice. With the price of crude oil high, they are planting crops to meet demand for cheaper biofuels. But converting more crops into energy means there is less to go into foodstuffs. And so the price of those foodstuffs rise.
(24 August 2007)
Goodbye beautiful Britain
Richard Girling, UK Times
Enjoy the countryside while you can. In the near future there will be no place for sentiment, no eye for beauty and no room for cows and sheep. Don’t blame the farmers: the culprits are population growth, global warming and the energy gap.
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The landscape of the future will be recognisable only to geologists. The land will rise and fall as it always did, but it will be clad in very different colours.
Gone will be the last vestiges of the quilted patchwork, ripe with the scents of hay and pedigree herds, that postwar farmers inherited from their fathers.
Vast fields of identical crops will fill the gaps between identical suburbs of identical brick-box housing. The part of the aural spectrum normally occupied by insects, birds and animals will be silent or filled with the drone of traffic.
Cows and sheep will be as rare as corncrakes, their former pastures switched to bio-fuel, and the price of food will make us wince. Farmers in the future may have to make a long journey to the bank, but they will be smiling all the way.
Welcome to drive-thru, wipe-clean, prairie Britain.
Already a report from Natural England called Tracking Change in the Character of the English Landscape, has concluded that, judged across a range of criteria – quality of farmland, woodlands, rivers, buildings, “semi-natural habitats” and historic features – nearly 40% of English landscapes are changing for the worse.
This is not so much a nightmare as the final chapter of a story that is already unfolding.
(26 August 2007)
The agonies of agflation
The Economist
SHARING pain is usually deemed a good thing. So advocates of dishing out agony will be gladdened that the wallet-crunching pangs of car drivers filling up with petrol are now equalled by the wince-inducing stabs felt by shoppers piling up their supermarket trolleys. As oil prices stay high, wheat prices hit an all-time peak of over $7.50 a bushel for December delivery at the end of trading in Chicago on Thursday August 23rd.
The soaring prices of bushels and barrels are not unconnected. The cost of agricultural commodities, just like oil and metals, has gone up sharply over the past couple of years. Aside from wheat, the prices of corn, rice and barley have all risen by over a third since 2005. Food prices around the world are rising so quickly that a new term has been coined to describe the ballooning price of breakfast staples and dinner-time favourites: agflation.
The latest spike in wheat prices has come in response to news that Canada’s crop could be reduced by roughly a fifth this year after bad weather hit the world’s second-largest exporter. This sent countries that rely on imported wheat, such as Japan and Taiwan, scampering to the market to secure supplies. Whether climate change is to blame for Canada’s poor summer is unclear but its underlying pressure on prices is in less doubt.
Demand for grain is accelerating not to feed humans or livestock but to fill petrol tanks.
(25 August 2007)
