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The World Food Crisis
Editorial, New York Times
Most Americans take food for granted. Even the poorest fifth of households in the United States spend only 16 percent of their budget on food. In many other countries, it is less of a given. Nigerian families spend 73 percent of their budgets to eat, Vietnamese 65 percent, Indonesians half. They are in trouble.
Last year, the food import bill of developing countries rose by 25 percent as food prices rose to levels not seen in a generation. Corn doubled in price over the last two years. Wheat reached its highest price in 28 years. The increases are already sparking unrest from Haiti to Egypt. Many countries have imposed price controls on food or taxes on agricultural exports.
… The United States and other developed countries need to step up to the plate. The rise in food prices is partly because of uncontrollable forces – including rising energy costs and the growth of the middle class in China and India. This has increased demand for animal protein, which requires large amounts of grain.
But the rich world is exacerbating these effects by supporting the production of biofuels.
… Washington provides a subsidy of 51 cents a gallon to ethanol blenders and slaps a tariff of 54 cents a gallon on imports. In the European Union, most countries exempt biofuels from some gas taxes and slap an average tariff equal to more than 70 cents a gallon of imported ethanol. There are several reasons to put an end to these interventions. At best, corn ethanol delivers only a small reduction in greenhouse gases compared with gasoline. And it could make things far worse if it leads to more farming in forests and grasslands. Rising food prices provide an urgent argument to nix ethanol’s supports.
… Continued growth of the middle class in China and India, the push for renewable fuels and anticipated damage to agricultural production caused by global warming mean that food prices are likely to stay high. Millions of people, mainly in developing countries, could need aid to avoid malnutrition. Rich countries’ energy policies helped create the problem. Now those countries should help solve it.
(10 April 2008)
Starving Haitians riot as food prices soar
Leonard Doyle, The Independent
Demonstrators have tried to storm the presidential palace in the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, as protests over hunger and rising food prices spread across the developing world.
Demanding the resignation of President René Préval, the protesters attempted to break through the palace gates before being driven back by a contingent of Brazilian United Nations peacekeepers who used tear gas and rubber bullets.
The prices of basic foods such as rice, beans, condensed milk and fruit have risen by more than 50 per cent in Haiti, where the poor even rely on biscuits made of mud to get through the day. Even the price of this traditional Haitian remedy for hunger pangs has gone up to more than $5 (£2.50) for 100 biscuits.
There is now a grave danger of a coup being triggered in what is the poorest country in the western hemisphere. Rising costs of commodities and basic foodstuffs have brought immense hardship to the population, 80 per cent of whom survive on less than £1 a day and only a minority has paid full-time jobs.
And it’s not just in Haiti where unrest is growing.
(10 April 2008)
We’ll reap what we sow
Daniel Imhoff, Los Angeles Times
The farm bill is loaded with pork and environmentally disastrous provisions.
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If you’ve ever driven through the southern end of California’s Central Valley in September, you’re familiar with the grids of lint-strewn cotton fields that blur by for nearly 2 1/2 hours. You might even have pondered the wisdom of planting such a thirsty crop as cotton on a million acres — an area larger than Yosemite National Park — in a state facing a water crisis. Then again, you might ask a similar question about the half a million acres of rice, a grain adapted to the monsoons of Asia, on the valley’s northern end.
Cheap irrigation water is part of the equation, but there is another common denominator. It’s a massive federal legislation package passed every five years known as the farm bill, which House and Senate members are scrambling to reauthorize by an April 18 deadline. Over the last decade, the farm bill has allowed the U.S. Department of Agriculture to shower tens of billions of dollars in subsidies on the nation’s cotton and rice farmers (along with corn, soybean, wheat, sugar and milk producers). These subsidies flow whether growers need them or not. They flow even as they damage the environment and our nutritional well-being. They flow, all the while enabling the biggest farms to consolidate into mega-farms.
It wasn’t always this way. The farm bill emerged during the Dust Bowl and Great Depression as a temporary financial safety net for family farmers.
Daniel Imhoff is the author of “Food Fight: The Citizen’s Guide to a Food and Farm Bill.”
(10 April 2008)
As Prices Rise, Farmers Spurn Conservation Program
David Streitfeld, New York Times
Out on the farm, the ducks and pheasants are losing ground.
Thousands of farmers are taking their fields out of the government’s biggest conservation program, which pays them not to cultivate. They are spurning guaranteed annual payments for a chance to cash in on the boom in wheat, soybeans, corn and other crops. Last fall, they took back as many acres as are in Rhode Island and Delaware combined.
Environmental and hunting groups are warning that years of progress could soon be lost, particularly with the native prairie in the Upper Midwest. But a broad coalition of baking, poultry, snack food, ethanol and livestock groups say bigger harvests are a more important priority than habitats for waterfowl and other wildlife. They want the government to ease restrictions on the preserved land, which would encourage many more farmers to think beyond conservation.
Kerry Dockter, a rancher in Denhoff, N.D., has about 450 acres of grassland in the program. “When this program first came about, it was a pretty good thing,” he said. “But times have definitely changed.”
The government payments, Mr. Dockter said, “aren’t even comparable anymore” to what he could make by working the land. He plans to devote some of his conservation acres to growing feed for his cows and some to grazing. He might also lease some land to neighbors.
For years, the problem with cropland was that there was too much of it, which kept food prices low to the benefit of consumers and the detriment of farmers.
Now, because of a growing global middle class as well as federal mandates to turn large amounts of corn into ethanol-based fuel, food prices are beginning to jump. Cropland is suddenly in heavy demand, a situation that is fraying old alliances, inspiring new ones and putting pressure on the Agriculture Department, which is being lobbied directly by all sides without managing to satisfy any of them.
(9 April 2008)
