food crisis

Is The End Near?

scleaver — Tue, 13 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400

To put it lightly: the food system is out of whack. So much so that we're conjuring up Thomas Malthus, a British economist not known for optimism. At the turn of the 19th Century, he predicted that a growing human population would be kept in check by food supplies, and predicted experiences like a “long night of hunger and drudgery.” For decades, even centuries, we thought we’d escaped Malthus’s ideas, with a seemingly endless increase in food, grain, meat, and convenience products (soup that fits in a car cupholder comes to mind) and it was all cheap too! (Take that Malthus.) But, as Bee Wilson writes in The New Yorker (“The Last Bite,” May 19, 2008), that "hunger and drudgery" that Malthus predicted is now upon us. That includes:

1. Thirty-three countries in food crisis,

2. Rapid increase in the cost of food staples (rice, corn),

3. 100 million people on the brink of poverty because of food prices, and

4. Hunger riots (Haiti), ration cards (Pakistan), and armies baking bread for the general population (Egypt), to name a few.

Recently, Paul Roberts published The End of Food, part of a “second wave of food-politics books,” writes Wilson. The first wave, Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, wasn’t as apocalyptic as the current tidal surge that includes In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan, Bottom Feeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood by Taras Grescoe, and Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System by Raj Patel.

The one thing that all these food writers agree on: the Western food system must change and, I think, better to change now than be forced to change in a few years. Roberts predicts that in the next four decades demand for food will exceed supply, and we're not dealing with a basic supply and demand graph—demand is increasing when our population is staying the same. So it’s not how many people we’re feeding (as Malthus predicted would be the cause of our demise) but what we’re eating. The richer we are, the more we eat (see rising rates of obesity), and the more we eat of the wrong thing, mainly inefficient meat products (it takes four pounds of grain to produce one pound of meat).

Bottom line: we’ve created a food market that’s out of whack from what you learn in economics 101. As Wilson writes, “Our current food predicament resembles a Malthusian scenario—misery and famine—but one largely created by overproduction rather than underproduction. Our ability to produce way too many calories for our basic needs has skewed the concept of demand and generated a wildly dysfunctional market.”

Wilson continues on to break down this market of bottomless stomachs and the enemy of cheap food with typical New Yorker thoroughness (read the full article HERE) and I can warn you that it’s not pretty, but what’s the solution?

Well, Wilson doesn't provide many. There's Pollan’s solution: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” something most of us could do to get behind. Or, as a country, we could stop using synthetic fertilizers and pesticides by using crop rotations and mixed-livestock farming, and split our huge industrial farms into smaller cooperatives. The only downside is that the best example of this (it’s already been done) is Cuba, so its unlikely that many countries will follow their lead.

Fine, so Wilson doesn’t give easy fixes, but he does provide a lot to think about, especially next time you’re in the grocery store and deciding what to cook for dinner (farmed salmon vs. industrially grown beef vs. a nice big salad with fresh veggies). Because, it seems, we're speeding into a food apocalypse, where everyone is susceptible, there are few "healthy" options left (thank you industrial farming), and every food choice we make has huge ramifications. Thank goodness its farmer's market season.

Book cover from Amazon.com

Solving The Food Crisis

scleaver — Mon, 12 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Food riots, protests, and rising food prices across the globe are now common news fare. But, even as food prices force Americans to eat more peanut butter or eat out less, there are larger discussions at stake, like: how do we farm and is that contributing to food unrest?

The Associated Press ran an article on just that subject over the weekend (David Koop’s “Behind the Food Riots: A Debate On How Best to Farm”). Governments, writes Koop, are applying “Band-Aid” solutions left and right—sending in troops, raising wages, banning exports, suspending trading, promising food aid—when what we should be doing is figuring out how to change how the world gets its food so that we’re not re-bandaging the food industry in the future. “However,” writes Koop, world leaders are “deeply divided about which way to go.”

1. Invest in small farmers, not in “letting them sink in a free-trade world.” The U.N. would “level the playing field” by cutting subsidies to agri-business, reducing tariffs, and upping investment in small-farms, one at a time. "This could be a window of opportunity for governments to relaunch the small-farming sector and traditional farming," Fernando Soto, the policy chief for Latin America and the Caribbean with the [Food and Agriculture Organization’s], told the AP.

2. Increase free-trade policies like NAFTA so that the current farm subsidies don’t increase and make everything worse.

Whether you’re for free-trade or against it, small farmers seem to get the brunt of this—they’re growing food, but can’t afford foreign food imports, and eventually leave farming as a result. In Mexico, since NAFTA, 200,000 Mexicans leave the country each year for cities or the U.S.

3. Get used to it: biofuels, oil prices, huge developing countries will keep demand and prices for food high.

4. Innovate: After the last 1970s food increase, the “green revolution” reduced costs. “If we don’t mess this up,” Tyler Cowen, professor of economics at George Mason University told the AP, “we can expect the same today.”

In the meantime, “the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates 820 million people go hungry in the developing world, and … the crisis could force as many as 100 million people deeper into poverty,” according to the AP. The world has 420 million farms that are smaller than five acres, out of 525 million farms total. So, what should we do with those small farms and the farmers who work them, and how?

Photo from a World Bank article about Food Prices in Africa.

See The Silent Tsunami

scleaver — Thu, 01 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400

The food crisis hit hard this month. The price of wheat and rice has doubled; corn is up by one-third, in some areas, according to the U.N. In some areas, the price of food has increased by 80 percent. People have died in riots in Egypt and Haiti. And it’s all predicted to get worse.

To show us what this really looks like, Newsweek Magazine posted a slide show with photos from a protest in India, a devastating harvest in Zimbabwe, and images of all the ways people are searching to meet their basic need for food or are fighting back against a global food market that isn’t working for them. View the slideshow HERE.

Then, learn why your milk prices are increasing by watching “The Crunch: Got Milk?” video at the Newsweek Magazine Home Page.

Photo from the World Food Programme.

Global Food Crisis Reaches Code Red

scleaver — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 01:00:00 -0400

The world’s food crisis has become an emergency, and a crisis that we’ll likely face for a while. The International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development released a United Nations-sponsored report this week that presents a disturbing promise: the world will continue along the path of social unrest and environmental disaster unless and until we reform our food system.

Poor countries have staggering numbers of hungry citizens, 850 million people are hungry or malnourished, and each year four million more are added to that roster. If we continue our current production and distribution practices, according to the report, we will “exhaust our resources and put our children’s future in jeopardy.” This is a global issue: “the increasingly globalised food market and ever-increasing food imports mean that no country can assume itself to be immune.”

The report advises that farmers focus on producing food for local markets and reduce dependence on fossil fuels, rather than focus on trade, which can have long-term negative effects on alleviating poverty and food security. Right now, the UN needs more money to address the current crisis—the UN food program received $14 million after asking for $500 million to deal with higher food prices.

Read an article about the report from the Gulf Daily News HERE.

Learn more about the UN World Food Program and donate HERE. (Photo taken from the WFP website’s Fill the Cup donation page: http://www.wfp.org/english/.)

Take it to your community with 40 ways that individuals, local governments, and others (grocery stores, colleges) can help address the food shortage in their areas by growing and eating local at the 100-Mile Diet’s How to Change the Food System.