Food crisis: New set of questions surfaces
Saturday, 15 November 2008
Billy Ahmed
In the wake of a food crisis that grasped the media attention during the summer of 2008, a new set of questions is beginning to surface.
As analysts predict, the era of cheap resources is finally over, the food emergency is no blip but a situation that could last indefinitely.
Could it be that the interconnected turning point in food, energy and financial markets suggests beginning of a terminal decline in the export-led, free market development model that has defined the past few decades of globalisation?
Or will the emergency in food provision, as previously happened in 1974, strengthen the same policies supporting large-scale industrial farming that have already devastated rural communities throughout the developing world?
The inability of world leaders to face the root causes or policy contradictions of a food crisis is nothing new.
Throughout the 1980s and 90s, mass protests over a recurring food crisis in developing countries were popularly known as "IMF riots", although the solutions - as today - were handed to the structures that caused those crises.
The Ethiopian famine during the 1980s led not to initiatives that helped sustain poor rural dwellers, but rather dedicating good land to export crops under the instruction of the World Bank, thus further worsen food insecurity and storing up a repeat of the famine situation that is surfacing today.
In Peru in August 1990, following the dictats of the IMF, fuel prices increased 30 times overnight, and bread prices increased 12 times within a day.
In Caracas, 1989, after a 200 per cent increase in the price of bread, anti-IMF riots led to the indiscriminate killing of men, women and children.
Compared to the last major food and fuel crisis of 1973/4, which culminated in similarly vain promises from the FAO's first World Food Conference to end hunger and prevent a repeat happening, the needed lessons after 34 years are far from being recognised.
The main difference today is in parting extremes, or the deepening polarisation between alternative examples, narratives and solutions.
On one side of the court stand the impassioned NGOs and hardened campaigners who have long opposed large-scale agribusiness in place of food sovereignty, bottom-up development, and the empowerment of small farmers through local and regional markets.
The food price crisis, they say, has exposed the disaster of global agricultural production and the convincing failure of a market fundamentalist ideology left unchecked for far too long.
On the other side of the court, supported by Gordon Brown, George W. Bush, Bill Gates' pockets and the most powerful financial institutions in the world, stand the Green Revolutionaries led by chemical technologies and multinational corporations from the E.U and U.S.A.
One path, say almost all the NGOs, will lead to social justice, strengthening local communities and food security for all, while the current path is inherently unsustainable, responsible for continued hunger in a world of plenty, and incapable of ending poverty.
By 2008 it should be a commonplace to state the escalating global food crisis, which some NGO's are pointedly distinguishing as the "food price crisis", is the unavoidable long-term outcome of misguided economic policies and a disastrous free market restructuring of agricultural land.
The official version of history over the past few decades as interpreted by G8 governments, however, could not be more different.
In the World Bank's latest World Development Report 2008 on agriculture, the same model of development that has created a global crisis in food production firstly - import liberalization, elimination of tariffs, a dependency on cash crops, GMO seeds and fertilizers, and all other measures that work in favour of agribusiness and against the millions of small-scale farmers struggling against poverty and hunger - is being promoted as the only solution.
The $1.2 billion of extra loans as part of the World Bank's 'Global Food Crisis Response Facility' will be handed out with the same underlying conditions of further trade liberalisation and market reforms.
Also, the IMF used the crisis to augment its existing arrangements under the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF), attaching the same conditions requiring structural adjustment to the 10 countries, mostly in Africa, already forced to make new agreements
The World Trade Organisation similarly tried to capitalise on the crisis by working to increase its mandate through the Doha Round of trade agreements, alongside a push to persuade developing countries to further liberalise their financial sectors under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS).
Between the expert rhetoric and analysis by international financial institutions on the disastrous extent of the crisis, with even the IMF declaring that some countries are at "tipping point", their offered medicine is still being mixed with the same deep-seated poisons.
This basic contradiction of agreeing to increase agricultural production in developing countries to address the plight of small and poor farmers, while promoting policies that achieve the opposite ends, was set in stone after the UN's emergency food summit held in Rome.
The final declaration made no attempt to address the structural problems and deeper causes of the crisis.
Despite both Ban Ki-moon and Jacques Diouf's impassioned speeches and articles over the period of the Summit, neither of them sought to address the entrenched structural origins of the food crisis.
Most worrying was Ban's simplistic prescriptions for improved market efficiency and a 50 per cent rise in food production by 2030 to meet rising demand, thus playing into the hands of politicians who seek to divert political debate away from the role of agribusinesses in the current food crisis, as well as the corporations who wish to speed up a "Doubly Green Revolution" in agriculture as proposed by Bill Gates and the Rockefeller Foundation.
The unavoidable result, without a critical re-examination of the unsustainable manner in which food is produced and distributed, will be more of the same; more privatization, more corporate monopolization of food systems, more GMO crop initiatives, more displacement of poor farmers, more migration into cities and slums, more hunger, more poverty, more over-consumption and obesity.
And all this without even considering the environmental footprint of producing more food on less available land, or transporting more food through international markets which contradicts the urgent need of reducing CO2 emissions.
The search for technical fixes to produce cheap and plentiful food may have made sense in the 1940s, but 70 years of the "productionist" model has led to the challenge of defining a sustainable diet - one that recognises the central crisis of distribution and overcomes the coexistence of under-, over- and mal-consumption in a world defined by extremes of inequality.
There are signs, however, the world direction is changing course. As a knee-jerk response to skyrocketing food price inflation, those developing governments fortunate enough to have export stocks began pulling out of the global market to safeguard their domestic prices.
The failure of the Doha round of trade negotiations, which sought to further liberalise agricultural markets, was widely interpreted as recalcitrance by developing countries - and the issue of agriculture, because of the food crisis, was cited by most accounts to have provoked the collapse.
The only source of good to emerge from spiralling food price inflation is the resultant crisis of faith among poorer and developing countries in neoliberal economic orthodoxy.
Unlike the crisis of 1970s that signalled the end for the Keynesian social democratic model, 2008 could be marked down in history for setting in motion an opposite trend.
A notable example of this gradual shift in economic thinking is set down in the UN's latest World Economic and Social Survey (WESS), released a week before the G8 Summit.
A belief in the self-regulating market is no longer credible, was the Report's message, noting that "John Maynard Keynes, until recently persona non grata in policy circles, is once again the 'defunct economist' to consult."
Such an acknowledgement of the redistribution agenda is no longer confined to renegade economists free from mainstream discussion.
Although the food price crisis has failed to serve as a wake-up call to world leaders, a crucial international debate has started to emerge on the whole theology of food security.
For now, the redundant model of export-led agriculture and import dependency has won through, but the calls for people-led social change are rapidly achieving a long-awaited consensus.
(Billy I Ahmed is tea planter, columnist and researcher)
In the wake of a food crisis that grasped the media attention during the summer of 2008, a new set of questions is beginning to surface.
As analysts predict, the era of cheap resources is finally over, the food emergency is no blip but a situation that could last indefinitely.
Could it be that the interconnected turning point in food, energy and financial markets suggests beginning of a terminal decline in the export-led, free market development model that has defined the past few decades of globalisation?
Or will the emergency in food provision, as previously happened in 1974, strengthen the same policies supporting large-scale industrial farming that have already devastated rural communities throughout the developing world?
The inability of world leaders to face the root causes or policy contradictions of a food crisis is nothing new.
Throughout the 1980s and 90s, mass protests over a recurring food crisis in developing countries were popularly known as "IMF riots", although the solutions - as today - were handed to the structures that caused those crises.
The Ethiopian famine during the 1980s led not to initiatives that helped sustain poor rural dwellers, but rather dedicating good land to export crops under the instruction of the World Bank, thus further worsen food insecurity and storing up a repeat of the famine situation that is surfacing today.
In Peru in August 1990, following the dictats of the IMF, fuel prices increased 30 times overnight, and bread prices increased 12 times within a day.
In Caracas, 1989, after a 200 per cent increase in the price of bread, anti-IMF riots led to the indiscriminate killing of men, women and children.
Compared to the last major food and fuel crisis of 1973/4, which culminated in similarly vain promises from the FAO's first World Food Conference to end hunger and prevent a repeat happening, the needed lessons after 34 years are far from being recognised.
The main difference today is in parting extremes, or the deepening polarisation between alternative examples, narratives and solutions.
On one side of the court stand the impassioned NGOs and hardened campaigners who have long opposed large-scale agribusiness in place of food sovereignty, bottom-up development, and the empowerment of small farmers through local and regional markets.
The food price crisis, they say, has exposed the disaster of global agricultural production and the convincing failure of a market fundamentalist ideology left unchecked for far too long.
On the other side of the court, supported by Gordon Brown, George W. Bush, Bill Gates' pockets and the most powerful financial institutions in the world, stand the Green Revolutionaries led by chemical technologies and multinational corporations from the E.U and U.S.A.
One path, say almost all the NGOs, will lead to social justice, strengthening local communities and food security for all, while the current path is inherently unsustainable, responsible for continued hunger in a world of plenty, and incapable of ending poverty.
By 2008 it should be a commonplace to state the escalating global food crisis, which some NGO's are pointedly distinguishing as the "food price crisis", is the unavoidable long-term outcome of misguided economic policies and a disastrous free market restructuring of agricultural land.
The official version of history over the past few decades as interpreted by G8 governments, however, could not be more different.
In the World Bank's latest World Development Report 2008 on agriculture, the same model of development that has created a global crisis in food production firstly - import liberalization, elimination of tariffs, a dependency on cash crops, GMO seeds and fertilizers, and all other measures that work in favour of agribusiness and against the millions of small-scale farmers struggling against poverty and hunger - is being promoted as the only solution.
The $1.2 billion of extra loans as part of the World Bank's 'Global Food Crisis Response Facility' will be handed out with the same underlying conditions of further trade liberalisation and market reforms.
Also, the IMF used the crisis to augment its existing arrangements under the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF), attaching the same conditions requiring structural adjustment to the 10 countries, mostly in Africa, already forced to make new agreements
The World Trade Organisation similarly tried to capitalise on the crisis by working to increase its mandate through the Doha Round of trade agreements, alongside a push to persuade developing countries to further liberalise their financial sectors under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS).
Between the expert rhetoric and analysis by international financial institutions on the disastrous extent of the crisis, with even the IMF declaring that some countries are at "tipping point", their offered medicine is still being mixed with the same deep-seated poisons.
This basic contradiction of agreeing to increase agricultural production in developing countries to address the plight of small and poor farmers, while promoting policies that achieve the opposite ends, was set in stone after the UN's emergency food summit held in Rome.
The final declaration made no attempt to address the structural problems and deeper causes of the crisis.
Despite both Ban Ki-moon and Jacques Diouf's impassioned speeches and articles over the period of the Summit, neither of them sought to address the entrenched structural origins of the food crisis.
Most worrying was Ban's simplistic prescriptions for improved market efficiency and a 50 per cent rise in food production by 2030 to meet rising demand, thus playing into the hands of politicians who seek to divert political debate away from the role of agribusinesses in the current food crisis, as well as the corporations who wish to speed up a "Doubly Green Revolution" in agriculture as proposed by Bill Gates and the Rockefeller Foundation.
The unavoidable result, without a critical re-examination of the unsustainable manner in which food is produced and distributed, will be more of the same; more privatization, more corporate monopolization of food systems, more GMO crop initiatives, more displacement of poor farmers, more migration into cities and slums, more hunger, more poverty, more over-consumption and obesity.
And all this without even considering the environmental footprint of producing more food on less available land, or transporting more food through international markets which contradicts the urgent need of reducing CO2 emissions.
The search for technical fixes to produce cheap and plentiful food may have made sense in the 1940s, but 70 years of the "productionist" model has led to the challenge of defining a sustainable diet - one that recognises the central crisis of distribution and overcomes the coexistence of under-, over- and mal-consumption in a world defined by extremes of inequality.
There are signs, however, the world direction is changing course. As a knee-jerk response to skyrocketing food price inflation, those developing governments fortunate enough to have export stocks began pulling out of the global market to safeguard their domestic prices.
The failure of the Doha round of trade negotiations, which sought to further liberalise agricultural markets, was widely interpreted as recalcitrance by developing countries - and the issue of agriculture, because of the food crisis, was cited by most accounts to have provoked the collapse.
The only source of good to emerge from spiralling food price inflation is the resultant crisis of faith among poorer and developing countries in neoliberal economic orthodoxy.
Unlike the crisis of 1970s that signalled the end for the Keynesian social democratic model, 2008 could be marked down in history for setting in motion an opposite trend.
A notable example of this gradual shift in economic thinking is set down in the UN's latest World Economic and Social Survey (WESS), released a week before the G8 Summit.
A belief in the self-regulating market is no longer credible, was the Report's message, noting that "John Maynard Keynes, until recently persona non grata in policy circles, is once again the 'defunct economist' to consult."
Such an acknowledgement of the redistribution agenda is no longer confined to renegade economists free from mainstream discussion.
Although the food price crisis has failed to serve as a wake-up call to world leaders, a crucial international debate has started to emerge on the whole theology of food security.
For now, the redundant model of export-led agriculture and import dependency has won through, but the calls for people-led social change are rapidly achieving a long-awaited consensus.
(Billy I Ahmed is tea planter, columnist and researcher)