Pouring Fire on the Food

April 16th, 2008

by Eric Holt Giménez

This week’s headlines are ablaze with reports of food riots. Seemingly overnight, the world went from cheap food and surpluses to food prices spiking 80% and countries banning exports of food in an attempt to stave off shortages.

Welcome to the new world food crisis. Except that it has been brewing for decades. Ever since the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund broke down trade barriers in the global south—thus opening the gates for the dumping of subsidized grain from the U.S. and Europe—farmers in poor countries have steadily been driven out of business. Under the banner of “comparative advantage,” many poor countries that had previously been self sufficient in food were turned as a conscious matter of US foreign policy into food importing countries. But with the U.S. hoarding its corn and selling the rest of its food dear, these nations are left holding the poor end of an expensive stick.

Laying the blame on Australian droughts, rising meat consumption in China, the agrofuels boom, and the high cost of oil, our world leaders have been quick to offer a spate of solutions: A “New Deal” from the World Bank, another “Green Revolution” from the Bill and Melinda Gates and Rockefeller Foundations, and a quick $300 million in emergency food aid from the U.S. Billions more will be spent, and it’s a lucrative business. While agribusiness monopolies like ADM, Cargill, Monsanto and food giants like General Foods have remained conspicuously silent, about the crisis, over the pat three years, even as the crisis was unfolding, they were posting record profits of 60-80%.

Emergency measures are urgently needed to make food accessible to poor people. But so are profound changes to a globalized food system in need of repair. Inherently vulnerable to economic and environmental shock, we produce, process, transport and consume food in ways that are structurally dependent on vast amounts of petroleum, obsessed with three or four commodities, and subject to the unaccountable market power of a handful of seed, grain and chemical companies.

Unfortunately, the need for systemic change—not simply more of the same—is absent from official proposals to solve the food crisis. Perhaps this is understandable as it would mean that government, international finance institutions and agribusiness corporations acknowledge that they are part of the problem.

World leaders are rightly concerned about the wave of popular demonstrations against high food prices. With the exception of Haiti (where the poor are eating biscuits made of clay and vegetable oil), these street actions look more like angry rebellions of disenfranchised citizens than they do crazed rioting by starving masses. People are not just upset about high prices; it is the inherent injustice of the global food system that are driving them to revolt.

The International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology (IAASTD) recently released its final report in Johannesburg, South Africa. The result of an exhaustive 3-year international consultation similar to that of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IAASTD calls for an overhaul of agriculture dominated by multinational companies and governed by unfair trade rules. The report warns against relying on genetic engineered “fixes” for food production and emphasizes the importance of locally-based, agroecological approaches to farming. The key advantages to this way of farming—aside from its low environmental impact—is that it provides both food and employment to the world’s poor, as well as a surplus for the market. On a pound-per-acre basis, these small family farms have proven themselves to be more productive than large-scale industrial farms. And, they use less oil, especially if food is traded locally or sub-regionally. These alternatives, growing throughout the world, are like small islands of sustainability in increasingly perilous economic and environmental seas. As industrialized farming and free trade regimes fail us, these approaches will be the keys for building resilience back into a dysfunctional global food system.

Expecting solutions from the institutions that created the disaster in the first place is like calling an arsonist to put out the fire. Getting the poor back on the land and providing them the support presently being captured by the world’s agri-foods monopolies would be a truly systemic and durable solution to our current global food crisis.

Eric Holt-Giménez, Ph.D.
Executive Director, Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy
Oakland, California
510-654-4400 Ext 227
fax: 510-654-4551