Food crisis- direct result of IMF-prescribed reform.
'World Bank to blame for global food crisis' 2 June 08 (http://dailypioneer.com/indexn12.asp?main_variable=OPED&file_name=opd4%2Etxt&counter_img=4)
Along with the IMF, it takes its cue from the US... Its policies are to blame for decline in agriculture, says Raj Patel
Facing ever-rising and sometimes skyrocketing prices for basic foodstuffs, everyday people are pondering how to put food on their families' tables. Meanwhile, policy-makers are debating institutional changes to try to ensure that food is plentiful and affordable, and businesses are assessing how to keep agriculture profitable.
Raj Patel, a visiting scholar at University of California, Berkeley's Center for African Studies, is one of dozens of scholars who are exploring the substantial challenges of modern agriculture. Author of the newly-released book, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, Patel recently spoke to Kathleen Maclay. The following are excerpts from the interview:
Q. The term 'food crisis' is being used a lot lately. How do you define a 'food crisis', and is there really a food crisis around the globe?
A. There's something a little arbitrary about any situation being called a 'crisis'. There isn't, for example, a widely accepted definition for 'famine'. Instead, we have definitions ranging from "where the number of people dying is between two to four people per 10,000 population per day" to "a catastrophic food crisis that results in widespread acute malnutrition and mass mortality".
Bear in mind that when all seemed well with the world in 2006, 854 million people were 'food insecure', 35.5 million of whom lived in the US. This, however, didn't qualify as a crisis. Certainly, it would have been a crisis for millions of people, but not for policy makers.
Food insecurity, technically, is the situation that arises when at some point in the year, you were uncertain about whether you'd be able to have your next meal, due to the availability of food or poverty.
What makes the current situation different is the rapidity of the change, with food prices doubling and tripling, but incomes remaining static. That means that many more people are now unable to afford to feed their families. And throughout this process, it has been women rather than men who have been hit hardest, being the ones who skip meals so the rest of their family can eat. That's an everyday crisis that has been ignored for decades.
Q. Did this food crisis just happen all of a sudden, or has it been developing for quite some time?
A. The figure of 854 million food insecure people points to the fact that the current crisis sits atop a much longer and painful chronic history of hunger. There are five factors -- the price of oil, biofuels, unsustainable levels of meat consumption, poor (possibly climate change-related) harvests, and financial speculation -- that have driven up the price of food recently.
But there have been 20 years of mistakes, authored mainly by institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which, in turn, take their political-economic cues from the United States and European Union. Those mistakes have resulted in a plummeting level of investment in developing country agriculture, which has harmed food production and exacerbated poverty.
At the same time, developing countries have been forced into competing on a very un-level playing field on which the poorest farmers are not allowed state support, but on which the European Union and United States get to pay their farmers billions of dollars a year. What we're living through right now is a consequence of these policies, which have promoted inequality, rural poverty and, now, hunger.
Q. What should international financial institutions, such as the World Bank, do to deal with this situation?
A. The World Bank has been responsible for 'creating' the systemic vulnerabilities in the global food system, removing agricultural protections and transforming economies in profoundly anti-democratic ways. In terms of what it should be doing to help the situation, it should certainly be involved in unconditional debt forgiveness to allow developing countries to shape their economies in a democratic way.
If the World Bank continues to exist at all, it should be subservient to sovereign governments, rather than dictating to them. And one of the ways it might do this would be to support the findings of the IAASTD (International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development) report, which was sponsored by the World Bank. This report asks the question: 'How will we feed a world of 9 billion people?' It answers with the scientific solution of local, sustainable, non-industrial, non-genetically modified agriculture, with "maximum local policy flexibility". That's the very opposite of the regime the World Bank has been responsible for.
Q. What are some of the more likely solutions to the global food crisis?
A. There's nothing set in stone. If the World Bank gets its way, there'll be more liberalisation, and a continuation of the policies that have got us into this mess. Some developing country governments are talking about restrictions on exports so that they can feed their own populations.
What would be nice to see is a way of dealing with the crisis in which developing country governments can cooperate and are given funds to transfer and distribute food by the US and the EU.
At the moment, the US is in the business of buying American grain and shipping it on US carriers despatched half a planet away to reach the hungry, and flooding the local markets in foreign countries with cheap food, which has the unfortunate effect of wiping out domestic food producers there.
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