One More Post about Hunger

In Haiti, where three-quarters of the population earns less than $2 a day and one in five children is chronically malnourished, the one business booming amid all the gloom is the selling of patties made of mud, oil and sugar, typically consumed only by the most destitute.

"It’s salty and it has butter and you don’t know you’re eating dirt," said Olwich Louis Jeune, 24, who has taken to eating them more often in recent months. "It makes your stomach quiet down."

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In the sprawling slum of Haiti’s Cité Soleil, Placide Simone, 29, offered one of her five offspring to a stranger. "Take one," she said, cradling a listless baby and motioning toward four rail-thin toddlers, none of whom had eaten that day. "You pick. Just feed them."

I found these quotes, taken from an amazing New York Times article, on Little Blog in the Big Woods. His post today lays out some of the root problems and also what we must do.

It presents an angle that isn't always talked about. As Greenpa says, " Many of the causes of the world food crisis are beyond our immediate reach; we can't fix global warming this morning. But one cause is NOT beyond reach. It's HUGE-- and virtually UNRECOGNIZED." He's talking about the role of food speculation. Read his post for more details about what you can do.

Amber Waves of Grain

not waving...but drowning

continued from yesterday


In the comments yesterday, JulieB from Australia pointed out that there are many factors to the grain shortage--including severe drought in important grain-growing regions.

On top of that, a larger population is by itself a difficulty, and when many in that population are eating high on the food chain (meat rather than plant), it taxes the system further.

It is not a simple picture.

Lola pointed out the effect of biofuels in the comments yesterday. So today I thought I would elaborate a little on the role of biofuel in the hunger crises.



Lester Brown, author of Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, spoke in Takoma Park on Wednesday evening.

One of the things he pointed out is that while the food economy and the energy economy have until now always been independent, they are now utterly linked due to the growth of biofuels. We've had food crises before--but they have been much more event related. We could see the end of them.

Things have changed.

It is not an inexpensive proposition to turn agricultural products into energy. If the price of oil is under about $70 a barrel, it just isn't a profitable switch. But when energy prices are high (and right now oil is just about at its record high of $115 a barrel), the price of grains go up because there is increased demand.

In our industrial food system, high grain prices mean high prices for dairy products and beef as well. (Under a traditional system, cows eat only grass and are pastured on land that is not particularly usable for other agriculture.)

Chickens, accustomed to foraging on a mix of foods including lots of garden bugs, are now fed "vegetarian" feed which is predominantly grain. We even feed the fish we eat grain these days. So the price of chicken and fish also rises.

And even agricultural products that are totally unconnected to ethanol production wind up going up in price as farmers sacrifice planting other crops in order to grow more food for fuel.

The corollary is that non-food crops grown for fuel can force food crops off of good agricultural land.

So, as the price of fuel goes up, the price of food goes up.

The price of oil seems unlikely to drop substantially. But let's imagine what would happen if it did: grain prices would suddenly plummet because of the oversupply as oil companies turned away from biofuels. Many starving people would be able to afford to eat immediately, but almost as quickly, local farmers would loose their livelihoods.

Disturbingly, this is exactly the pattern that can occur when wealthy countries dump subsidized grain as food aid on poor countries. Grain from abroad floods local markets, removing the ability for many farmers to support themselves. They move to cities in an effort to find some sort of work. When they lose their farms, they then cannot feed the local community and the people of their country.

And the cycle of need just starts over.

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from Britain's Telegraph:

We drive, they starve. The mass diversion of the North American grain harvest into ethanol plants for fuel is reaching its political and moral limits.

"The reality is that people are dying already," said Jacques Diouf, of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). "Naturally people won't be sitting dying of starvation, they will react," he said.

The UN says it takes 232kg of corn to fill a 50-litre car tank with ethanol. That is enough to feed a child for a year. Last week, the UN predicted "massacres" unless the biofuel policy is halted.

We are all part of this drama whether we fill up with petrol or ethanol. The substitution effect across global markets makes the two morally identical.

The article is continued here.

Enough

There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.
--Gandhi

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In the last few months, a lot of us have been worrying about how we're going to afford to fill our gas tanks.

During this same period, increasing numbers of people are worrying how they are going to afford to fill their stomachs.

"The rapidly escalating crisis of food availability around the world has reached emergency proportions," the director of the U.N. World Food Program (the world's largest humanitarian agency) said recently. World Vision Australia head Tim Costello called the situation desperate and chronic: "It is an apocalyptic warning."

World Bank President Robert Zoellick holds up a bag of rice at the opening press conference of the World Bank-IMF spring meeting. (Photo courtesy of the World Bank)

International Monetary Fund managing director Dominic Strauss-Kahn says if food prices continue to rise there will be dire consequences. "Hundreds of thousands of people will be starving," he said.

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In the United States there has been a 41 percent surge in prices for wheat, corn, rice and other cereals over the past six months.

Any increase in food costs sets up a simple equation: give something else up to pay for food. "I was talking to people who make $9 an hour, talking about how they might save $5 a week," said Kathleen DiChiara, president and CEO of the Community FoodBank of New Jersey. For some, that means adding an extra cup of water to their soup, watering down their milk, or giving their children soda because it's cheaper than milk.

It is even harder in much of the rest of the world.

In Bangladesh, a 2-kilogram bag of rice now consumes about half of the daily income of a poor family. Poor people in Yemen are now spending more than a quarter of their income just on bread. The price of wheat has jumped 120 percent in the past year, meaning that the price of a loaf of bread has more than doubled in many places. It is typical that the poor spend as much as 75 percent of their income on food.

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Food riots have erupted in Ivory Coast, Senegal, Ethiopia, Madagascar, and the Philippines. There have been tortilla riots in Mexico, protesting the rising price of corn. In Indonesia, ten thousand people demonstrated outside the presidential palace in Jakarta after soy bean prices rose more than 50% in a month and more than 125% over the past year. There was a general strike in Burkina Faso after the government promised to control the price of food but failed. Thousands of troops have been deployed in Pakistan and Thailand to guard trucks carrying wheat and flour.

In Egypt, rioters have burned cars and destroyed windows of numerous buildings as police in riot gear have tried to quell protests. At least seven people have died there in fights, or of exhaustion queuing for subsidized bread. In Cameroon, at least 24 people killed and 1,600 people arrested in February in food riots. Haiti's prime minister was ousted over the weekend following food riots there where at least four were killed and twenty wounded.

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Do you remember when the Department of Agriculture came out with its annual hunger statistics in 1999, showing that Texas was near the top?

George W. Bush, then running for president for the first time, responded defensively: "I saw the report that children in Texas are going hungry. Where?" he demanded. "No children are going to go hungry in this state. You'd think the governor would have heard if there are pockets of hunger in Texas."

(You would think so, wouldn't you?)

Are we--those of us with high-speed internet connections and the leisure to read and write blogs--living in the same kind of dream world? Do those who are suffering realize how little the privileged (to whatever degree) even know about what is happening in this world, even in our own countries?

* * *

As I think about these issues, I keep getting stuck on metaphors of abundance directly related to nourishment: I am fed up. I have had enough.

As Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says, "We've had 10 major sets of food riots across the world. So if you want something which should be close to our global agenda... [it is] how do we contribute to better food security around the world." The idea of a politics of the fork never seemed so important.

But this time, it is a lot less clear what we can or should do. Assisting starving people in the short term is not nearly as complicated as confronting the root causes of world hunger and poverty.

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Richmond Bread Riot, 1860s

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UPDATE: Also check out this insightful post .