Food for Thought

As the global price of food soars out of reach of the world’s poor people, the issue of which crops are grown where, and where they are consumed, has never been so fraught with moral dilemmas.  Recent months have seen food riots in a number of developing nations in which people have died, and food aid through the United Nations has become so expensive that the programme of aid to the very poorest has been cut back.

The soaring price of food is causing social unrest. Last week 4 people died in Haiti, in riots which were mainly about the rising cost of living. In Burkina Faso there have been riots in three towns after the government promised but failed to control the price of food. In New Guinea, there have been a number of anti-government riots over cost of living. In Egypt seven people have died in fights while queuing for subsidised bread. In the worst unrest in February in Cameroon,  24 people were  killed and 1,600 people arrested. As a result taxes have been slashed on food imports and public sector wages increased by 15%. In Indonesia 10,000 people demonstrated outside the presidential palace in Jakarta after soya bean prices rose more than 50% in a month and more than 125% over the past year. In Mexico there have been serious riots over the cost of corn, which is used to make the staple diet of tortillas. In Pakistan thousands of troops have been deployed to guard trucks carrying wheat and flour.

In the last two weeks alone, the price of rice has risen by 50%. Rice is the staple food of half the world’s population. In the Philippines, the government has told fast food outlets like KFC and MacDonalds to halve the amount of rice given out with each meal, and traders who try to stockpile rice have been warned that they face a charge of 'economic sabotage', an offence which carries a life sentence. In India, the government has banned the export of non-basmati rice and also raised the price of basmati rice that can be exported. In the poorest parts of Asia it is reported that people have reduced their food intake from two meals a day to one.

For several decades after the Second World War much of the globe enjoyed the benefits of relatively cheap food. The so-called green revolution, boosted by the unique bounty of fossil fuels and nitrogen-based fertilisers, delivered food to the world’s booming population. No more. The era of cheap food is over.

This change has come about for a number of factors. On their own, they would have had an impact, but combined, their effect is devastating.

The first effects of climate change are already affecting crop yields. Drought in Australia has dramatically cut food production. Droughts have also been experienced in China. To make matters worse in the world’s most populous nation, an exceptionally severe winter in China hit crops, and agricultural land is being rapidly lost to expanding deserts.

Elsewhere crops have been lost to flooding as far apart as Bangladesh to Britain, which lost much of its pea harvest when a month’s rain fell in a day in July 2007.

Another factor affecting food prices is the change of diet among the new middle-class in Asia, who have switched from a largely vegetarian diet, in which meat was an occasional luxury, to meals in which meat is consumed daily. It takes large amounts of cereal crop to produce each kilo of meat.

Finally, there is the impact of a significant transfer from using land to grow crops as food, into the biofuels boom.

Nations like the United States, Brazil, and Indonesia, are now growing huge amounts of crops to produce fuel crops. Some commentators have likened this to the cars of the rich nations stealing food from the mouths of the poor. America is keen to reduce its dependence on oil from the unstable nations in the Middle East, now its own oil production is in steep decline. The UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, has called for a comprehensive review of the policy on biofuels as a crisis in global food prices - partly caused by the increasing use of crops for energy generation - threatens to trigger global instability:

"We need to be concerned about the possibility of taking land or replacing arable land because of these biofuels.......While I am very much conscious and aware of these problems, at the same time you need to constantly look at having creative sources of energy, including biofuels. Therefore, at this time, just criticising biofuel may not be a good solution. I would urge we need to address these issues in a comprehensive manner."  The UN's own special rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, has called biofuels "a crime against humanity", and called for a five-year moratorium.

Throw into this perfect storm of factors, which has pushed the price of food to an all-time high, the issue of food miles and their impact on climate change, and one begins to realise that the issue of food is one which will dominate the next decade like never before. Food miles and the use of land for biofuels are profound moral issues when you realise that luxury, out of season foods, and fuel produce from crops, are pushing people to the brink of starvation.