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Why a Food Crisis?
September 2008
by Fr. John S. Rausch
In the last year rice prices have more than doubled, wheat prices nearly doubled and corn prices rose by two-thirds.
Commentators blame the weather, the increased demand for meat from the growing middle class in India and China and the unforeseen consequences of ethanol production. All these factors bite into available food supplies, but they obscure the deeper roots of the problem.
Indeed, severe drought in Australia and widespread floods throughout Africa have contributed to price spikes, and one-third of the U.S. corn crop this year will help fuel our cars as ethanol.
However, food production has kept ahead of population growth. According to the U.N.’s 2008 forecast from the Food and Agricultural Organization, world cereal production will top 2.164 billion metric tons, an increase of 2.6 percent over last year’s global high.
Since it takes an average 8 pounds of grain to produce one pound of meat, the greater meat diet of the growing middle class in foreign countries diverts grain from breads to feedlots. A third of grain and most of soy goes to livestock, plus over a third of the global fish catch becomes feed. In the U.S. alone, meat consumption averages 222 pounds per person per year, 78 pounds more than in 1950. Cutting back on meat consumption will stretch the food supply, but given the production figures, the food crisis is better labeled a "food-price" crisis.
For decades neoliberal trade theory pushed Less Developed Countries (LDCs) to drop tariffs, quotas and other protections for local farmers to promote freer trade. The International Monetary Fund used the debt crisis beginning in the 1970s to demand less protectionism to qualify for loans. The World Bank promoted similar conditions for its advice and aid. To repay the loans and stay qualified for future help, debtor nations needed cash crops to sell internationally, which meant switching from local food production to exporting luxury crops including flowers.
Before neoliberal trading, LDCs grew enough food for themselves and more. In 1960 they grew a $7 billion surplus, but by 2001 they struggled with an $11billion shortfall. Governments under free trade restrictions could no longer offer small-scaled farmers low interest loans, technical assistance and subsidies for seeds and fertilizers, although 70 percent of those hungry in the world live in rural areas and depend on smallholder farms. Agriculture fell under free market principles.
Meanwhile, rich countries continued subsidizing corporate factory farms that needed huge quantities of fossil fuel to run mega-tractors, use petrochemical fertilizers and transport food around the world. In the U.S. 75 percent of commodity payments went to the largest 10 percent of farmers allowing them to dump cheap grains overseas which further drove small farmers off the land. NAFTA, for example, pushed one million farmers out of production and turned Mexico into a net corn importer.
With fewer local farmers and smaller nations reliant on grain from global corporations, food prices jumped when the price of crude climbed 80 percent in a year, hence causing the "food-price" crisis.
Frances Moore Lappe, food expert and author of Diet for a Small Planet, claims the crisis is not a shortage of food, but a shortage of democracy. She argues, "Because no human being chooses hunger, hunger is proof that a person has been denied a voice in meeting survival needs."
People of faith recognize that when structures keep people hungry, they must change. A right to life means a right to food.
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