from Sunday Herald 09 March 2008
by Kate Smith and Rob Edwards
It is the new face of hunger. A perfect storm of food scarcity, global warming, rocketing oil prices and the world population explosion is plunging humanity into the biggest crisis of the 21st century by pushing up food prices and spreading hunger and poverty from rural areas into cities.
Millions more of the world’s most vulnerable people are facing starvation as food shortages loom and crop prices spiral ever upwards. And for the first time in history, say experts, the impact is spreading from the developing to the developed world.
More than 73 million people in 78 countries who depend on food handouts from the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) are facing reduced rations this year. The increasing scarcity of food is the “biggest crisis looming for the world”, according to WFP officials.
At the same time the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation has warned that rising prices have triggered a food crisis in 36 countries, which will need extra help. The threat of malnutrition is the world’s “forgotten problem”, says the World Bank, and demands urgent action.
The bank points out that global food prices have risen by 75% since 2000, while wheat prices have increased by 200%. The cost of other staples like rice and soya bean have also hit record highs, while corn is at its most expensive in 12 years.
The increasing cost of grains is also pushing up the price of meat, poultry, eggs and dairy products. And there is every likelihood that prices will continue their relentless rise, according to expert predictions by the UN and developed countries.
High prices have already prompted a string of food protests around the world, with tortilla riots in Mexico, disputes over food rationing in West Bengal and protests over grain prices in Senegal, Mauritania and other parts of Africa. In Yemen children have been on the march to highlight their hunger, while in London last week hundreds of pig farmers protested outside Downing Street.
If prices keep rising, more and more people around the globe will be unable to afford the food they need to keep them alive and, without help, they will get desperate. More food riots will flare up, governments will totter and millions could die.
“Food scarcity means a big increase in the number of people going hungry,” says the WFP’s Greg Barrow. “Without doubt we are passing through a difficult period for the world’s hungry poor.”
The WFP estimates it needs an additional $500 million to keep feeding the 73 million people in Africa, Asia and central America who need its help. “We need extra money by the middle of 2008 so we don’t have to reduce rations," says Barrow.
He also points out that age-old patterns of hunger are changing. “We are feeding communities of people we didn’t expect to feed,” he explains.
“As well as rural, the profile of these new hungry poor are urban, which is new. There is food in the markets and shops – it’s just that they can’t afford to buy it. This is the new face of hunger.”
The shortages will also affect Western industrialised nations like Scotland, Barrow says. “Scarcity means that some foods will get very expensive, or disappear from supermarkets all together, meaning a move to seasonal, indigenous, vegetables.”
Of the 36 countries named last month as facing a food crisis, 21 are in Africa. Lesotho and Swaziland have been afflicted by droughts, Sierra Leone lacks widespread access to food markets because of low incomes and high prices, while Ghana, Kenya, Chad and others are enduring “severe localised food insecurity”.
In India last year, more than 25,000 farmers committed suicide, driven to despair by grain shortages and farming debts. “The spectre of food grain imports stares India in the face, as agricultural growth plunges to an all-time low,” warns India Today magazine.
The World Bank predicts that global demand for food will double by 2030. This is partly because the world’s population is expected to grow by three billion by 2050, but that is only one of many interlocking causes.
The rise in global temperatures caused by pollution is also beginning to disrupt food production in many countries. According to the UN, an area of fertile soil the size of Ukraine is lost every year because of drought, deforestation and climate instability.
Last year Australia experienced its worst drought for over a century, and saw its wheat crop shrink by 60%. China’s grain harvest has also fallen by ten per cent over the past seven years.
Over the next 100 years, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has predicted that a one metre rise in sea levels would flood almost a third of the world’s crop-growing land.
A recent analysis by the Conservative Party leader, David Cameron, also pinned the blame for the “global food crunch” on the accelerating demand for allegedly green biofuels, and the world’s growing appetite for meat.
Meat is a very inefficient way of utilising land to produce food, delivering far fewer calories, acre for acre, than grain. But the amount of meat eaten by the average Chinese consumer has increased from 20 kilos a year in 1985 to over 50 kilos now. Across all developing countries the demand for meat has doubled since 1980.
The world’s grain stocks are at their lowest for 30 years, Cameron warns. “Some analysts are beginning to make some very worrying, very stark predictions. And these analysts say that politicians should start to rank the issue of food security alongside energy security and even national security.”
Another key driver is the soaring cost of oil, which last week topped $105 dollars a barrel for the first time. As well as increasing transport costs, oil makes crop fertilisers more expensive.
According to the World Bank, fertiliser prices have risen 150% in the past five years. This has had a major impact on food prices, as the cost of fertiliser contributes over a quarter of the overall cost of grain production in the US, responsible for 40% of world grain exports.
Tackling hunger was one of the UN’s millennium development goals but it has been “forgotten”, says the bank’s president, Robert Zoellick. “But increased food prices and their threat – not only to people but also to political stability – have made it a matter of urgency.”
Scottish farmers warn that food security is becoming an issue for the first time since the Second World War. “This is a perfect storm and the effects are being felt right now,” says James Withers, the acting chief executive of the National Farmers Union in Scotland.
“At the same time as demand for food increases, the amount of land we have available to grow food on is reducing,” he adds. “An area twice the size of Scotland’s entire agricultural area has been swallowed up by Chinese towns and cities in the last ten years.”
John Scott, a Scottish Conservative MSP who farms in Ayrshire, goes further. “It’s almost biblical”, he says. “With all the wine lakes and butter mountains, we’ve had our 20 years of plenty since 1986.”
The prospect of global food shortages was now “Malthusian”, he suggests. One response from the UK and Scotland should be grow more of their own food, and to try and reverse the decline in self-sufficiency from 75% in 1986 to 60% now.
It is possible for the UK, and the world, to feed itself, argues Robin Maynard from the Soil Association, but it will require big changes. He invokes the wartime spirit which saw gardens turned into allotments, and 50 mixed farms feeding Britain.
"This is a wake-up call,” he says. “The choices we make now will determine whether we can feed ourselves in the future. If we get it right we can have a thriving food economy.”
Richard Lochhead, the Scottish government’s environment secretary, has launched a public discussion aimed at developing Scotland’s first ever food policy. “I am conscious that our generation has not experienced food shortages but we should never take food for granted”, he says.
“That is why the Scottish government will never allow food security to fall off the national agenda. We recognise the vital role of our primary producers, in ensuring the long-term capacity and capability of our food supply.”
THE LOOMING FOOD CRISIS IN NUMBERS
Three billion: expected increase in world population by 2050
250 million: acres of fertile soil lost every year due to drought, deforestation and climate instability - roughly the size of Ukraine.
73 million: people who depend on food handouts from the UN’s World Food Programme.
A third: how much of the world’s crop land could be swamped by rising sea levels in the next 100 years.
40: days it would take for the world’s current grain stocks to run out - the lowest it’s ever been.
240: kilos of maize needed to fill one tank of a US Sports Utility Vehicle (SUV) with biofuel - enough to feed a person for a year.
100: cost in dollars of a barrel of oil
250 million: extra tonnage of grain fed to cattle and other livestock over the last 20 years - enough to feed Brazil for 25 years
44%: the proportion of the ecological footprint of Scotland’s average diet caused by eating meat
60%: extent to which the UK is now self-sufficient in food production
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