Food for the masses

Roz Paterson Posted by on April 17, 2009. Filed under One World,Roz Paterson. Posted with the tags:, ,
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At least one billion people are currently starving, and that number is only rising.

A catastrophic combination of climate change, volatile oil prices and market speculation has left millions of households, on every continent, facing the very real possibility that they may not be able to access enough food even to stay alive.

Last year, it seemed to hit a peak, with oil prices hitting an all-time high, and tortilla riots erupting in Mexico, thanks to soaring wheat and grain prices, and children in Yemen, where 46 per cent of under-fives are underweight, marching on empty bellies.

And then the hyperinflation that had apparently caused it all retreated and the world, sort of, returned to normal.

Only it didn’t.

This year, the outlook is even worse.

The figure of 74million hungry people in 2008 has risen to over 100million, with food riots reported across Africa and Asia.

Food security

Food security is now the most clamouring crisis in over 80 nations, from Afghanistan – where drought and import shortages have seen wheat prices double in a year, and the average household now spends 75 per cent of its income on food – to Zimbabwe, where the agricultural system is on the brink of collapse and floods and drought have done the rest, throwing 1.5million (40 per cent of the population) on the mercy of the world’s food aid programmes.

Who, for their part, are struggling to keep up with the ever-increasing demands made on them.

But it’s not a problem that can readily be solved by humanitarian agencies, whose business is to step into the breach, rather then repair it.

One of the biggest drivers of the global food crisis is climate change.

For instance, in 2007, drought in Australia shrank its wheat production by 60 per cent.

This doesn’t just affect Australia, but has a devastating effect on the world wheat market, driving up prices and pushing marginal nations to the edge.

The UN estimates that an area of fertile soil the size of Ukraine is lost every year through climate changes, including drought, desertification and deforestation.

Reduced land

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that, within a century, the sea will have risen by at least one metre, reducing the world’s agricultural land by one third.

Measures can be taken to alleviate some of these problems.

In Yemen, for instance, the restoration of the crumbling water irrigation system would certainly improve agricultural yield, reduce water waste and, hopefully, reduce prices.

Helping nations to become self-sufficient using sustainable farming practises is now crucial and here’s where the people who work the land come in.

The International Union of Foodworkers (IUF) is calling for workers and trade unions to be involved in the global response to the food crisis, and this call is surely timely.

Those on the ground know what needs to be grown, and how, where the water is and how not to waste it.

The IUF argues that decent work – that is, under decent conditions and with a living wage -especially in the agricultural sector, must be integral to policy relating to world food shortages.

Professor Olivier de Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food agrees with them.

Speaking at a conference organised by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in Geneva earlier this month, he stated that labour rights must be part of the process, especially for strengthening the purchasing power of the poor, which in turn makes them less dependent on foreign aid, which in turn reduces transportation needs, food waste and, perhaps most importantly, the politicking that goes on around global food distribution.

Zimbabwe has many, many problems, but its government’s predilection for playing fast and loose with food aid is one of the worst.

Biofuels

Another partial solution to the food crisis is to give up the pipe-dream of biofuels.

It is becoming increasingly clear that, if we are to avert climate catastrophe, we will have to wean ourselves off private vehicle use and aviation.

Oil is running out, and its contribution to greenhouse gas emissions is well documented, but the solution is not biofuels.

Biofuels are created by growing crops which are then converted into supposedly carbon-free fuel.

But this practise, warmly embraced by George W Bush, which should give you at least a hint that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be, not only reduces the amount of land available to feed people, but may even have a carbon footprint as big as a traditional oil refinery’s.

Huh?

Yep, the fertilisers poured into these fields of waving corn are made from petrochemicals.

Add the fuel used to transport ethanol from, say, the rainforest regions of Brazil to car-mad Europe, and you have a seriously dirty fuel on your hands.

Plus, and this is the killer, you could feed a person for a whole year on the land it takes to fill a single tank in a 4×4.

But at the moment, biofuels remain a popular ‘green’ policy (or token gesture, to put it another way) with Western governments, who don’t want to frighten off their voters by even suggesting that car culture must become a thing of the past, and the requisition of land to pursue this policy is pushing world food prices higher and higher.

Still on the subject of dirty fuel, agricultural remains heavily dependent on the oil industry through its use of fossil fuel-based fertilisers.

Sue Longley, of the IUF, who also spoke at the Geneva conference, commented:
“It is time to cut the umbilical cord linking oil and agriculture, so that we can move to more sustainable levels of production, halt climate change and rescue vanishing topsoil and water resources.”

These issues, she notes tellingly, “are also the daily concern of agricultural workers.”

A world without fossil-fuel based fertilisers?

Cuban land reforms

Well, it’s already been done, in Cuba, where the USA’s oil embargo forced the revolution to go organic and get seriously food secure while they were at it.

And they did, though it was a process that took many lean years, and a great re-thinking on how land should be used.

Smaller, localised farming was favoured, including the cultivation of urban land, this latter ensuring that city dwellers had access to fresh produce on a reasonably regular basis.

This offers something of a blueprint for us in the UK, which has gone from a position of being almost completely self-sustaining, in the 1940s, when the Second World War drove us to cultivate allotments, gardens, even local parks, and furthermore not waste what we grew, to existing on a precarious 60 per cent food security basis now.

This state of affairs ensures that we are tethered to the deadweight of volatile food markets, and while we may not be experiencing food riots, we can be sure that the cost of living will rise beyond the limits of those who can afford it least.

Rural and urban shortages

Food shortages were once a chiefly rural problem, to be found in arid regions many thousands of miles from here.

But it has now become an urban issue too, with food available but too expensive for the poorest percentages, and it’s coming closer and closer.

The solutions must be collective, because it’s a collective problem, and they must include the knowledge and expertise of those who truly know where the land lies.

Not the speculators, who turn markets on their head but wouldn’t know a wheat ear if it bit them, not the policy-makers in Washington who thought turning the Amazon into an ethanol factory was a clean, green way forward, but the people who turn the earth with their hands, and the trades unions who seek to protect them.