Sunday, April 27, 2008
News

Understanding the world food crisis

CARE International’s Bob Bell explains the economics of hunger

Clockwise from left: A Bangladeshi beggar boy picks through mounds of rubbish. Soaring food prices in the impoverished nation have triggered riots; Sacks of flour donated by the U.S. arrive in the West Bank; Students in Haiti eat lunch the day that French aid officials visit after soaring food prices triggered riots.
Lalage Snow/David Silverman/ THONY BELIZAIRE/AFP/Getty Images
By Josh Clark

1. Why do I keep hearing about a global food shortage? How can we be low on food?

 A better term for what’s going on in the world is a food crisis. There’s food to be had, but it’s increasingly too expensive for a growing segment of the world population. As a result, food riots have broken out in Mexico, Haiti, Mauritania, India, Burkina Faso and Egypt, among many other countries. And while developed nations aren’t suffering quite the same consequences, think about how you cringe in the grocery store checkout line these days.
 
Thanks to rising fuel costs, it’s getting more expensive to transport food, not to mention the increased costs in fertilizer to grow that food on a large scale, since fertilizer uses petroleum, too. An increase in the cost of production raises food prices everywhere. As a result, many countries are trying to hedge against hard times by stopping food exports to other countries, says Bob Bell, food security director for Atlanta-based food aid organization CARE.

2. Have biofuels contributed to the food crisis at all?

Actually, quite a bit. You may have noticed stickers on your local gas pump that say something along the lines of “May contain up to 10 percent ethanol.” Ethanol’s gotten bigger than disco in the last couple years, with research into turning stuff like corn and soybeans into fuel seeing breakthroughs and attracting investment like never before. That used to be a pipe dream due to ethanol’s high costs, but last week’s $2.83 average price of a gallon of E85—a blend that’s 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent fossil fuel—is looking pretty sweet these days, in the face of the $3.50 we’re paying for regular unleaded.

Once corn became a leading source for ethanol, its value went up tremendously. In the span of a year, the average price per bushel of corn in North Dakota went from an average of $2.30 in 2006 to $3.50 in 2007, largely because of its value as a biofuel.
 
European countries like France and the United Kingdom were way ahead of the U.S. in slurping up ethanol. By Parliamentary mandate, England’s been cutting its gas with a minimum of 5 percent ethanol like so much baby laxative for years. And it looks like it’s beginning to have an effect, not just on CO2 emissions, but on global food prices.
 

3. With the food crisis we’re seeing, what’s the deal with CARE no longer accepting food aid from the government?

Since the 1990s, CARE’s been shrugging off aid from the U.S. government little by little. The federal government’s Food for Peace program, created in 1964, offered two ways for aid organizations like CARE to help overseas populations with America’s surplus food supplies: either purchasing the food and distributing it directly to families in other countries, or buying the food and selling it on the open market for cash. CARE is decelerating direct distribution, says Bell, relegating it to major emergencies like natural disasters. The organization has concluded that giving food to the poor should be short-term or as a means to help an area get back on its feet when it falters, not as a general policy as it had been in the past. Local regions that had benefited from food aid from CARE had come to expect it, growing fewer crops as a result. So instead, the agency is focusing more on programs that address underlying problems, like transportation infrastructure, irrigation and crop dependency.

The second process is called monetization, and CARE was seeing a return of only 70 to 80 cents on the dollar when using it, Bell says. Even worse, the agency found that the food it was selling was largely out of the reach of the poor, and mainly ended up in the hands of the middle and upper classes of the needy nations. So CARE will phase out monetization completely by Sept. 30, 2009.

4. Is the land in other countries really so poor that they can’t grow their own food?

CARE’s Bob Bell tells me that in some areas, that is the case. Sub-Saharan Africa really is as arid as it looks on television. And, Bell says, under current climate change projections, it’s going to get worse. The U.N. estimates about 2.6 billion people (41 percent of the entire world population) were without access to safe water last year. And this isn’t just water needed for drinking or sanitation—agriculture accounts for about 70 percent of the world’s water usage. So less water means less crop production.
 
In some instances, the food crisis is in fact a food shortage because of infrastructural problems: Crops grown in one area can’t make it to other regions that need them, and those that do are often too expensive, which is the general underlying cause of the food crisis we’re in now.

5. Why isn’t the U.S.—the wealthiest nation on the planet—doing more to help?

In a most surprising and relatively unpublicized turn of events, President George Bush has actually been trying to increase the United States’ ability to provide foreign aid in the form of food throughout his administration. Bell says Bush has simply been stalled by a reluctant Congress.
 
At the heart of the matter is the Farm Bill, a lumbering piece of legislation that has become a means by which multi-billion-dollar corporate factory farms receive enormous subsidizations from the federal government, while struggling family farms get next to nothing.
 
One of the proposed Farm Bill upgrades Bell’s rooting for is to allow the federal government to not simply sell food to American aid organizations, but to allow Food for Peace to actually buy food grown locally or regionally overseas, sell it, and give the money earned to aid organizations or directly to programs for starving populations elsewhere in the world. Bush endorsed legislation that would give the Food for Peace program a little more spending money and the authority to spend it in ways that it doesn’t currently have. But Congress killed the proposal, and the next go-round for Farm Bill debate isn’t slated until 2012.
 
In the meantime, Bell says he hopes the food crisis will prompt some real change: “Hopefully this is one of those times where the world might wake up.” SP

Josh Clark’s Five Questions is a weekly column published exclusively by The Sunday Paper. For syndication information please email sundaymail@sundaypaper.com.