china news: How do you get the rich to care about feeding the world?

Saturday, November 5, 2011

How do you get the rich to care about feeding the world?

Debora MacKenzie, contributor

Oxfam knows a thing or two about hunger. Now it is one of the world?s biggest famine relief and development organisations, but it started life with something that might sound eerily familiar: a Greek bail-out. That time, it meant getting food to starving Greeks after World War II naval blockades. But as Oxfam grew, it realised delivering food was not enough, not unless it also fought the causes of famine - which, at some level, boil down to poverty and injustice: the poverty of the people who are starving, the injustice of the people who aren?t.="http:>

That view pervades their new analysis of the world food situation, Growing a Better Future, available in print from Oxfam, but also online. You might quibble with some of its politics, but I have seen few better, brief introductions to the whole knotted problem.

Not that it?s a fun read. ?The world food system is broken,? they tell us. We aren?t growing enough food for everyone now, never mind the millions who are coming, they argue, because a rich elite profits enough from the current situation of inequity to resist changing it. So, that?s where we must focus to fix things.

That resistance may indeed be futile, as the former Egyptian and Tunisian presidents might attest. Oxfam?s analysts somewhat naively demand a complete change in global governance that would redistribute wealth and power to the poor, so they can improve their own circumstances, grow more food, become more prosperous so they can buy more food, and basically fix the broken system.

They do suggest not entirely implausible ways this might happen, with renewed government focus on public goods and the welfare of majorities, and vastly more investment in the agricultural technology and infrastructure available to the world?s millions of small farmers. They give quite remarkable examples from around the world. There are roles for business, and for food consumers. But I would have liked to have seen more on why it might be in the self-interest of the rich to arrange this.

Oxfam also commissioned new research from a group at the University of Sussex, UK, that has a predictive global food price model. Prices capture the really meaningful output of the world food system, combining the amount we can produce with changing demands - by grain-guzzling livestock and biofuel plants as well as increasing numbers of people. The price then determines who can eat. No less an establishment stalwart than the World Bank finds current food price fluctuations worrying.

In the Sussex group?s model, available in detail as well as folded into Oxfam?s wider analysis, the prices of the staple grains that form the basis of our food supply rise around 80 per cent between 2000 and 2030, simply because of increasing demand for food from limited land and water. Taking account of climate change as well adds about the same increase again.

The number of the world?s chronically hungry peaked at a billion in 2008; Oxfam calculates that we could go back to that next year if prices keep rising. ?The international community is sleepwalking into an unprecedented and avoidable human development reversal,? it concludes, and its analysis does seem to back that up. Read it, and at least we won?t all be quite so fast asleep.