One Billion Already Hungry as Deeper Food Crises Loom
Enough food exists for all, but shortcomings of global capitalism and industrial food system thwart new approaches to problem
Despite growing enough food to feed to entire world, almost a
billion people are now hungry – one in seven of the global population –
and, according to Oxfam International, conditions are getting worse and
the number of acutely malnourished children has risen for the first time
this decade.
The aid groups' warnings come amid even more troubling news that
droughts in the United States, India, and elsewhere are driving a spike
in global food prices. (Image: iStockphoto.com/Tobias Helbig) Reporting by The Independent reveals
that for the first time in recent history, humanitarian organizations
like Oxfam have had to respond to three serious regional food crises –
in West Africa, Yemen and East Africa – while also witnessing an
"unparalleled number of severe food shortages" that have added 43
million to the number of people going hungry worldwide this year.
One week ahead of a"hunger summit" scheduled to coincide with the
closing of the Olympics in London, aid groups say that unless action is
taken urgently, many more could fall victim.
Barbara Stocking, Oxfam GB's chief executive, called th summit on the
crisis "a positive step forward", but stressed: "It must be the start
of concerted action to address the shocking fact that while we produce
enough food to feed everyone on the planet, about a billion will tonight
go to bed hungry.
"Dwindling natural resources and the gathering pace of climate change
mean that without urgent action, things will only get worse, and
multiple major crises could quickly move from being an exception to
being the norm."
Justin Forsyth, chief executive of Save the Children, said the Sahel
region of Africa was in a "permanent food crisis". He added: "It is
lurching from one crisis to the next. One bad year tips families over
the edge, and the world responds to the emergency, but this is the tip
of the iceberg. Below the surface, there is a huge ongoing crisis we
don't address."
The aid groups' warnings come amid even more troubling news as
droughts in the United States, India, and elsewhere are driving a spike
in the price of corn and other cereal grains, which experts warn will
create conditions similar to the food crisis of 2008, when dramatic
shortages and price increases set fragile economies into turmoil.
Earlier this week, investment analyst Jeremy Grantham said
the world was heading into a "chronic food crisis that could unfold
over the next forty years" and predicted that the ongoing droughts would
"threaten poor countries with increased malnutrition and starvation and
even collapse," and that "resource squabbles and waves of food-induced
migration will threaten global stability and global growth.”
Food policy expert and economist Raj Patel, however, says
that a focus on "food rioting" and scenarios of "collapse" misses the
point about the politics -- and therefore the solutions -- to food
crises when they occur.
"When the media reduces to the sort of irrational mob the actions of
people who are protesting on the streets," Patel said in a recent interview,
"they lose the biggest part of the story. Because when you see protests
around food, what you're seeing is the actions of people who have run
out of other ways of explaining and demanding change from their
governments, and are finding the food that they need to help their
families survive. And so every food protest is inevitably a protest
about politics and invariably those politics are very well articulated."
"But I think that that's why food rebellions," Patel continued, "are
not things to fear, but an expression of political dissatisfaction that
can be very powerful. You know, the idea of a riot is always represented
in the media as a loss of order, but if the order was unjust and
undemocratic then that's no order that anyone should want a part of. And
I think that food rebellions can, and often have been in history, a
moment when democracy has flourished."
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