Back in 2010 I wrote an essay on the ‘world food shortage’, focussing on the World Food Programme’s strategies to ‘increase family nutrition’, namely by providing cash transfers and vouchers, and school feeding programmes. This essay was largely informed by debates related to the 2007/2008 rise in food prices and increased food shortages, and there seemed to be a sense that this was a problem that we were already seeing the back of as governments, global institutions and NGOs presented various solutions.
However, in 2011, the global food crisis is an issue being placed at the forefront of development discussions, as we have seen the global food price index (produced by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation) reach a historic peak this February, at 237 points. As in early 2010 when the WFP’s responses clearly seemed inadequate for tackling the scale of the crisis, numerous debates are emerging around how the related problems should be solved, and who should solve them, and it seems the debate is even more urgent as it has been proved that this is an issue that can’t be swept under the carpet and forgotten about in global development discussions.
In the past few weeks, discussions related to the food crisis on blogs, development news sites etc have been numerous, in part due to the publication of various reports and policy papers, speculation around recent and future G8 and G20 meetings, and the launch of Oxfam’s new campaign, ‘Grow’. The key statistic being quoted by all food crisis writers is that there are 7 billion people in the world and 1 billion going hungry, despite the fact that there is enough food to feed everyone; as Oxfam put it, ‘People do not go hungry because there is not enough food to go round. They go hungry because the system that delivers food from the fields to our plates is broken’. This is a human rights issue and is exacerbated by the same inequalities that affect all other poverty-related areas, including significant gender differences.
(In developing countries women often make their living from agriculture, and are also more likely to reduce their own diets to feed the family – see the World Bank’s discussion of the impact of biofuel on women farmers, and Duncan Green’s experiences discussing food and hunger with men and women).
Addressing hunger and poverty is the first Millennium Development Goal, and the current crisis is a major threat to achieving this. The poorest people in the poorest countries are the ones most affect by rising food prices – in their roles as buyers and farmers – and the World Bank has concluded that an additional 44 million people fell below the poverty line as a result of the 2010 food price shocks. Staple foods make up a large proportion of the expenditure of the poorest countries (around 70% according to the World Bank) and whilst high food prices could – in a more balanced world – provide an opportunity for those poorer people making a living from agriculture, many of these people are unable to produce enough to feed their own families, let alone contribute to markets, because costs of fertilizers, irrigation systems etc are so high. Oxfam’s new campaign is based on the argument that there will soon be 9 billion people on the planet, and more and more of the world’s poorest will be going to bed hungry every night.
