Should we be worried by food riots in Mexico and West Bengal, empty shelves in Caracas and Mexico and warnings of hunger in Jamaica, Nepal, the Philippines and sub-Saharan Africa? After all, we’ve got so much food in the UK that we throw away a third of it.
Well, yes. Something is radically wrong and if we don’t take positive steps to help the situation, we’ll end up reaping the whirlwind.
There is a “last days of the Roman Empire” feel about the UK and food. The “Love food hate waste” campaign is urging us to save food, not buy too much, not cook too much and not to throw away so much. Yet, much of the rest of the world is in a food crisis, or more accurately, a lack of food crisis. There are 854 million hungry people in the world and 4 million more join their ranks every year. There are severe shortages of and rising prices for basic foodstuffs like grains and rice. The West is not helping the situation by hastily switching grain-for-food crops to grain-for-bioethanol fuel crops, thereby taking the food out of the mouths of the third world to stick it in our fuel tank.
It’s an imprecise allegory but John Donne’s “Send not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee” seems relevant here. We have to help our fellow human-beingss to be fed, or we will end up being badly bitten in the end. We cannot live in a separate world from the hungry. Strife, poverty and crisis will end up devouring us in the end.
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11 Comments
This is a timely comment. I noticed that the price of a humble tin of beans in my local supermarket had gone up quite significantly this weekend and milk costs are also rising sharply. If staples such as these are getting more expensive a crunch may come sooner than we would imagine.
There really does seem to be something in the wind.
Nothing in your piece or in the Guardian article on US farm subsidies or the Common Agricultural Policy, which are the real villain for third-world agriculture.
Also, nothing about the impact of the Fair Trade movement, which is all about pushing up food prices.
Even more surprisingly, no comments about whether high prices will cause more farmers worldwide to plant staple crops next year rather than biofuels, exotic fruit or fodder. You’d think they would.
I only eat one meal a day.
In the 1970s, someone raided Henry Kissinger’s dustbin and found the equivalent of the average UK family’s weekly supermarket purchases, packaging undisturbed.
Nicholas Van Hoogstaten, on the other hand, dries out teabags on his window-sill for re-use, and only ever buys butter and jam in huge tubs because it’s cheaper that way.
Chris – Thank you for topping up my thoughts with some knowledge of the subject, of which I am lacking.
OK, so world population is what 6.5bn, growing 80m per year, that’s +1.2% ish
The hungry are 854m, growing 4m per year, that’s +0.5%
So, relatively speaking this problem is getting better. We are feeding more people faster than the world population is growing.
That’s not to say the trend will necessarily continue, of course, but as the rate of population growth is currently declining, if we can maintain the rate of growth of numbers of people who are fed…
Of course this doesn’t mean we should be complacent, just that our determination can be optimistic.
Joe, I don’t know where you get your statistics from.
I am not an expert, but I do not know how what you write is possible at a time when global warming combined with extreme weather events is going to make farming harder rather than easier. In this country for example, after the floods, have the crop yields really increased?
Wars in places like Rwanda, Darfur and Palestine are exacerbated by water shortages.
The Lib Dems defence papers anticipate more wars caused by resource shortages.
Agricultural output grows because more farmers adopt more efficient methods of growing crops. This has been true for centuries and continues to be true.
Studies of famine tend to show that there is not generally a food shortgage overall – on a national or even a regional scale. The problem is almost universally about distributing the food and the power to buy it.
Chris is dead right on this. Anyone wanting to understand the problems faced in very poor countries would do well to read Paul Collier’s recent book “Bottom Billion”. As far as we can tell, the number living on less than a $ a day is going down – for the first time in human history. If that isn’t a cheerful note to end the day on, I don’t know what is!
Geoffrey, my statistics (the 6.5bn and 80m) came from the best of sources – the top of my head.
The 854m and 4m were in the original blog post.
It is hard to square with the general impression that the world is going to pot. But the world isn’t going to pot, just yet, rather we naturally focus on bad news, and this results in a bad overall impression.
Of course the world may well still go to pot in the future, as you suggest. So keep up the good work.
World hunger is decreasing, although all the anti-globalisation people seem to want to stop that.
It is also part of the reason why the IPCC models suggest that higher globalisation is part of the solution to global warming and protectionism would be one of the worst things we could do.
The reason for the high food prices in Mexico is a combination of global warming scaremongering(*), US concern about ‘energy sovereignty’ and political manoeuvring which result in the subsidy of corn for use as biofuel (despite it being more polluting) which is pushing up corn prices. Corn is the staple of the diet of the Mexican poor, high prices caused by this could cause famine.
Once again, we have politicians and pressure groups thinking they know best causes suffering and death…
(*) the problem of climate change is severe, but its not going to kill us all if we’re sensible. Higher food prices will kill more people.