By Steve Hynd
The head of the World Bank is being shrill about food poverty (h/t Kat). The BBC reports:
The president of the World Bank has warned that the world is "one shock away from a full-blown crisis".
Robert Zoellick cited rising food prices as the main threat to poor nations who risk "losing a generation".
He was speaking in Washington at the end of the spring meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
And in the Guardian:
Food producing countries must relax export controls and divert production away from biofuels to prevent millions more people being driven into poverty by higher food prices, the head of the World Bank Robert Zoellick said in Washington.
Without action to increase the supply of food, 10 million more people could fall below the $1.25 (76p) a day extreme poverty line over the next few months � in addition to the 44 million pushed into poverty by soaring food prices during the last year, he warned on Thursday.
A report by the World Bank found prices had jumped by 36% since April 2010, driven in part by higher fuel costs connected to instability in the Middle East and North Africa.
Higher transport and fertiliser costs have sent the price of wheat, maize and soya back to levels last seen in the price boom of 2008.
"More poor people are suffering and more people could become poor because of high and volatile food prices," Zoellick said. "We have to put food first and protect the poor and vulnerable, who spend most of their money on food."
As historian Mark Safranski pointed out today, "Food is a key indicator. Revolutions often start as bread riots, when people used to eating go hungry for a couple of days." That's how the Tunisian revolution that kicked off the current Arab unrest beagn, and why that unrest spread so quickly.
Right now, the rich world is largely sitting idly by while revolutions and hunger aflict the poorest of poorer nations - it just doesn't affect "us" and there have been poor always. But there's a perfect storm on its way which could bring that misery to the most developed nations too, very soon. We're past "peak cheap oil", climate change is accelerating and already-high food prices are being driven even higher by diversion of resources into biofuels and by unscrupulous fat-cat speculators. If it reaches a point where the poorest in the US or Europe need to spend three quarters of their income just to eat or to drink clean water, with nothing left for other bills, that storm will hit. At that point, government "of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%" would finally be toppled as the poor - which by the richest standars includes all the rest of us - finally took up their torches and pitchforks.
I was disappointed by his remarks. While I fully agree that the U. S. should eliminate its agricultural subsidies and stop using corn to produce ethanol and European nations eliminate their own agricultural subsidies and stop using food oils as fuel, there are changes that need to be made in the developing world as well.
ReplyDeleteLess developed countries' agricultural policies are major contributors to high food prices. China and India maintain more or less official policies of food autonomy, cf. India's ban on exports of rice.
And let's also remember that the price of oil is inextricably tied to food prices. The instability that's complained about is a direct result of looking the other way over the corruption and tyranny of the governments of oil-exporting countries.