War on hunger

Fighting both sides of the war

Say what you want about U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, the man does not flinch when it comes time to sell the USDA agenda. Whether that agenda, which he will push at a meeting of the G20 agriculture ministers this month, is one that will adequately tackle an emerging food crisis remains an open question.

"I would say that there are many reasons that there are food shortages globally, but none of them have anything to do with American farmers and ranchers," argued Secretary Vilsack at a recent hearing defending US biofuels incentives. If you are dumbstruck by this statement, it may be for good reason: it’s just not true.

The reality of course is that we live in an interconnected world where US policies and the practices of the US agriculture industry help determine whether farmers from Kenya to Yemen eat or go hungry. And right now many of them go hungry.

Today the world produces enough food for everyone, yet one out of every seven of us lives in hunger. With the population set to balloon from 7 to 9 billion by the year 2050, we'll need to produce 70 percent more food and ensure that those who need it can afford it even as climate change cripples yields.

But currently, we are fighting both sides of the war on hunger. On the one hand, the U.S. has been a global leader, trying to attack the roots of food insecurity by boosting the livelihoods of small farmers in the developing world with programs such as President Obama's Feed the Future initiative. On the other you have U.S. policies that undermine the very initiatives we are investing in.

In a recent speech on food security in Rome, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described the ambitious agenda of the U.S. to plan fight hunger, "Through Feed the Future, we aim to lift incomes of 18 million vulnerable men, women, and children ... prevent stunting and child mortality for 7 million children ... generate $2.8 billion in agricultural GDP in the target regions that we have chosen ... and leverage 70 million more dollars in private investments that improve sustainable market opportunities for small-holder farmers."

These programs, if fully funded and properly implemented, will indeed address hunger at its core, offering farmers the tools and opportunity they need to feed their families. This will reduce dependence on U.S. aid over the long term and help prevent the kind of instability we saw break out in capitols around the globe as prices spiked.

But on the other side of town we've deepened our investments in policies that increase food insecurity. A string of policy disasters, from inaction on climate change to irresponsible biofuels subsidies, have driven food price spikes and punished the billions of people who live on less than two dollars a day.

This Fucking War: The hunger to come in Egypt

Egypt is running out of food, and, more gradually, running out of money with which to buy it. The most populous country in the Arab world shows all the symptoms of national bankruptcy - the kind that produced hyperinflation in several Latin American countries during the 1970s and 1980s - with a deadly difference: Egypt imports half its wheat, and the collapse of its external credit means starvation. The Arab uprisings began against a background of food insecurity, as rising demand from Asia priced the Arab poor out of the grain market (Food and failed Arab states, Asia Times Online February 2, 2011). The chaotic political response, though, threatens to disrupt food supplies in the relative near term. Street violence will become the norm rather than the exception in Egyptian politics. All the discussion about Egypt's future political model and its prospective relations with Israel will be overshadowed by the country's inability to feed itself. Egypt's political problems - violence against Coptic Christians, the resurgence of Islamism, and saber-rattling at Israel, for example - are not symptoms of economic failure. They have a life of their own. But even Islamists have to eat, and whatever political scenarios that the radical wing of Egyptian politic might envision will be aborted by hunger. According to the ministry, "Thugs are in control of bread and butane prices" and "people's committees" are required to stop them. Posters on Egyptian news sites report sharp increases in bread prices, far in excess of the 11.5% inflation reported for April by the country's central bank. And increases in the price of bottled propane have made the cost of the most widely used cooking fuel prohibitive. The collapse of Egypt's credit standing, meanwhile, has shut down trade financing for food imports, according to the chairman of the country's Food Industry Holding Company, Dr Ahmed al-Rakaibi, chairman of the Holding Company for Food Industries. Rakaibi warned of "an acute shortage in the production of food commodities manufactured locally, as well as a decline in imports of many goods, especially poultry, meats and oils". According to the country's statistics agency, only a month's supply of rice is on hand, and four months' supply of wheat. The country's foreign exchange reserves have fallen by US$13 billion, or roughly a third during the first three months of the year, Reuters reported on May 5.

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