Global Emergency

As food costs soar worldwide, much of the progress made in recent years in the war against poverty threatens to come undone. In fact, respected New York correspondent from 'The Australian' newspaper, David Nason, talks about the "First signs of the coming famine."

Facing a hungry and desperate world

To have enough food each day ‘on the table’ they don’t have is the number one concern for around two billion people on earth. It’s survival, not going under beyond hope. By contrast, what are our chief concerns? Our comforts, our mortgages on lovely spacey brick homes, our holidays, our luxuries, our petrol bills. One billion out of the world’s 6 billion people have to make ends meet on $US1 a day, another 1.5 billion on around $US1.50 a day. And these people have to spend at least half of their income on food, some up to 90%. For us, to have enough to eat is just no issue.

Under these circumstances what does it mean then that “across the region, the price of food, from wheat to pork, is increasing at dizzying rates. But it is rice, the foundation of Asia’s diet and potent symbol of its cultures that is causing the most anxiety.” (TIME Magazine, April 21 2008) Medium quality Thai rice has risen 120% within three month this year. The price of good quality rice has risen astronomically this year in the Philippines as well, a country that with its 90 million people is the greatest importer of rice in the world and also a country in which three quarters of the population lives on less that $2 a day. The same in remote Sierra Leone, West Africa, where according to the country’s Foreign Minister, rice has become unaffordable for 90% of its people!!! And it’s a staple diet there also!

THIS IS AN EMERGENCY that is killing many more people than the worst tsunami catastrophe (‘only’ 230 000 dead on Boxing Day 2004), the Aids curse and many other epidemics put together! We clearly have a SILENT TSUNAMI here of immense proportions. According to Caritas Australia, this ‘tsunami’ threatens to leave additional 820 million people on earth malnourished and essentially fighting for survival. How many are dying daily as a result is anyone’s guess.

The present worldwide food inflation is quite dramatic. It is presently changing the eating patterns of India and China and everywhere in the poor world. It is changing the social fabric of whole nations. We have seen food riots all over the place - in Nairobi, Haiti, Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, even Malaysia and other places. Pakistan and Thailand deploy troops to protect rice fields and warehouses. No less that 33 countries are in danger of social upheavals.

Here’s one anecdote that drives home the desperate suffering of the poor: Mothers in Haitian slums have been forced to feed their children mud pies mixed with oil and sugar to try to make their hunger pangs go away. There is something massively wrong with the world when people have to eat mud!

The absolute crime and tragedy it that basically, even right now, not one person in the world would have to go hungry! The food is there. The price explosion is due to many factors including herds of Wall Street market traders, speculators, white-collar financial bandits who “turned wild and constructed a world of inequality and horror” (UN food envoy Jean Ziegler) through greed and opportunism. Of course, there are other important reasons too but it is quite true that the small time criminals land themselves in prison but many a big fish sits in black suits on the boards of a multitude of international corporations.

Without lumping them together with Jean Ziegler’s ‘bandits’, here are the names of some of the companies benefiting from the present misery: Monsanto (profits more than doubled in last three months); DuPont, Syngenta, Deere (55% rise in earnings); Mosaic (quarterly profit up 12-fold); Cargill (86% rise) and Bunge (20-fold rise). In February 2008 a Bunge official said food companies were so panicked about supplies that Bunge could charge what it wanted for soybean oil (The Australian, 1-5-2008).

Sure, supply and demand are out of kilter because of today’s record energy prices (oil and gas), rising world population levels and the biofuel fiasco engineered by a crop of Wall Street and Pitt Street ‘farmers’: the decision to convert productive farm lands into ‘clean’ energy producing palm oil plantations tying up critical land resources for decades, like in Indonesia, or to divert huge amounts of corn into biofuels, like in the USA.

Writes Time Magazine (21 April 2008), Politicians and Big Business are pushing biofuels like corn-based ethanol as alternatives to oil. All they are really doing is driving up food prices and making global warming worse – and you’re paying for it. Says India’s Finance Minister, When millions of people are going hungry, it is a crime against humanity that food should be diverted to biofuels.

The globalism of the last 25 years has made food price rises global as well. Globalism has indeed lifted millions out of poverty but is now sending millions back into poverty. Now everyone is affected and infected. Even in countries with a strong economy like Australia globalism has produced much social disparity and dissatisfaction that people ask, If our country is doing so well, why have WE got so many problems too – increasing poverty and what have you? It just may be that our highly prized system is failing us badly.

Pastor August Fricke