Food Prices: Hunger Strikes

from Time

by Vivienne Walt

As the sun sets over Nairobi's sprawling Kibera slum, a sweet smell wafts through a small house where Malahasen Juma is cooking dinner for her eight children: a handful of onions, chopped and tossed into a pot of steaming maize porridge and leftover vegetables. Until recently Juma would spice up suppers with beef or fish stews. But not now. "Everything is more expensive," she says. "The children need milk, but I cannot afford that. Meat is a luxury now, not a necessity. We are just living at God's mercy."

The world will need more than divine intervention to end the food crisis that has ripped across the planet during the past few months. Prices for almost every staple food — rice, wheat, maize, sugar, milk — are soaring at rates of inflation not seen on such a global scale in a generation, resulting in hoarding, widespread food shortages and fears of outright famine in the world's poorest countries. Rice prices have nearly tripled since January, reaching $1,000 per metric ton last month in India. Wheat has doubled in price in a year and jumped 25% in just one day in February. Reeling from sticker shock, tens of thousands of people have stormed the streets in protest across the Caribbean, Africa and South Asia, demanding that their governments offer relief. They have found bloodshed instead. More than 24 people were killed in Cameroon during food riots in February; five more died in Haiti in March, and two more were killed in protests in Somalia last month.

Many more deaths are likely to occur not with the crack of gunfire but from grinding hunger, experts warn. Scrambling to avert that grim scenario, aid officials and political leaders from about 40 countries converged this week at the Rome headquarters of the U.N.'s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) to craft a rescue plan for the world's food supplies. By all accounts, they have arrived late to the crisis. The U.N.'s World Food Program (WFP) calls this emergency a "silent tsunami" that could have dire consequences for more than 100 million of the world's poor in countries as varied as Somalia and North Korea. A South Korean Buddhist organization recently quoted a North Korean official's chilling view of the mounting hunger there: "Life is more than difficult. It seems like everyone is going to die."

Until now, aid agencies have been hard pressed to respond. The WFP says soaring food costs and supply-chain disruptions have dented its ability to distribute food to the hungry. The organization bought a record $667 million worth of food for donations last year; about 80% of that was spent in developing countries to buy produce from small farmers. But even farmers in poor countries are holding out for more money. Traders in Cambodia and Sri Lanka recently broke agreements to sell rice to the WFP because they "preferred to sell it where prices were higher," says WFP spokeswoman Brenda Barton.

After months of muddled responses, governments and international agencies are racing to allay the damage. Headway will not come cheap. U.N. officials warn that boosting agricultural production enough to feed the world could cost about $20 billion extra a year. Warning that a decade of progress against poverty could be obliterated in short order, World Bank president Robert Zoellick announced the bank would quickly spend about $1.2 billion to boost crop production in the world's poorest countries. U.S. President George W. Bush has committed about $360 million in U.S. emergency food aid, while the Asian Development Bank has vowed to give $500 million in emergency loans to the hardest-hit countries.

Such aid is a stopgap solution to problems that have been brewing for years, but have only recently gone critical due to several complex factors: soaring oil prices; massive amounts of farmland diverted into producing biofuels; and crop failures from freak weather, including droughts in Australia and Europe and last month's cyclone in Burma (Myanmar). At the same time, millions of people in China and India can now afford to buy more food and eat more grain-fed meat, causing world food demand to soar.

But aid officials and food experts say there's a more fundamental reason why prices are rising: a world grown accustomed to plenty is increasingly unable to produce enough food to sustain itself. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon told the world's leaders in Rome this week that farmers would need to grow 50% more crops by 2030 in order to avert a massive global shortage of food. "There is nothing more degrading than hunger, especially when it is man-made," Ban said.

The Price of Success
The current crisis can be traced to a perception of plenty stemming from the Green Revolution of the 1960s. Dramatically improved crop yields sent world food prices plunging, beginning a 40-year period when billions of people ate relatively cheaply. The illusion that such progress was permanent and irreversible seemed to take root alongside the high-yield hybrids, and the threat of widespread famine was assumed to have passed.

Government agricultural policies have always been tailored to the times. Many wealthier countries — notably the U.S. and members of the European Union — have for years propped up their agricultural industries with generous subsidies and trade barriers; this has skewed the real price of food on international markets and stunted farming in poorer countries. With food relatively abundant, Western countries over time also reduced the amount of assistance going to poor countries to improve farming practices and build agricultural infrastructure such as irrigation systems and dams. Global assistance for agricultural development plummeted from about 18.7% of total foreign assistance in 1979 to 5.2% in 2006, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The West last year donated $1.2 billion to help Africa's 400 million small farmers. Adjusted for inflation, that is about the same amount donated annually more than 30 years ago, according to World Bank figures.

Underinvestment in agriculture was partly due to fears that funds would be wasted due to rampant corruption and mismanagement. "I remember going over to Sudan in 1985 and seeing donated tractors that had rusted over," says Ellen Levinson, executive director of the Washington-based Alliance for Food Aid. African nations' own policies have also been inadequate. In 2002, African Union leaders vowed to spend 10% of their annual budgets on agricultural development; few of the 53 member nations have consistently met that target. "We have been warning of the dangers for a long time," says Simon Scott, head of statistics for the OECD, which has tracked how several African countries have gone from being food exporters in the 1980s to relying heavily on foreign food aid today. In short, the world is suddenly hungry because of decades of neglect. "It is as much a question of complacency as anything else," says Charles Riemenschneider, head of the FAO's Investment Center in Rome.

Pain in Africa
The million or so people living in Kibera, the Kenyan slum, are what the WFP calls "the new face of hunger." They are victims of soaring prices, not just of food but also of more costly staples such as fuel, charcoal, cooking oil and kerosene. Residents can almost feel themselves becoming poorer by the day. The sensation is particularly cruel because Kibera's stores have adequate supplies, but the tomatoes lie rotting on the shelves alongside untouched bags of rice and cereal: they are now too expensive for locals to buy and cook. "We are not eating to be satisfied, we are eating to sustain ourselves," says Daniel Anyona, a counselor at a Kibera AIDS clinic.

There's little immediate relief in sight, because Africa's farmers face their own inflation problems and can't easily boost output. The FAO predicts that food prices will remain high for years to come, but that galloping price rises will begin to slow down. For poor farmers that is little cause for cheer. The surging price of oil has made using tractors costly, and the cost of fertilizer has doubled in Uganda over the past year, says Kenneth Kaboi, a 19-year-old farmer who was out in his family's maize field recently in Uganda's lush Kapchorwa district, churning the deep-red soil with a hoe. The earth looks fertile. But Kaboi isn't expecting a bumper harvest. "Farmers have not been able to buy materials like fertilizer," he says. "So they have done without."