Real food crisis is not about prices

from Business Day

The world’s hungriest people are the rural poor who starve even when prices are low, writes ROBERT PAARLBERG

THE price of many basic foodstuffs has surged in the past six months. High import prices, on top of high fuel prices, place an acute economic squeeze on urban consumers in developing countries that depend heavily on the world market. In Haiti, Egypt, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal and Ethiopia, the urban poor have been taking to the streets.

Yet it is a mistake to see high prices as a proxy for actual hunger. Most of the world’s hungry citizens do not get their food from the world market and most who rely on the world market are not poor or vulnerable to hunger.

In south Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, hunger levels are twice as high as in the developing countries of east Asia and four times as high as in Latin America. Yet these two hungry regions import very little food from the world market.

Sub-Saharan African countries take only 16% of their total grain consumption from the world market and less than 10% of total calorie consumption. So, fluctuations in international prices will have little effect in this hungry region.

Countries deep in poverty rely very little on food imports in part because they lack foreign exchange or simple purchasing power, but also because they consider the world market to be unstable and unreliable — and the current price spike illustrates why.

In poor countries, roughly 850-million people are chronically malnourished, even when world market prices are low. Most of the hungry are rural dwellers, far from grain import terminals. They can fall victim to hunger due to any number of local circumstances, including low farming productivity, illiteracy, poor health or low status linked to caste, ethnicity and gender — or all of the above.

In sub-Saharan Africa in 2005, a year when food was cheap on the international market, 23 out of 37 countries were consuming less than their nutritional requirements and one-third of all citizens were malnourished.

There are notable exceptions to this disconnect between world hunger and world markets. Countries like Eritrea, Liberia, Haiti, Burundi and Zimbabwe depend on grain imports for more than 40% of consumption and have average diets of less than 2200 calories a day, so in these countries, higher world prices will cause more actual hunger.

But in most of the developing countries that are heavily dependent on imports, diets are not so poor. In north Africa, while roughly half of all essential food items are imported, the average diet is well above 3000 calories a day, so high import prices will bring an income squeeze and perhaps even riots, but little real hunger.

The international response to the current crisis has focused on urban dwellers because they make more political noise and are within easy reach of news cameras, but the real world food crisis is mostly found in the countryside.

More than 60% of all Africans live and work in impoverished rural communities — starving for lack of any modern investments. The average African smallholder farmer is a woman who works constantly, yet earns only about $1 a day. This is because she does not plant any modern seed varieties, applies no nitrogen fertiliser to replace soil nutrients and has no irrigation (only 4% of farmland in Africa is irrigated). African farmers use hand tools because they have no access to modern machinery or electrical power. Their animals are diseased and weak because they have no access to veterinary medicine.

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