In 2006, the average developed country wasted US$100 billion worth of food, while excess consumption by the world’s obese amounted to $20 billion. In the same year alone, the world spent a scarcely credible $1,200 billion on weapons.
“Against that backdrop, how can we explain to people of good sense and good faith that it was not possible to find $30 billion a year to enable 862 million hungry people to enjoy the most fundamental of human rights: the right to food and thus the right to life?”
So asked FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf at the opening of the Rome summit yesterday.
“The problem of food insecurity is a political one,” Dr Diouf added. “It is a question of priorities in the face of the most fundamental of human needs. And it those choices made by Governments that determine the allocation of resources.”
Warnings like these have been sounded before, often as not by reformed pop-stars such as Bob Geldof and U2’s Bono. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, advertising campaigns bombarded Western homes with images of emaciated children in places like Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia. But while these initiatives tended to exclusively concentrate on Africa – where the bulk of the 862 million hungry still lives – the crisis has since deepened to such an extent that even developed and prosperous nations now face the possibility of mass starvation within their own borders.
Ostensibly, the reason involves skyrocketing prices of staples such as rice, corn and wheat, which shot up by 180% in the last three years. But in apparent defiance of the economics law of supply and demand, this price hike was not triggered by shortage and/or increased demand.
Last April, The Guardian’s George Monbiot pointed out that the world’s total grain harvest last year reached an all-time record of 2.1 billion tonnes. We are in fact producing more food than ever before; but according to FAO, less than half of that grain will actually be eaten by human beings... and even then, mostly in countries which will go on to throw away $100 million in leftovers a year.
In Rome yesterday, Diouf described this crisis as a “chronicle of disaster foretold”: attributing the phenomenon to a combination of environmental factors, human wastage, poor allocation of resources, and above all, to the spiralling world oil crisis.
It is a vicious circle: the energy demands of developing nations such as India and China push up the international price of oil, forcing developed countries to seek affordable alternatives. These normally take the form of bio-fuels such as Ethanol, grown on agricultural land previously used to produce crops for food. Even as the world’s remaining farmland shrinks because of global warming, what little is left is increasingly being utilised to produce animal feeds on account of the Western world’s steadily increasing demand for meat. This in turn fuels deforestation in countries such as Brazil, and the diversion of some 760 million tonnes of grain a year to feed livestock which will eventually up as burgers, sausages and steaks... none of which is likely to feed the world’s 862 million hungry people to begin with.
There is also a political price to pay for the status quo. World Bank President Robert Zoellick recently warned that exploding food prices threaten to destabilise at least 33 countries, including relatively prosperous nations such as Egypt and Indonesia. Political observers also believe the crisis is fuelling Islamic fundamentalism in North Africa.
Back in Rome, FAO’s director-general yesterday argued that this could conceivably be avoided if richer nations were willing to dig into their pockets and cough up the sum of $30 billion a year: around 40,000 times less than is spent annually on arms.
“Regrettably the international community only reacts when the media beam the distressing spectacle of world suffering into the homes of the wealthy countries,” Dr Diouf concluded.