World Food Supply

Canada and the World

Current Events with a Canadian Perspective

Last update

02 February 2011

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World Food Supply

There is enough food in the world for everyone,

but one out of every seven people on Earth is hungry

A large amount of Canada’s aid budget is spent on food - we do have a surplus of the stuff and a high percentage of us are overweight.

However, on World Food Day in 2002, the United Nations said that 50 million people in the world did not have enough to eat.

Crisis in

Sub-Saharan Africa

At least 10 million people in four of the worst-hit southern African nations alone risked starvation if the international community didn’t do something fast: other agencies said nearly double that number could be affected by drought, disease, and extreme crop failure by mid-summer 2002.

According to the Famine Early Warning system used by international aid agencies, the region would need at least three million tonnes of food aid before early 2003, to make up for crop shortfalls.

In response, the U.S. Agency for International Development planned to donate an extra $18.9 million worth of food to help ease shortages in Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. That was on top of $49.5 million worth of corn, corn meal, vegetable oil, and beans the agency donated in the previous four months.

Many others also reached out: the Canadian International Development Agency, which had donated $1.65 million in food aid and $1.5 million in health assistance to the region in March and April 2002, sent staff to assess conditions to decide what more it could do to alleviate the crisis.

UNICEF Canada and World Vision Canada launched public appeals to help ease the situation, in addition to sending emergency food aid, tools, and seeds to many in the affected countries. OXFAM's relief included tools and seeds because many people had to eat their seeds to survive and were left with nothing to sow for the next growing season.

Food Summits

At the UN World Food Summit in Italy in November 1996, 168 nations adopted a Rome Declaration and Plan of Action. This committed them to reducing food insecurity by half in 20 years.

But, the United Nations called another Summit - World Food Summit: Five Years Later - in 2002 to examine why hunger persists despite the 1996 Plan of Action.

According to Peter Rosset of the Institute for Food and Development Policy, not only has progress lagged by at least 60 percent behind the goals for the first five years, conditions are worsening in much of the world.

”Research carried out by our Institute reveals that since 1996, governments have presided over a set of policies that have conspired to undercut peasant, small, and family farmers, and farm cooperatives in nations both North and South,” writes Mr. Rosset in The World Food Summit: What Went Wrong (June 2002).

Unfair Competition Hits Small Farmers

“These policies have included runaway trade liberalization, pitting family farmers in the Third World against the subsidized corporate farms in the North (witness the recent U.S. Farm Bill), forcing Third World countries to eliminate price supports and subsidies for food producers, the privatization of credit, the excessive promotion of exports to the detriment of food crops, the patenting of crop genetic resources by corporations who charge farmers for their use, and a bias in agricultural research toward expensive and questionable technologies like genetic engineering while virtually ignoring pro-poor alternatives like organic farming and agroecology.”

Unless policies change dramatically, he says “it will be impossible to meet the 2015 goal, and hunger may actually increase...If the poor nations aren’t given the sufficient means to produce their own food, if they are not allowed to use the tools of production for themselves, then poverty and dependency will continue.”

Food Aid a Temporary Solution

Shipping food alone to people hit by famine does not eliminate hunger and starvation in the long term. We did that in Ethiopia in the 1980s and we’re back there again

David Blumenkrantz

dealing with a repeat of the same famine conditions. In May 2003, the UN World Food Program warned that despite an early warning and a rapid response by the international community, 12.5 million Ethiopians continue to face starvation. Besides a food shortage, the country lacks clean drinking water, has a widespread seed shortage, and poor sanitation, nutrition, and primary health care.

The problem is that 70 percent of the world’s poor live in rural areas and rely on what they grow themselves as their food source, making them vulnerable to natural disasters such as droughts and floods.

Very little aid money is spent on improving rural agriculture, and increasingly, the poor have no cushion to protect themselves from repetitive famine. What they need is aid during the “quiet” years for development projects - such as irrigation - to help prevent the next crisis, but as one aid worker put it, “If you don’t have starving babies you don’t get the money.”

The Economics of Food Production

J.W. Smith, of the Institute for Economic Democracy, sums up the problem in his 1994 book, the World’s Wasted Wealth II: “Highly mechanized farms on large acreages can produce units of food cheaper than even the poorest paid farmers of the Third World. When this cheap food is sold, or given, to the Third World, the local farm economy is destroyed. If the poor and unemployed of the Third World were given access to land, access to industrial tools, and protection from cheap imports, they could plant high-protein/high calorie crops and become self-sufficient in food. Reclaiming their land and utilizing the unemployed would cost these societies almost nothing, feed them well, and save far more money than they now pay for the so-called ‘cheap’ imported foods.”

Part of the problem is within the governments of the hungry countries themselves, which don’t spend much on agricultural development. But, rich countries are to blame too. Spending has dropped on all kinds of aid in the last decade, but for agriculture it dropped by half in the 1990s. That seems to be changing though: along with other aid agencies, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) has said it plans to focus more aid on supporting rural agriculture.

The United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization estimates it would cost $24 billion U.S. to end hunger through investment in rural infrastructure, irrigation, and research and development to boost yields. That, combined with new global trade policies that are more favourable to developing nations, could create a world of full bellies.

Image credits

Peter Casier

Food and Agriculture Organization Director-General Jacques Diouf has called the one billion hungry people in the world “our tragic achievement in these modern days.”

FOOD FIGHTS

Magharebia

Anger over rising food prices prompted people in Tunisia to take to the streets in protests (above). In rapid order, the food protests turned into anti-government riots and within a couple of weeks the country’s long-time dictator had fled.

To the east, Egyptians were facing the same food price increases as well as scarcities. They too took to the streets and the demonstrations morphed into demands that dictator Hosni Mubarak step down after 30 years of political repression.

Reporting for The Telegraph (January 30, 2011), Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes that, “Vulnerable governments are scrambling to lock up world supplies of grain while they can. Algeria bought 800,000 tonnes of wheat last week, and Indonesia has ordered 800,000 tonnes of rice, both greatly exceeding their normal pace of purchases. Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Bangladesh, are trying to secure extra grain supplies.”

The effect of this panic buying is to drive food prices higher. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization says its Global Food Index has risen past its previous all-time high, set in 2008.

Paul Waldie, writing for The Globe and Mail (February 1, 2011) reports that “Wheat prices on the Chicago Board of Trade jumped nearly six percent in January, something not seen for that month since 1993, and prices have climbed 77 per cent in the last 12 months.

LIVING HIGH

Government delegates who spend days discussing how to deal with the world’s poor eat very well.

At the United Nations Earth Summit in Johannesburg in August 2002, for example, delegates fed on oysters, lobsters, and steaks. A five-star hotel in the city catering to the event said money was no object in satisfying the national leaders and VIPs attending: it set up a separate kitchen with a 24-hour staff of at least five people to help teams of chefs accompanying some leaders.

Another top hotel said it had hired two dozen extra chefs for the occasion, and all reported massive food orders.

Seven people die of hunger in the world every two seconds, and three-quarters of them before reaching their fifth birthday.

“Hunger is a low, quiet killer. It does not make loud explosions. It does not crumble tall buildings. It kills mostly children, whose voices are small and weak.”

Laura Carlsen, The International relations Center, June 2003

According to a report by the U.K.-based Centre for Food Policy and Thames Valley University, approximately 1.2 billion people suffer from hunger and two to 3.5 billion are malnourished, while 1.2 billion people suffer from obesity.