View previous stories
	We in Africa can and must be able to grow our own food by The Earth Institute & agencies Kenya   May 2008   Greed behind world food price rises says head of South Africa"s Bank.   The food price crisis is caused largely by greed and speculation rather than food shortages, the head of Southern Africa"s development bank says.   "These increases in food prices are not the consequence of food shortages, it"s the consequence of human greed that is putting at risk the lives of millions of men, women and children," Jay Naidoo said.   "There are companies that are making super profits on this issue." Naidoo, of the Development Bank of Southern Africa, said on the sidelines of a conference on malnutrition in Brussels. He said that governments and world bodies should take concerted action to control surging food prices.   April 2008   "The global food crisis is the result of a perfect storm," said Dr. Pedro Sanchez of the Earth Institute at an event in Nairobi on Thursday, April 24. "The diversion of land for biofuels, the increasing demand for feed grains has contributed to the soaring food prices," said Sanchez.   Speaking at a press briefing organized by The MDG Centre in Nairobi on Thursday, Pedro Sanchez stressed that Africa now has a historic opportunity to make its agriculture sector profitable. "African governments should do all they can to increase the food production. By supporting agricultural inputs, as the Government of Malawi has done with subsidy programs for seeds and fertilizers, the much needed African Green Revolution can be made operational."   Sanchez called for the establishment of a global fund for agriculture in Africa. He was critical towards the donor countries’ response so far to the global food crisis, saying farmers need fertilizer and better seed to produce more food.   This criticism was echoed by Dr. Namanga Ngoni, President of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). "As long as Africa depends on imports for meeting our food demands, we will experience food crises as the costs continue to rise for consumers. Donors should step up their efforts to provide input support programs for African smallholder farmers and boost local production. We in Africa can and must be able to grow our own food."   Apr 2008   Africa needs "green revolution" says Kofi Annan. (BBC)   Former UN head Kofi Annan has called for a "green revolution" to solve the food crisis threatening Africa.   "A genuinely African green revolution could lead to a doubling or tripling of food production," he told the BBC.   Africa needs direct, immediate help for farmers to stop food imports including new seeds and fertilisers, he said.   But political analyst and South African beef farmer Moeletsi Mbeki said the heart of the crisis was property rights - as most farmers do not own land.   "The farmers in Africa have no secure property rights - their land doesn"t belong to them it can be taken away from them just about any time," Mr Mbeki, brother of South Africa"s President Thabo Mbeki, told the BBC.   Mr Annan said he wanted to see Africa become responsible for its own food security, and to eventually end the continent"s food imports.   "If you help farmers all along the value-chain, they are more likely, not only to improve production, but to sustain it," he told the BBC"s World Today programme.
	Making a killing from hunger by GRAIN Spain   Apr 29, 2008   For some time now the rising cost of food all over the world has taken households, governments and the media by storm. The price of wheat has gone up by 130% over the last year. Rice has doubled in price in Asia in the first three months of 2008 alone, and just last week it hit record highs on the Chicago futures market. For most of 2007 the spiralling cost of cooking oil, fruit and vegetables, as well as of dairy and meat, led to a fall in the consumption of these items.   From Haiti to Cameroon to Bangladesh, people have been taking to the streets in anger at being unable to afford the food they need. In fear of political turmoil, world leaders have been calling for more food aid, as well as for more funds and technology to boost agricultural production. Cereal exporting countries, meanwhile, are closing their borders to protect their domestic markets, while other countries have been forced into panic buying. Is this a price blip? No. A food shortage? Not that either. We are in a structural meltdown, the direct result of three decades of neoliberal globalisation.   Farmers across the world produced a record 2.3 billion tons of grain in 2007, up 4% on the previous year. Since 1961 the world’s cereal output has tripled, while the population has doubled. Stocks are at their lowest level in 30 years, it’s true, but the bottom line is that there is enough food produced in the world to feed the population. The problem is that it doesn’t get to all of those who need it.   Less than half of the world’s grain production is directly eaten by people. Most goes into animal feed and, increasingly, biofuels – massive inflexible industrial chains. In fact, once you look behind the cold curtain of statistics, you realise that something is fundamentally wrong with our food system.   We have allowed food to be transformed from something that nourishes people and provides them with secure livelihoods into a commodity for speculation and bargaining. The perverse logic of this system has come to a head. Today it is staring us in the face that this system puts the profits of investors before the food needs of people.   The policy makers who have shaped today’s world food system – and who are supposed to be responsible for averting such catastrophes – have come out with a number of explanations for the current crisis that everyone has heard over and over again: drought and other problems affecting harvests; rising demand in China and India where people are supposedly eating more and better than in the past; crops and lands being massively diverted into biofuel production; and so on.   All of these issues, of course, are contributing to the current food crisis. But they do not account for the full depth of what is happening. There is something more fundamental at work, something that brings all these issues together, and which the world’s finance chiefs are keeping out of public discussion.   Nothing that the policy makers say should obscure the fact that today’s food crisis is the outcome of both an incessant push towards the trade liberalisation and structural adjustment policies imposed on poor countries by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund since the 1970s. These policy prescriptions were reinforced with the establishment of the World Trade Organisation in the mid-1990s and, more recently, through a barrage of bilateral free trade and investment agreements. Together with a series of other measures, they have led to the dismantling of tariffs and other tools that developing countries had created to protect local agricultural production.   These countries have been forced to open their markets and lands to global agribusiness, speculators and subsidised food exports from rich countries. In that process, fertile lands have been diverted away from serving local food markets to the production of global commodities or off-season and high-value crops for Western supermarkets.   Today, roughly 70% of all so-called developing countries are net importers of food. And of the estimated 845 million hungry people in the world, 80% are small farmers.   Agricultural policy has completely lost touch with its most basic goal of feeding people. Hunger hurts and people are desperate. The UN World Food Programme estimates that recent price hikes have meant that an additional 100 million people can no longer afford to eat adequately.   Governments are frantically seeking shelter from the system. The fortunate ones, with export stocks, are pulling out of the global market to cut their domestic prices off from the skyrocketing world prices. With wheat, export bans or restrictions in Kazakhstan, Russia, Ukraine and Argentina mean that a third of the global market has now been closed off.   The situation with rice is even worse: China, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, India and Cambodia have banned or severely restricted exports, leaving just a few sources of export supply, mainly Thailand and the US. Countries like Bangladesh can’t buy the rice they need now because the prices are so high.   For years the World Bank and the IMF have told countries that a liberalised market would provide the most efficient system for producing and distributing food, yet today the world’s poorest countries are forced into an intense bidding war against speculators and traders, who are having a field day.   Hedge funds and other sources of hot money are pouring billions of dollars into commodities to escape sliding stock markets and the credit crunch, putting food stocks further out of poor people’s reach.   According to some estimates, investment funds now control 50–60% of the wheat traded on the world’s biggest commodity markets.   One firm calculates that the amount of speculative money in commodities futures – markets where investors do not buy or sell a physical commodity, like rice or wheat, but merely bet on price movements – has ballooned from US$5 billion in 2000 to US$175 billion to 2007.   The situation today is untenable. Look at Haiti. A few decades ago it was self-sufficient in rice. But conditions on foreign loans, particularly a 1994 package from the IMF, forced it to liberalise its market. Cheap rice flooded in from the US, backed by subsidies and local production was wiped out.   Now prices for rice have risen 50% since last year and the average Haitian can’t afford to eat. So people are taking to the streets or risking their lives to journey by boat to the US. Food protests have also erupted in West Africa, from Mauritania to Burkina Faso.   There, too, structural adjustment programmes and food-aid dumping have destroyed the region’s own rice production, leaving people at the mercy of the international market. In Asia, the World Bank constantly assured the Philippines, even as recently as last year, that self-sufficiency in rice was unnecessary and that the world market would take care of its needs. Now the government is in a desperate plight: its domestic supply of subsidised rice is nearly exhausted and it cannot import all it needs because traders’ asking prices are too high.   It seems that nearly every corporate player in the global food chain is making a killing from the food crisis. The seed and agrochemical companies are doing well, with record profits in 2007.   Such record profits have nothing to do with any new value that these corporations are producing and they are not one-off windfalls from a sudden shift in supply and demand. Instead, they are a reflection of the extreme power that these middlemen have accrued through the globalisation of the food system.   Intimately involved with the shaping of the trade rules that govern today’s food system and tightly in control of markets and the ever more complex financial systems through which global trade operates, these companies are in perfect position to turn food scarcity into immense profits. People have to eat, whatever the cost.   Many countries have lost that most basic power: the ability to feed themselves. It is a measure of how out of touch business leaders are that many now openly call for more trade liberalisation as a solution to the food crisis, with some even proposing that the rules of the WTO be changed to prevent countries from imposing export restrictions on food.   The World Bank president, Robert Zoellick, has tried to win the world over with his call for a “New Deal” to solve the hunger crisis, but there is nothing new about it: he calls for more trade liberalisation. Today’s food crisis is the direct result of decades of these policies. While immediate action is necessary to lower food prices and to get food to those who need it, we also need radical changes in agricultural policy so that small farmers around the world gain access to land and can make a living from it.   We need policies that support and protect farmers to produce food for their families, for the local markets and for people in cities, rather than money for an abstract international commodity market and a clan of corporate executives. And we need to strengthen and promote the use of technologies based on the knowledge and in the control of those who know how to grow food.   To put it another way, we need food sovereignty, now – the kind that is defined and driven by small farmers.   * GRAIN is an international non-governmental organisation (NGO) which promotes the sustainable management and use of agricultural biodiversity . Visit the related web page
	View more stories