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	Solve food crisis by changing policies by Le Monde / The Guardian   May 2008   The Revenge of Agriculture. (Le Monde)   While 75 percent of the world"s poor live in rural areas, agriculture receives only four percent of public investment and four percent of development aid. Beyond the cyclical reasons put forward to explain the present food crisis - increase in demand, climate change, competition from biofuels and financial speculation - it"s this absence of resources that constitutes the principal grounds for the crisis.   Two rationales explain this unbelievable injustice in the allocation of public spending. Unlike city dwellers, rural people rarely form pressure groups. Paradoxically, it"s in developed countries, where they are the least numerous, that farmers have the most political weight (and receive the most aid). Above all, up until just these last few months, the World Bank and most world leaders considered agriculture a residual activity.   To hear World Bank President Robert Zoellick worry today about agricultural scarcity leaves one perplexed. The World Bank is among those the most responsible for the present situation. It was the World Bank that for decades imposed the reduction of all financial and administrative aid to this sector on poor countries, that forced them to favor export crops. The results of this myopia are that farmers in poor countries suffer cruelly from the absence of training and public investment, and food self-sufficiency has long been considered obsolete.   The recent World Bank turnabout proves that the present tensions, resulting from twenty years of mistakes and passivity, are leading officials to once again consider agriculture a strategic sector.   Berkeley professor Alain de Janvry reminded everyone that agriculture was a key sector for growth. In China, India, and Vietnam, it was the development of agriculture that allowed hundreds of millions of people to emerge from poverty and the countries economies to take off.   Above all farmers in poor countries need irrigation systems, passable roads and refrigerators that allow them to access markets and to compete.   The observations are the same in Asia, Africa, Latin America and central Europe: farmers lack a sustaining environment, networked organizations such as production and training cooperatives, and public infrastructure. Money is also cruelly lacking.   The responsibility of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund is also considerable. For decades, these institutions have explained to emerging countries that the future of agriculture was behind it. So, emerging countries favored export crops in order to bring in foreign currency; they are harvesting the bitter fruits of that policy today. Thus does Senegal export food products - which Europe taxes when Senegal has the gall to want to process them domestically - but has to import 80 percent of the rice it consumes. Now not only has rice become scarce, but speculators are making its price climb as much as 30 percent in a day. The West cannot erase its share of responsibility for the major crisis that threatens today.   April 2008   The Angry Hungry, by Raj Patel. (The Guardian/UK)   The food crisis is no ’silent tsunami’: the world’s poor have been making a noise for decades, but the world"s leaders have not been listening.   Josette Sheeran, the head of the United Nations World Food Programme, says the current food crisis is “a silent tsunami which knows no borders, sweeping the world”.   If the tsunami were really silent, the tales of international development could be told in nothing louder than a whisper.   But the tsunami has been noisy for decades. Some of the poorest people on earth have been extremely vocal, ever since the dawn of modern development policies. Via Campesina, one of the world’s largest movements of poor people with membership estimates as high as 150 million, has been warning of the dangers of handing over agriculture to the private sector ever since its inception in the early 1990s.   They’ve long been campaigning for things that aren’t on the policy table at the moment - things like state-led land reform. Like grain stores and income support for the poor. Like equal access to natural resources. Like government investment to develop new and sustainable agro-agricultural technologies, as opposed to GM crops - a position recently vindicated by a venerable panel of experts at the IAASTD.   Above all, they demand democracy so that their voices count. Those voices are articulate and audible. The International Day of Peasants’ Struggle happened last week, with protests in over 60 countries. Those protests were rich with ideas for food sovereignty.   But their voices have so far been ignored. The most common agricultural response to the demands of landless people and the hungry urban poor is they are ignored by those in power.   But, surely the tsunami is now loud and clear. Perhaps the global wave of food riots that the current policies have engendered will help to clear out their ears. Visit the related web page
	The New Economics of Hunger - The world"s poor suffer most by Anthony Faiola Washington Post   Apr 2008   The globe"s worst food crisis in a generation emerged as a blip on the big boards and computer screens of America"s biggest grain exchanges. At first, it seemed like little more than a bout of bad weather.   In Chicago, Minneapolis and Kansas City, traders watched from the pits early last summer as wheat prices spiked amid mediocre harvests in the United States and Europe and signs of prolonged drought in Australia. But within a few weeks, the traders discerned an ominous snowball effect - one that would eventually bring down a prime minister in Haiti, make more children in Mauritania go to bed hungry.   As prices rose, major grain producers including Argentina and Ukraine, battling inflation caused in part by soaring oil bills, were moving to bar exports on a range of crops to control costs at home. It meant less supply on world markets even as global demand entered a fundamentally new phase. Already, corn prices had been climbing for months on the back of booming government-subsidized ethanol programs. Soybeans were facing pressure from surging demand in China. But as supplies in the pipelines of global trade shrank, prices for corn, soybeans, wheat, oats, rice and other grains began shooting through the roof.   At the same time, food was becoming the new gold. Investors fleeing Wall Street"s mortgage-related strife plowed hundreds of millions of dollars into grain futures, driving prices up even more. By Christmas, a global panic was building. With fewer places to turn, and tempted by the weaker dollar, nations staged a run on the American wheat harvest.   Foreign buyers, who typically seek to purchase one or two months" supply of wheat at a time, suddenly began to stockpile. They put in orders on U.S. grain exchanges two to three times larger than normal as food riots began to erupt worldwide. This led major domestic U.S. mills to jump into the fray with their own massive orders, fearing that there would soon be no wheat left at any price.   "Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan - they all came in with huge orders, and no matter how high prices go, they keep on buying," said Jeff Voge, chairman of the Kansas City Board of Trade and also an independent trader. Grains have surged so high, he said, that some traders are walking off the floor for weeks at a time, unable to handle the stress.   "We have never seen anything like this before," Voge said. "Prices are going up more in one day than they have during entire years in the past. But no matter the price, there always seems to be a buyer... . This isn"t just any commodity. It is food, and people need to eat."   Beyond Hunger   The food price shock now roiling world markets is destabilizing governments, igniting street riots and threatening to send a new wave of hunger rippling through the world"s poorest nations. It is outpacing even the Soviet grain emergency of 1972-75, when world food prices rose 78 percent. By comparison, from the beginning of 2005 to early 2008, prices leapt 80 percent, according to the United Nations" Food and Agriculture Organization. Much of the increase is being absorbed by middle men - distributors, processors - but consumers worldwide are still feeling the pinch.   The convergence of events has thrown world food supply and demand out of whack and snowballed into civil turmoil. After hungry mobs and violent riots beset Port-au-Prince, Haitian Prime Minister Jacques-Édouard Alexis was forced to step down this month. At least 14 countries have been racked by food-related violence. In Malaysia, Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi is struggling for political survival after a March rebuke from voters furious over food prices. In Bangladesh, more than 20,000 factory workers protesting food prices rampaged through the streets two weeks ago, injuring at least 50 people.   In an attempt to to quell unrest, countries including Indonesia are digging deep to boost food subsidies. The U.N. World Food Program has warned of an alarming surge in hunger in areas as far-flung as North Korea and West Africa. The crisis, it fears, will plunge more than 100 million of the world"s poorest people deeper into poverty, forced to spend more and more of their income on skyrocketing food bills.   "This crisis could result in a cascade of others ... and become a multidimensional problem affecting economic growth, social progress and even political security around the world," U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said.   Few believe prices will go back to where they were in early 2006, suggesting that the world must cope with a new reality of more expensive food.   People worldwide are coping in different ways. For the 1 billion living on less than a dollar a day, it is a matter of survival. In a mud hut on the Sahara"s edge, Manthita Sou, a 43-year-old widow in the Mauritanian desert village of Maghleg, is confronting wheat prices that are up 67 percent on local markets in the past year. Her solution: stop eating bread. Instead, she has downgraded to cheaper foods, such as sorghum, a dark grain widely consumed by the world"s poorest people. But sorghum has jumped 20 percent in the past 12 months. Living on the 50 cents a day she earns weaving textiles to support a family of three, her answer has been to cut out breakfast, drink tea for lunch and ration a small serving of soupy sorghum meal for family dinners. "I don"t know how long we can survive like this," she said.   Countries that have driven food demand in recent years are now grappling with the cost of their own success - rising prices.   Although China has tried to calm its people by announcing reserve grain holdings of 30 to 40 percent of annual production, a number that had been a state secret, anxiety is still running high.   In the southern province of Guangdong, there are reports of grain hoarding; and in Hong Kong, consumers have stripped store shelves of bags of rice.   Liu Yinhua, a retired factory worker who lives in the port city of Ningbo on China"s east coast, said her family of three still eats the same things, but they are eating less of it. "Almost everything is more expensive now, even normal green vegetables," said Liu, 53. "The level of our quality of life is definitely reduced."   In India, the government recently banned exports of non-basmati rice. As in many parts of the developing world, the impact in India is being felt the most among the urban poor who have fled rural life to live in teeming slums. At a dusty and nearly empty market in one New Delhi neighborhood this week, shopkeeper Manjeet Singh, 52, said people at the market have started hoarding because of fear that rice and oil will run out.   "If one doesn"t have enough to fill one"s own stomach, then what"s the use of an economic boom in exports?" he said.
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