Debate

A silent tsunami threatening the global population

Thalif Deen

When a gaggle of unruly and starving peasants complained about a shortage of bread in 17th century France, the queen consort Marie Antoinette is said to have infamously remarked: "Let them eat cake."

Historians have since disputed the apparently callous comment, arguing that she was either misquoted or mistranslated.

However, there was no ambiguity about a statement attributed to the Bangladeshi army chief, General Moeen U. Ahmed, who told his compatriots last month that if they don't have rice, they should eat potatoes.

As the current food crisis continues to spread across developing nations, the staple food of over 150 million Bangladeshis has been hit by spiralling prices an increase of over 87 percent in March alone, according to the World Food Programme (WFP).

Bangladesh, which is expected to produce about 8.0 million tonnes of potatoes this year compared with 5.0 million tonnes in 2007, has been more pragmatic in switching from one staple to another.

In the country's armed services, "The daily food menu now includes 125 grammes of potatoes for each soldier, irrespective of ranks," Gen. Ahmed, who is also head of the army-backed interim government, was quoted as saying at a recent luncheon for newspaper editors in the Bangladeshi capital.

According to the Dhaka-based Daily Star, the luncheon menu included potato soup, french fries, potato corn curry, potato kopta curry, potato roller gravy, potato with spinach, potato malai curry, potato navaratna, potato pudina, and potato pulse. One journalist was quoted as saying that the army cooks, at the end of an exhausting day in the kitchen, had run out of recipes.

Coincidentally, the boost for the tuber comes at a time when the United Nations is commemorating 2008 as the 'International Year of the Potato' in an attempt "to increase awareness of the importance of the potato as a food in developing nations."

Bangladesh, categorised by the United Nations as one of the world's 50 least developed countries (LDCs), suffered two severe floods and a cyclone which destroyed about 3.0 million tonnes of food grains over the last year, according to published reports.

The Bangladesh government is trying to stall a hunger crisis, which Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says will affect some 100 million people worldwide, driving some of them to near-starvation.

"The steeply rising price of food has developed into a real global crisis," he told reporters last week.

WFP's Executive Director Josette Sheeran says that people in industrialised countries spend only about 15 to 18 per cent of their household income on food, making them better equipped to cope with disasters and price hikes than households in developing countries which, on average, spend about 70 per cent of their incomes on food.

She said high food prices are "creating the biggest challenge that WFP has faced in its 45-year history, a silent tsunami threatening to plunge more than 100 million people on every continent into hunger."

An agency that provides direct food aid, WFP has a core budget of about 3.1 to 4.3 billion dollars annually. But so far, it has raised only 1.0 billion dollars.

"And of course, this 4.3 billion-dollar sum does not take into account the new face of hunger," says WFP spokeswoman Bettina Luescher. "So we will also need an as yet-to-be-determined amount that will allow WFP to begin addressing the needs of the new face of hunger those people who could make it when bread was 30 cents per loaf, but cannot make it when bread is 60 cents per loaf," she noted.

The secretary-General says the United Nations is very much concerned, as are all other members of the international community. "We must take immediate action in a concerted way," Ban said.

The Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), the primary U.N. body dealing with economic and social issues, is scheduled to hold a meeting on food security in mid-May, to be followed by a summit meeting of world leaders, sponsored by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), in Rome Jun. 3-5.

The food crisis will also be on the agenda of the Group of Eight summit meeting of industrialised nations in Japan in July.

Asked how the world body should deal with the food crisis, the Secretary-General told reporters last week: "In the short term, we must address all humanitarian crises, which have been impacting the poorest of the poor people in the world because 100 million people have been driven into this additional hunger crisis."

Ban said that last month, he convened the MDG (Millennium Development Goals) Africa Steering Group. At that meeting, he said, "We adopted several important recommendations, which approved as one of the initiatives to try to launch the African green revolution."

He said he was going to discuss this matter in depth with all the agencies, heads of agencies, funds and programmes of the United Nations, as well as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

"Then, we will try to see what kind of immediate action and immediate long-term actions we can take as a part of a United Nations-led initiative," he added. (IPS)

Poverty and Hunger - food for thought

Miran Perera

Food, the first of the three basic needs of man is essential for life. At the beginning man only ate to live and not vice versa. That is why we do not see disfigured human forms with bulging bellies etc. in sketches and drawings found in caves of primordial man.

They shared the natural food available in the jungle like fruits and leaves of trees and creepers. It was acquisitiveness that came in to being when man began to have property of his own that altered this healthy state of affairs and some began to eat more than they could digest.

This was the beginning of the state in which although there was enough food and resources in any environment on this planet for man's need there was not enough for man's greed. This also resulted in the emergence of the few haves and the large number of have nots.

The greedy and the selfish and not necessarily the able grabbed more than was needed while the unselfish were even deprived of their needs. It is widely believed that democracy and hunger cannot go together.

A hungry stomach questions and ensures the systems failure to meet what is a basic biological need of every human being. There can be no place for hunger and poverty in a modern world in which science and technology have created conditions of abundance and equitable development.

Yet this is an easy ride to the hungry and starving millions. Bio-technologists continue to swear their discoveries in the name of the hungry. Their concern for feeding the world should not be misconstrued as aimed at eradicating hunger.

It is only aimed at increasing the profits of the private seed bio-technology companies and that too in the name of the world's poor, hungry and severely malnourished.

Eradicating global hunger is certainly a pious intention, for a mere 3000 tonnes of genetically modified rice the human health risks of which have still not been ascertained.

To eradicate extreme poverty and hunger from the earth, world leaders have set a target to reduce by half the number of people living on less than $ 1 a day by the year 2015. It was estimated that more than a billion people fall into this category. Eradicating poverty to fill the food problem of millions of people is not a case of providing charity.

These countries should be assisted in these efforts to achieve sustainable economic development. What often happens as experience has shown is that by abiding by the conditions set by the multilateral donor agencies and donor countries they fall into an eternal debt rap.

Consequently instead of getting out of the abyss of poverty they sink further and further into the abyss. Benefits obtained by such methods as controlled environment Agriculture makes decrease the land available for production due to the development of industries, urbanization housing projects etc. The per capita Agricultural land at present is only 0.22 ha.

Therefore future food production will have to come through intensive cropping on small extends of land. This will be an inevitable event that people of most countries will have to face.

Although food production has been increasing due to progressive policies of the Government the future scenario appears to be different and the strategies may have to be changed. It is here that protected Agriculture has to be considered due to its specific advantages in food production.

All over the world molecular biologists are screaming over the need to push in bio-technology to increase food production to feed the 800 million hungry who sleep on an empty stomach.

Politicians and policy makers are quick to join the chorus not realising that hundreds of millions of the hungry in South Asia are staring with dry eyes at the overflowing food granaries. Many have launched a frontal attack to ensure that food reaches those who need it desperately, so that hunger will certainly be drastically reduced if not completely eliminated.

Attempts have been made over the years to alleviate poverty but still it remains one of the pressing problems in the country. The question we have to consider is whether we should look at the strengths of the poor people who receive services in helping them to move out of these programmes.

People escape poverty and achieve wealth through asset acquisition not simply income. One of the clearest failures of current welfare policy is that it maintains consumption but does not invest in the ability of people to support themselves and their communities.

It is said that income may feed people's stomachs but assets change their heads. We must consider the modernization of the production of staple foods by the introduction of new production technology into the sector as the basis for Agricultural modernization and development.

Staple food commodities tend to have low price elasticity of demand with the result that the introduction of new production technology to the sector will result in a lower price for the staple other things being equal. That decline in real prices will be equivalent to an increase in real per capita incomes for consumers. This points to the ultimate importance of Agriculture in the development process.

It is important because everybody consumes food. Many take as a basic premise that food security is a poverty problem. The lack of food is due to the lack of the means to acquire it. It is not in general due to a short fall in food production.

The food security problem can be of a short term or a long term nature. In other words people may suffer either from short term fluctuations in their incomes or they may suffer chronically from low per capita incomes.

The policy prescriptions of these two problems are quite different. Whether a country would opt for a more centralised or decentralised system on its turn is likely to depend significantly on the nature of its power elite and the historical, political, economic and social systems under which they have been functioning.

If the system is such that it survives mainly through transfer of resources from the poor to the non poor eventhough the poor are efficient then there is a strong case for promoting a pro poor structural change as a priority step for effectively meeting the challenges of poverty.

Here the critical question is; would the non poor who are the main beneficiary of the system, pioneer such a change at their own initiative or the poor would have to empower themselves. The poor still continue to be fed with an overdose of statistics while the onerous task of feeding the hungry mouths have now been left to the market forces.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has been in the forefront in welcoming many initiatives in the name of feeding the world and ensuring food security. The tasks of eradicating poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy, unemployment tackling environmental degradation and food insecurity need to be jointly addressed.

As members of social movements, and organisations working for the development through empowerment of the people living in poverty SAARC country members are urged to implement the commitments of their governments and bring a regional level increased serious and meaningful cooperation for eradicating poverty and eliminating social injustice.

'Neglect of farming led to rice crisis'

Marwaan Macan-Markar

The headlines screaming about a global food shortage have not aroused surprise in a leading non-governmental organisation (NGO) working with farming communities across Asia. To its members, warnings of hunger on a biblical scale are hardly news.

After all, the Asia-Pacific arm of the Pesticide Action Network (PAN), a global environmental lobby, has been raising the alarm about an impending rice shortage for years. Among its more recent campaigns was one launched to coincide with ''The International Year of Rice,'' which was marked globally in 2004.

But the alarm bells rung by PAN were ignored by Governments in the region, home to nine of the world's top 10 producers of the grain. They are China, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Thailand, Burma, the Philippines and Japan. The only non-Asian in this rice league is Brazil.

"Governments refused to listen to our concerns. In the last five years we have been saying that we are in rice crisis, that food security and food sovereignty were being undermined,'' Clare Westwood, campaign coordinator for PAN's 'Save Our Rice Campaign, said during a telephone interview from Malaysia. ''It was only a matter of time before the warnings became real.''

PAN's primary concern was the push towards rice cultivation on an industrial scale that promoted monoculture, where a few high-yield rice varieties that needed large doses of chemicals were held up as the answer to growing demand. Marginalised, consequently, were the small farmers, who came from rural communities that had used local knowledge over centuries to generate new varieties of paddy seeds that blended with the local environment.

"The high-yielding seeds prompted in the monoculture style of farming are not as hardy as local varieties produced through the ecological style of farming,'' adds Westwood. ''This hybrid rice can only perform well under certain circumstances and they need a lot of fertiliser and pesticides and they are water intensive. These are their inherent weaknesses.''

A recent report by a regional U.N. body lends weight to PAN's view about the high cost Asian governments are currently paying for neglecting the agricultural sector, where a bulk of the poor in Asia and the Pacific some 641 million people live. "The rural poor account for 70 percent of the poor in the Asia-Pacific region, and agriculture is their main livelihood,'' states a survey published by the Bangkok-based Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP).

''The agriculture sector has been neglected for a long time, nearly four decades, and the Asia-Pacific regions would have run into a food shortage problem and rising food prices sooner or later,'' says Shamika Sirimanne, chief of the socioeconomic section in the poverty and development division of ESCAP. ''Governments used to provide much more public services to the agriculture sector earlier.''

Assistance had ranged from public funds to help farmers improve their yields, assistance with research and development and with marketing the grain.

State funds had also been invested to improve roads and other infrastructure projects to improve the quality of life in rural areas.

"This shift has become marked since the 1980s,'' Sirimanne explained in an interview.

"Everybody began to think of economic growth in that decade and what could be achieved through manufacturing, industry and services. The idea of growth through agriculture was sidelined.''

World Bank figures help to explain why these new avenues for growth in the region were attractive. In China, the emerging Asian economic powerhouse, the gross domestic production (GDP) from agriculture during the 1981-1985 period was 28.7 percent, while industry accounted for 26 percent. But during the 2001-2006 period, agriculture's contribution to China's GDP had dropped to 8.7 percent, while industry rose to 49.1 percent.

In India, during the same period, agriculture went down from 18.4 percent of GDP to 6.2 percent, making way for industry and services. And in Indonesia, agriculture dropped from 18.4 percent of GDP to 11.8 percent, also making way for industry and services.

But what did not follow as a result of this shift away from agriculture was a drop in the number of poor in rural areas. ''Even today, 60 percent of the region's labour force is in the agriculture sector, where a large number live in poverty,'' says Sirimanne.

"The Asian agriculture sector is dominated by very poor people and it is the duty of governments to start re-investing in them to improve productivity.''

And now, even the authors of a major international study on the future of global agriculture have made a strong case to resurrect the role of the small, neglected rural farming communities to improve cereal production, including rice.

The final report of the U.N-backed International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), which was authored by 400 experts from across the world, was approved in mid-April at a meeting of governments and scientists in Johannesburg.

"The report called for greater participation of small-scale farming and for governments to rethink their prevailing agriculture structures,'' Lim Li Ching, the lead author for the Asia report to IAASTD, told IPS. ''This is because the traditional farming methods in this region were environmentally sustainable.''

The IAASTD report also called into question the Green Revolution, because the production of high yield rice during that period ''came with a huge environment cost,'' she added. ''The social and environmental cost of the Green Revolution in the region cannot be ignored.''

The Green Revolution was masterminded by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), based in Los Banos, the Philippines. To ensure high yields in rice cultivation at a time when there was an escalating demand for the grain, IRRI introduced high-yield rice seeds to be grown on an industrial scale, changing dramatically the landscape of rice cultivation in Asia.

During the Green Revolution, from 1968-81, high-yield rice varieties resulted in rice output increasing by 42 percent. But now, in retrospect, IRRI admits that the monoculture rice production did come with some costs.

"We are aware of the environmental lessons learnt from the Green Revolution,'' Duncan Macintosh, spokesman for IRRI, said in an IPS interview. ''The first Green Revolution occurred when there was no environmental movement. Back then, there was only one purpose: feeding people.''

Consequently, IRRI welcomes the findings of the IAASTD. ''We have no disagreement with that report,'' adds Macintosh. ''We need rice production systems that are environmentally safe and sound.'' (IPS)

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Global food crisis:

Causes and solutions

Today we embark on another topic which has filled our TV screens during the past few weeks: The global food crisis. Food prices have been going up around the world. Asia has been particularly affected because of the rise in the prices of rice, the region's staple.

Several reasons have been cited for the unprecedented rise in global food prices: The use of crops for biofuel, which has robbed the hungry of various food items. The rise in oil prices has also driven up food transport costs, which are reflected in the customers' bill. The changing climate patterns have adversely affected agriculture, as droughts and floods continue to destroy crops.

But what are the answers ? The Government has initiated the Api Wawamu Rata Nagamu (let us grow more food to develop the Nation) programme. Likewise, Governments around the world are proposing or implementing solutions to the food crisis. Many world leaders are also calling for a moratorium on biolfuels.

Do write in (less than 1,000 words) with your views on the subject and any solutions you espouse on 'Global Food Crisis: Causes and Solutions' on or before May 5, 2008 to Daily News Debate, Daily News, Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Limited, PO Box 1217, Colombo, or via e-mail to [email protected].