Food under threat

Carlos A. SÁNCHEZ

Recalling a title of Nobel Literature laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) director general, Jacques Diouf, said in Madrid on January 26 that the situation of food insecurity was “the chronicle of an announced tragedy.”

With a diverse degree of restlessness, UN agencies, as well as news reports and analysis are publishing since the beginning of the year about a fall in world food production in 2009, in several important producing countries in the planet.

Weather conditions have affected agricultural production

As there were not enough problems affecting the agricultural sector of the economy, there is the threat now of drought in most of those regions.

Before representatives of a hundred countries, Diouf said “it will be difficult to achieve the goal of hunger reduction” due to the failure to meet the commitments in that area and recalled that in three summits, that of 1996, 2002 and the one in 2008 have reviewed the situation of food crisis affecting almost one billion -953 million people- he said.

At the first High Level Meeting on Food Security, it was warned of the risk “of not reducing half the hunger in the world by 2015 and the possibility this goal would not be met until 2050.”

Diouf stressed the case of the Subsaharian countries that add 24 million to the number of hungry persons, with low production of basic products, the increase in food imports and the drawback in agricultural development.

Fall in investment

For his part, the Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation, Miguel Angel Moratinos, affirmed it is an “unquestionable fact that in the first decade of the 21st century about one billion persons suffer from hunger every day without access to an adequate nutrition.”

Among the causes of that worsening he mentioned the fall in investment in the agricultural sector, energy prices, transformation of the demand, financial and mercantile speculation as well as the climate change.

“Seventy-five percent of the three billion poor in the world live in rural places and scarcely survive from agriculture and this activity only receives four percent of the aid for development.”

The lack of credit will worsen the situation of farmers. Their solvency to buy seeds and fertilizers in 2008-2009 was bad enough and that will limit production throughout the world. The effects of drought in the world will also be extended due to the lower quantity of seeds and fertilizers used for the crops, say some news services on Internet.

Low prices by the end of 2008 deterred new crop plantations in 2009. In Kansas, for example, farmers planted 3.6 million hectares, the lowest in half a century. The planting of wheat this year has dropped by about 1.6 million hectares in all of the United States and by about 445,000 hectares in Canada.

Thus, even if drought-related losses are not included, the US, Canada and other food producing countriese face a lower agricultural production in 2009.

Europe will not compensate the food deficit. Europe, the only great agricultural region relatively exempted from drought, not only will not compensate the food deficit, but expects a great fall in its own harvests.

The world is headed to a drop in agricultural production from 20 to 40 percent, depending on the severity and duration of the current global droughts. The food-producing nations are imposing restrictions to food exports. Food prices will rocket and millions will die of hunger, in poor countries with food deficit.

Change empty stomachs for gas tanks

In the issue of environmental protection, George W. Bush only came up with the idea of incentivating the production of ethanol. a fuel based on basic foods for the majority of the planet’s inhabitants as corn, wheat, rice, soy and sugar cane, among others and thus save increasing percentages of contaminating gasoline by substituting it with a less damaging fuel and, also, renewable, no matter if that implies using food crops as basic raw material desperately needed by millions of persons.

According to estimates given by the US Department pf Agriculture, it is expected that by 2017, the hungry of the world will add up to 1.2 billion persons.

The situation is dramatic when reports indicate that world population increases by 90 to 100 million per year and the products destined to their stomachs are being diverted to fuel production.

Over the last five years, the United States cut its food donations by 50 percent, says a study by Fortunato Esquivel (ALAI,America Latina en Movimiento, September 4, 2008. The fuel business will kill the Third World by hunger.)

China, by far the amost populated country in the world, considers the amount of biofuels it produces does not influence on food price increases, by indicating its ethanol production from corn is very small, only 1.3 million tons, compared to the US that destines 19.8 million tons.

The situation seems to get worse, as North Americans are planning on producing 110 million tons of biofuels by the year 2020, which will severely affect world supplies.