Food security: Bread and freedom | Editorial

The cries of ‘bread and freedom’, heard across the Arab world the past two weeks, are not mere rhetoric The cries of “bread and freedom”, heard across the Arab world during the past two weeks, are not mere rhetoric. The price of bread has always been as powerful a driver of revolt as the denial of liberty. The latest reminder of this has come in Tunisia, Egypt and Jordan, where the lethal combination of joblessness and sharply rising prices for basic foodstuffs helped to set off the current protests. In Davos last week, the leaders of global capitalism could be heard musing about how far such unrest might spread. The revolts will cause sleepless nights in many presidential palaces. Their wider effect, though, is to focus political attention on the upward spiral in world energy and food prices. The revolts mean the warnings of a new food crisis are being taken more seriously. Food security is back on the agenda in ways that echo 2008, when it was estimated that rising food prices set off violence in 30 countries . It is to the last government’s credit that, at that time, it commissioned an important study on food sustainability. So the publication of that report – The Future of Food and Farming , written by Sir John Beddington , the former chief scientific adviser – could hardly be more timely. Working out how to feed a world population that may have grown to 9 billion (or even 11 billion) within the next 40 years, at a time when a sixth of the current population of 6.5 billion already goes hungry (and another billion is malnourished) is a mammoth task. But finding a way to do it that does not exacerbate climate change, nor otherwise do lasting damage to the environment, is arguably the single greatest collective challenge the world faces. The Beddington report is an admirably clear account of the difficulty of devising an affordable, equitable and sustainable solution. It rightly identifies the need to contain the demand for resource-intensive foods (also known as meat), the problem of avoidable waste, and the weaknesses of political and economic governance of the food industry. It cannot be faulted for its careful mapping of a complex problem. But the report lacks an answer to the enduring difficulty posed by the power politics of the globalised food industry: food security and free markets can be uneasy bedfellows in the absence of social safety nets provided by strong institutions. Higher prices for agricultural products are not necessarily bad: in cash crops like cocoa and cotton, they can transform the balance sheets of some of sub-Saharan Africa’s poorest countries. But most countries of sub-Saharan Africa are net importers of grain. They are now suffering the consequences of the new volatility of cereal-price speculation on the world’s commodity markets . This magnifies every change in price and distorts the relationship between production and prices. Nor is that the only area where the needs of poor countries conflict with the desires of the rich. Demand for biofuels is reducing the amount of land available for food and driving up the price. So is the strategic land grab mounted by fast-growing countries like China and South Korea, investing in political stability by ensuring food supplies. The report rightly highlights the weaknesses of infrastructure – poor roads, lack of storage – but can no more impose an answer to them than it can solve the problems of global distribution. It is right to argue that agriculture subsidies in rich countries distort food production; but it pays little attention to the question of national food security (and the environmental impacts of food imports). It notes the concentration of corporate power in the food supply chain, but argues that the market can be left to sort it out for itself. It puts its faith both in promoting agricultural research and best practice in poorer countries, and in the introduction of GM crops and cloned animals in the richer ones. In short, the Beddington report has analysed a failing system and then wanly concluded that what will work best is more of the same. Egypt Middle East guardian.co.uk

Posted by on February 1, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry