Half the world is starving and many are becoming hungrier and angrier. Millions more are impoverished daily. Many of these are poor mothers and children in poor nations of Africa and other developing countries.
The New Face of Hunger is not a stark picture of battered and malnourished children in Ethiopia. It is the rise of commodity prices and super inflation now biting all across the globe.
The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation predicted in October 2007: “If prices continue to rise, it would not be surprising if we began to see food riots.” World food prices have risen 45 percent in the last nine months and there are serious shortages of rice, wheat and maize, according to FAO.
Now for the first time in history, FAO is finding it hard to live to its Latin motto Fiat Panis or “Let there be bread.” So it is calling world leaders to a mouthy parley – Food Security, Climate Change and Bioenergy Summit in Rome, Italy, between 3 and 5 June 2008 to address the crisis.
Speaking in Dubai this week, Sir John Holmes, undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs and the UN’s emergency relief coordinator, said the problem was escalated by rising prices, food scarcity and soaring energy costs, further compounding the damaging effects of global warming.
The FAO food price index is at its highest level since 1990. Wheat and milk are untouchables to the poor while other agricultural commodities, including corn and meat, are trading higher than averages in 1990s.
Last November, FAO said world prices for most staple foods had led to double digit inflation in China (18%), Indonesia and Pakistan (13%), and 10% or more in Latin America, Russia and India, and the figures keep rising.
Retail price controls are creaping back to forestall social and political unrest as witnessed in Russia. In India, the second-largest rice producer in the world, the government has banned rice exports to save enough staple grain for her own people, depriving the rest of the world of more than four million tonnes of rice a year.
But no country is safe, not even America. Don’t be surprised, Uncle Sam, to wake up and find your favorite oat meal missing from the supermarket shelves, or its price makes it untouchable. And John Bull take notice, riots in London are always bloody.
Since 2007, food riots have been experienced in Mexico, India, Morocco, Egypt, China, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Uzbekistan, Indonesia, Yemen, Guinea, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Mauritania and Senegal…Several deaths have been reported in Haiti’s version of food riots as many more poor feast on mud cakes, just to survive!
Truly, the world has made steps back to the seventeenth century and the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when food riots were a reactionary form of collective action in protest of shortages and an unacceptable inflation in the price of basic necessities like foodstuffs.
Blame climate change, failing science or capitalism, but inflation is biting hard and food is becoming, sadly, a preserve of the rich.
In order for riots to break out the whole food supply doesn’t have to be wiped out. It just has to be threatened sufficiently, according to experts.
What is science doing about this? Is food as a basic necessity too commercialized that the poor cannot access it? Are world governments doing enough to address this crisis?
Have we got our priorities wrong? Is the world’s quest for cheaper sources of energy to blame when we allow the diversion of crops and farmland to producing fuel instead of food? Bio-fuels or food?
We are all trying to find the answers as the world continues to starve and more battle lines drawn daily.
Resources and further reading:
FAO: Steps to Reduce Food Prices, Guardian: Global Food Crisis, TIME: Food-Price Crisis
Photo credit: Mr. Kris via Flickr
Who told you that Ethiopia was the face of Hunger? Why not Kosovo? Why not Somalia? Why not Louisiana? Why not China? Why not India? Why not Inner City America?
I am sick and tired of people comparing Ethiopia to hunger and famine. Perhaps you should go and visit the country. Millions have died in China due to famine in the 1970′s but no one is saying China is a face of famine where more people have died. People are starving in North Korea, yet it is always Ethiopia that gets mentioned. And how about you Mr. Okolo an African about where you came from, aren’t people eating rats?
That may be one of the most insensitive comments I’ve ever read.
And, to be clear, Sam’s point seems to be that hunger is rampant in all the countries you name, and more.
Revelation 6:6, unfortunately it will get worse, all these things as ever were long ago predicted in the Bible and with everyone coming true, not much left now to be fulfilled.
Read Matthew 24 and Luke 21, and then look at the News headlines every day and suddenly you think, hello, this guy (me) is not nuts, he has a point, earthquakes are increasing and floods and hurricanes and tornadoes and floods and conflicts and famine and so on.
The more we go away from the one true God, creator because we’d rather live our way, the more the earth shall fall apart.
There are frightening times ahead.
The key though is still Israel and to look at what is going on:
Zechariah 12:2 “Behold, I will make Jerusalem a cup of reeling to all the surrounding peoples, and on Judah also will it be in the siege against Jerusalem.
3 It will happen in that day, that I will make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all the peoples. All who burden themselves with it will be severely wounded, and all the nations of the earth will be gathered together against it.
We see this today all nations so concerned with peace, when the Bible says there shall never be any until Yeshua (Jesus) returns, it’s a con, and sadly the people in government in Israel are falling for it.
Ask yourself this, has it gotten better in Gaza since Israel left, no, have they stopped attacking with rockets, no.
I could write pages to prove my, sorry prove the Bible’s point and how genuine it is.
Some related links that might interest:
No Water Means No Food
Food Shortages Herald “New Era Of Hunger”
It may interest Solomon that Hunger and Anger in the Time of Food Riots bears an allegory to Gabriel García Márquez’s novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, a title that may be a metaphor for the disease of social irresponsibility.
It would therefore be socially irresponsible to deny that hunger and lack of water is a serious problem in Africa, Ethiopia included. We cannot forget the good work Sir Bob Geldof and Midge Ure (remember Live Aid)and Kenyan photojournalist, late Mohamed “Mo” Amin did for starving Ethiopian children in 1984/85. Amin died in 1996 on the shores of Ethiopia in a plane hijacking, once again on his way to cover the country for her children’s sake. Senior George Bush once said of him: “Millions are alive today because Mohamed Amin risked his life time and again…” The Interlink Publishing House said his work on Ethiopia as part of the “We Are the World” campaign was so compelling and inspired a collective global conscience.
Have you ever noticed that conflict and poverty are important causes of hunger? See: http://www.unu.edu/unupress/unupbooks/uu22we/uu22we0j.htm and http://www.derrickjensen.org/mittal.html
Why is the Horn of Africa a famine and hunger “blackspot”, according to the UN World Food Programme?
Ethiopia’s difference with North Korea or China was that its Communist leaders accepted the rallying call of humanity to save lives, and many were saved. Instead of denying the stark reality of hunger, collectively, we must deny famine (and hunger) a future in Ethiopia, and elsewhere. But there still are good, uplifting stories from Ethiopia: http://www.institutenotes.org/2008/02/alleviating-foo.html
Blame biofuels.
When I read of the famine and food shortages in other countries and the rising food prices and difficult times ahead for the poor in this country, the first thing that comes to mind is how much food and other resources we waste. The United States wastes more resources per capita than any other country.
When you are in the supermarket, look how much meat, fish and poultry they throw away every day in order to display it “fresh”. If the was meat frozen immediately at the time it was processed and left that way until it is ready to be used, it would stay good for months. A great deal of fresh produce is thrown away because it is slightly imperfect there was more than could be sold. Stores dispose of large amounts of usable produce when food banks in the same cities don’t have enough to go around. It’s ridiculous.
There are also methods of making fresh foods last longer, such as irradiation. It’s been given a bad rap. But, there are many people looking for a way justify their group’s agenda and they deliberately ignore the big picture. People are hungry and each and every one of us could do something about it if we would just FOCUS on the main problem. Ending the waste. Tell your grocer and tell your government that we have to stop wasting stuff in order to make certain that there is enough food and other resources for everyone.
If we don’t, the future looks pretty grim for all of us.