How we think about the global food crisis

I was really disappointed, when watching the BBC’s US newsfeed this evening to hear the two evidently well-fed white-guy anchors talking about the mounting global food crisis in ill-informed and patronizing terms. One of them said something like, “It looks as though it could cause hunger and even perhaps a degree of social unrest.” No recognition there of the desperate straits that millions of families in the low-income world are already living in, and the imminence of not just “hunger” but actual megadeaths from starvation… and not just “social unrest”, but social collapse, war, and all the associated pestilence.
This editorial in the WaPo, back in March, wasn’t much better. It spoke only of the possibility of some people in what is still coyly called “the developing world” being pushed into “privation or even hunger.” It also, quite unconscionably, failed to mention the relationship between US subsidies for the new “biofuel” industry and the current shortages of food grain around the world.
This week, however, the WaPo news section has what looks like a very informative series on the unfolding global food crisis Tomorrow, they’ll be publishing an article on “The problem with linking food and fuel.”
My recommendations for what citizens of rich countries should be doing and pushing for right now to address the crisis remain the same as I stated at the beginning of the month:. We should:

1. drastically reduce the amount of meat we all eat;
2. stop the subsidies for biofuels immediately; and
3. push our governments to stop the current financial speculation in basic foodstuffs.

Meanwhile, we should also do all we can to restore agricultural livelihoods to the millions of families in the low-income world who have been pushed off their land by the combination of (a) massive subsidies given to rich-world farmers, that has allowed them to dump their products on poor countries, and (b) the imposition on poor countries by the (rich-country-dominated) IMF of ‘structural adjustment programs’ that wiped out many supports those governments used to give to their farmers.
This is probably the first food crisis in history that the whole of a united humanity has faced together. Can we come through it with our basic relationships with each other and our sense of compassion and human decency all intact?
Remember, there is enough food for everyone in the whole world, if we are wise and generous in how we decide to distribute it among our fellow humans. And we have the know-how to make the harvests of the years ahead even better, with the right distribution of inputs including credit to small farmers around the world), and fair methods for distribution of the subsequent harvest.
Left to themselves, I don’t think the markets can solve this one. Governments need to come together on a basis of equality and mutual respect among all persons, rich or poor. In 2000, all the governments of the world came together to endorse the Millennium Development Goals. The very first of those goals included that the proportion of people suffering from hunger should be halved by 2015. The base-line for that goal was 1990, so in 2000 maybe it looked quite doable. Today, I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the world’s poorest, most vulnerable people think that “goal” was nothing but a sick, unserious promise.