On the food riots
If you didn’t already know, there have been riots over rising food costs and shortages of staple foods over the past few weeks. If this is a shock to you, it is probably because it has been largely ignored in the media. I am by no means an expert on what is going on, so I’ll include excerpts of two articles, one in AlterNet by Anuradha Mittal of the Oakland Institute, and an interview on Democracy Now! of Raj Patal, author of Stuffed and Starved.
Mittal:
World food prices rose by 39 percent in the last year. Rice alone rose to a 19-year high in March — an increase of 50 per cent in two weeks alone — while the real price of wheat has hit a 28-year high.
As a result, food riots erupted in Egypt, Guinea, Haiti, Indonesia, Mauritania, Mexico, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen. For the 3 billion people in the world who subsist on $2 a day or less, the leap in food prices is a killer. They spend a majority of their income on food, and when the price goes up, they can’t afford to feed themselves or their families.
Analysts have pointed to some obvious causes, such as increased demand from China and India, whose economies are booming. Rising fuel and fertilizer costs, increased use of bio-fuels and climate change have all played a part.
But less obvious causes have also had a profound effect on food prices.
Over the last few decades, the United States, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have used their leverage to impose devastating policies on developing countries. By requiring countries to open up their agriculture market to giant multinational companies, by insisting that countries dismantle their marketing boards and by persuading them to specialize in exportable cash crops such as coffee, cocoa, cotton and even flowers, they have driven the poorest countries into a downward spiral.
In the last thirty years, developing countries that used to be self-sufficient in food have turned into large food importers. Dismantling of marketing boards that kept commodities in a rolling stock to be released in event of a bad harvest, thus protecting both producers and consumers against sharp rises or drops in prices, has further worsened the situation.
Patal:
For a start, there were just bad harvests last year. Some people say that this is a sign that climate change is biting in agricultural economies. And it’s certainly the case that there was some very bad weather, particularly in Australia, last year. So there’s a low level of crops available.
But on top of that, there are a few other factors. One of them, one of the issues, is that governments, particularly the US government, is very keen on biofuels. Biofuels are fuels that are derived from corn, from sugar cane, and they’re being presented as a way of achieving energy independence. The trouble is, of course, that the biofuels drive up the price of these commodities, which means that poor people can’t afford them anymore.
On top of that, you’ve got an increasing demand for meat in developing countries. And as people get richer in those countries and they shift to something that looks more like an American diet, you have a situation where the grains are being diverted away from poor people and into livestock. So, again, that’s driving up the price of grains.
And finally, I think one of the major issues is, of course, the price of oil. I mean, one of the problems with the way our food reaches us today is that it is industrial, it is very fossil fuel-intensive, not just to the distance the food travels, but also in the fertilizer. You know, fossil fuel is required to produce fertilizer, pesticide, these sorts of things. And so, when the price of oil is over $100 a barrel, that combines with all the other factors to make a perfect storm where food prices are absolutely beyond the means of the poorest people.
My general ideological, academic, and personal understanding of these events is really no more than that something big is in the works. The present is a product of the past, and a number of ill-considered policies in the past may be starting to catch up to us. I see basically three things going on:
1) Good food is being wasted or diverted into other projects. This is obvious; as Americans we probably waste nearly as much food as we actually consume. Policies are in place to protect us from disease, but they also have the unintended effect of keeping consumable and safe food from those who need it. The experience of Food Not Bombs underscores the paradox of these policies. Even “socially responsible” stores like Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods and most restaurants often throw out fresh foods at the end of the day–this is day-old, perfectly eatable bread or bagels–and on top of that, lock their dumpsters. Police also scope out dumpsters and make sure no one is “stealing” food. Imagine that! Society is so protective of its own waste that it cannot permit others in need to use it for sustenance. Food Not Bombs and other groups seek to reclaim wasted food and use that to feed the hungry, but they still face constant harassment from police and governments who strangely enough would rather see good food rot in a landfill than feed humans. Yet our obsession with waste and cleanliness reaches a point of hypocrisy when you consider just how terrible the conditions actually are in which food is processed and prepared–the cockroach and mice problem at UW’s Memorial Union is enough evidence of that, or the “quota” of cigarette butts and rat feces that is allowed into some foodstuffs.
Additionally, a lot of food now is being diverted from the hungry and poor and towards more profitable endeavors: mainly the production of biofuels and the production of meat. Both of these are renowned for their inefficiency; basically, the amount of energy put into their production is greater than the actual payoff. In the case of biofuels, the amount of gasoline and power used to convert grains and sugars into ethanol is considerably more than the actual gasoline and electricity saved by using ethanol. The only reason it is even considered is the political pandering of politicians to rural votes and to agricorps. But this diversion creates demand, which raises the price of foodstuffs, mainly grain and sugarcane, and additionally raises fuel costs, further raising the cost of food (by raising the cost of transporting food).
Meat is seen as an important part of diets outside of the United States and Europe, where synthetic food production isn’t an advanced, and meat becomes the main source of protein for many. But to produce beef in the commercial market requires intensive use of grains in the raising of cattle: the amount of food consumed in the production of beef is far greater than the volume of food obtained from slaughtered cattle.
2) Thus far, economic and food aid problems have contributed more to poverty and hunger than they have helped. Paternalistic policies like the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and imperialistic, opportunistic organizations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and World Trade Organization (WTO), have reduced the access that the poor have to the land. Subsistence farming is being stomped out in favor of large commercial agriculture. USAID and the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture (AoA) have resulted in crop dumping, where Western governments subsidize domestic agricultural production destined for export; using economic and political pressure, they force down tariffs and trade barriers; and then, using the economic might of the large GNP countries, undersell subsistence and small farmers.
Additionally, the economic power of agricorps like Monsanto, local corruption, and trade pacts like the WTO’s Trade-Related Intellectual Property (TRIPS) agreement have–amazingly enough–copyrighted ancient seed varieties. This has forced small farmers to stop the sustainable and responsible agricultural practices they are used to, instead leaving no other option but to use non-reproducing, un-saveable “terminator” seeds and extensive amounts of fertilizers. Very recently, this has led to deep debts for farmers, especially in India and Southeast Asia, where farmers have taken to committing suicide with those same fertilizers.
Other trade pacts have served to force farmers off their land. NAFTA required that Mexico revise Article 27 of their Constitution, which previously granted agrarian rights. The use of ejidos, or communal land holdings, was eliminated in many parts of the country. And the Drug War is often used as justification to further remove peasants and small farmers from their land. The IMF and World Bank’s predatory loaning practices has advanced this in other parts of the world, through conditions for loans, through incurred debts, and then, finally, through austerity measures intended to alleviate and repay those debts. The greatest irony is that, after small tracts of land are taken from peasants and small farmers and agglomerated into large estates, much of the land goes unused; but attempts at reoccupying the land are thwarted with violence from paramilitaries, police, and army units.
Just like with the example of dumpsters mentioned above, the rich and full-of-stomach use their economic, political, and sometimes military might to prevent and further hamper the ability of the poor and hungry to access food and grow their own food. After leaving the land, often the only choice left, the only alternative to starvation, is work in sweatshops–this also seeks to drive global wages further down, further prohibiting cheap access to food.
3) It should be painfully obvious to all by now the poverty of the “free market” and capitalism as a whole. It simply is incapable of distributing goods efficiently and equally. What we are studying today is the result of neoliberal policies designed to redistribute wealth and resources upward. We have reached the breaking point where the global poor have nothing more to hand to the wealthy. Now it is their turn. At risk of being ideological, this is the time when the people of the world will take back what is theirs, if it is not willingly given to them.
Activists, academics, opportunists, and politicians will surely use the food riots as justification for their own platforms, linking genuine outrage and spontaneous rebellion to their own objectives. There will be articles in newspapers using this to make the case for state socialism. Others will use these inconvenient riots to promote their fight against global warming. Still others will use it to promote their anarchist and ecological agendas. I of course am guilty of seeing food scarcity as support for my own ideas. But I would also recommend that we treat it only as it is, and nothing more. It is part of something greater, to be sure, but we cannot run the risk of placing ourselves in the vanguard of global uprising, attempting to use this widespread suffering to advance our own goals. It is part of something larger, as of yet still misunderstood, which I hope will be clear in time. There is a transformation taking place in the South which the North will be incapable of harnessing. We should not challenge it, but seek to understand the causes in our own lives in the US and look for ways to act in solidarity.
Recommended additional reading
Raj Patal, “Stuffed and Starved: the Hidden Battle for the World Food System”
Naomi Klein, “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”
Ha-Joon Chang, “Reclaiming Development: An Economic Policy Handbook for Activists and Policymakers”
From Behind the Orange Curtain 