Several of you were gobsmacked by, if not suspicious of, last month’s reference to data published in November’s Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine (furnished by its researcher, Mark Rank, PhD). The study (“Estimating the Risk of Food Stamp Use and Impoverishment During Childhood”)—based on the longest-running and most comprehensive U.S. longitudinal data set tracking patterns of income and welfare use (a 30 year study)—discovered that,
“Between the ages of 1 to 20 years, nearly half (49.2%) of all American children will, at some point, reside in a household that receives food stamps.
“American children are at a high risk of encountering a spell during which their families are in poverty and food insecure as indicated through their use of food stamps. Such events have the potential to seriously jeopardize a child’s overall health.”
On Monday, USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS) released its annual report on Household Food Security in the U.S., which revealed that
“[I]n 2008, 17 million households [49 million Americans or better put, 1-in-6 people] were food insecure [that's code for: went hungry]. This is an increase from 13 million households, or 11.1 percent, in 2007. The 2008 figures represent the highest level observed since nationally representative food security surveys were initiated in 1995.”
So you have a trending long view that doesn’t even account for these recent findings—namely that the current recession resulted in a 45% increase in the number of people in the U.S. who went hungry in one year (from 2007 to 2008). Consider that in 2008, the unemployment rate maxed out at 7.2%; October 2009 marked the twenty-second consecutive monthly decline in jobs. The nation’s unemployment rate is now 10.2 percent (15.7 percent for African Americans), the highest it has been in twenty-six years (and by the way, the longest losing streak on record dating back seventy years). Anyone care to guess what the record-high post-war unemployment rate was? 10.8%
Pure coincidence, but no less interesting that the 1-in-6 ratio of people who went hungry in 2008 is the same as the number of unemployed or underemployed workers last month.
One-in-six is also a global phenomenon. According to U.N. officials, roughly 1 billion people (1-in-6) are chronically hungry.
Monday kicked off a three day summit of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO); Ban Ki-Moon underscored the plight of children who do not have enough to eat:
- 6,000,000 children die of starvation every year; that is
- 17,000 children die of starvation every day; or put another way
- 1 child dies of starvation every five seconds.
Brazilian president, Ignacio Lula Da Silva, said
“In the face of the threat of an international financial collapse, caused by irresponsible speculation and…fiscalization of the system, world leaders did not hesitate in spending hundreds of billions of dollars to save banks. With less than half of that, it would be possible to eradicate hunger in the whole world.”
Jacques Diouf, director-general of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, estimated that it would take $44 billion per year to end hunger globally.
“We have the technical means and the resources to eradicate hunger from the world so it is now a matter of political will, and political will is influenced by public opinion.”
This is not my opinion, this is fact: According to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, the U.S. has spent on average about $265 million per day in Afghanistan since the invasion of that country in 2001. Five months of military spending by the U.S. (as sole contributor) would meet Diouf’s goal.
Appallingly, only hours after summit began, some 60 heads of state and dozens of ministers rejected the U.N.’s call to commit $44 billion annually for agricultural development in these nations. The final declaration also omitted a pledge, sought by the United Nations, to eradicate hunger by 2025.
Of course you know that this is not a supply challenge—there’s plenty of food (remember, we lead the world in genetically modified agricultural technology). This is a poverty issue, a gender issue and age issue (60% of the hungry are women and girls). It is exacerbated by a shrinking welfare state and government subsidizing corporations by privatizing social safety nets.
There’s another way that governments enable the private sector to capitalize on the hunger crisis: land grabs. GRAIN is a small international non-profit organization that works to support small farmers and social movements in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems. This statement was presented in Rome this week:
Investors are colluding with governments to take control of tens of millions of hectares of prime farmland in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Governments pushing these deals, such as Saudi Arabia or South Korea, see outsourced food production as a new strategy to feed their own people without relying on international trade. Private investors see agricultural land in emerging economies as a new source of guaranteed returns in light of ongoing high food prices. Either way, this farmland grab is turning the food crisis into an opportunity for even more profits as the expansion of export-oriented agribusiness is at the heart of it. More than $100 billion is on the table, and over 40 million hectares have already been acquired from Ethiopia to Indonesia. Small scale farmers are losing critical access to land and water, and local communities will be further cut off from access to food. Yet they are usually kept completely in the dark about these deals, without any involvement in the decisions that affect lands they have cultivated for generations. The implications for the global food system are dramatic.
Take for instance, China. While self-sufficient in food at the moment, it has a huge population, its agricultural lands have been disappearing to industrial development and its water supplies are under serious stress. With 40% of the world’s farmers but only 9% of the world’s farmland, it should surprise no one that food security is high on the Chinese government’s agenda. And with more than $1.8 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, China has deep pockets from which to invest in its own food security abroad.
Through China’s new geopolitical diplomacy, and the government’s aggressive ‘Go Abroad’ outward investment strategy, some 30 agricultural cooperation deals have been sealed in recent years to give Chinese firms access to ‘friendly country’ farmland in exchange for Chinese technology, training and infrastructure development funds.
“In the next three years, China will organize 50 groups of agricultural experts to Africa for transferring and disseminating agro-technology and for putting into place a system of agro-technology promotion among African countries…China will continue to encourage competent and reputable agro-businesses to invest in Africa, and transfer and deploy China’s technology and managerial expertise in agriculture. China continues to identify infrastructure as a priority for China-Africa cooperation and will intensify investments in infrastructure projects across Africa.”
The day that the food starts to run out in the world may come far more quickly than most of us imagine. The climate crisis is already arriving far more quickly than scientists expected and proving far more dangerous. One of the most comprehensive models of the impact of climate change, carried out in 2007 by William R Cline, predicts that crop productivity in the developing world is likely to decline drastically—by 21 per cent over the next 80 years.
Many impoverished governments in sub-Saharan Africa are sorely tempted by the offer of money up-front; they are letting go of land needed to feed their own populations. The Sudanese government has sold a 99-year lease on 1.5 million hectares of prime farmland to the Gulf states, Egypt and South Korea. But Sudan is also the world’s largest recipient of foreign aid, with 5.6 million of its citizens dependent on food packages from abroad. All principles of basic justice tell us that Sudan should be using this land to feed its own people.
If any of you read (or saw) Michael Pollan’s, The Botany of Desire, the world destroys its biodiversity at its peril, for it is hugely important to have genetically varied populations and species-rich natural and agricultural ecosystems, particularly at times of environmental stress. Biodiversity plays a crucial role in supplying the raw materials and the genes that make possible the emergence of the new plant varieties on which we all depend. Such new varieties will be urgently required as the world heats up. Outside investors, however (working with large private companies), are destroying existing ecosystems and creating huge areas of monoculture crops dependent on chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
Two years ago many financial players—the investment houses that manage workers’ pensions, private equity funds, hedge funds, big grain traders and so on—saw that the sub-prime mortgage bubble was about to burst and moved money into the safer commodities market. Although there was no real shortage of food, food prices (especially of cereals, but also of dairy and meat) rose dramatically. In July of this year, Der Spiegel covered the first investors’ conference on the emerging worldwide market in farmland—Global AgInvesting 2009, held in New York (it was translated here). I’ll end this post, just as the article did, but with one big reminder/reference back to FAO’s director-general: “We have the resources to eradicate hunger from the world so it is now a matter of political will, and political will is influenced by public opinion.” Let yours be known!
“[O]ne of the speakers is reciting numbers to illustrate how fast the global population is growing: By 154 people per minute [less the 20 that will die of starvation in that time], 9,240 per hour or 221,760 per day. And each one of them wants to eat.”
