Global Food Security

As my late Christmas gift to you, I present some things to consider this New Year, convenient and hackneyed, numbered 1 - 4. I hope it will - if nothing else - serve as a distraction if you, along with the rest of the West, wonder what will happen to jobs and bank accounts and car companies, and await a new administration promising something better. I believe something better is possible, but it will require a radical shift in ideology and priorities at the personal and political level. I am certainly no expert, but I’ll do my layman’s best to lay out some of what we should be considering in 2009.

1. The Global Food Crisis is nothing new.

The global food crisis has been going on for much longer than this transient financial ‘crisis,’ and is of much greater consequence, although few seem to care that much, if we count amount of news coverage as an indicator of our priorities. Thirty-seven countries, all of them of course in the developing world, are right now at massive risk of widespread famine. This is due to a number of factors, including world financial instability, natural disasters, and, most importantly, skyrocketing food prices, which restrict subsistence farmers from planting and prevent the extremely poor from purchasing the food that is available. UN Secretary-General Ban has termed this situation a “moral outrage,” albeit one which doesn’t garner nearly as many cable news headlines as, say, Detroit CEO’s choosing to fly commercial.

2. The financial crisis has just made things worse.

Oxfam reports that the Wall Street meltdown of 2008 has sent an additional 119 million people to live below the poverty line. Already nearly a billion people went undernourished in 2007, and now these negative developments threaten the very fabric of communities in Sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere as family units struggle to survive, already floundering under the burden of HIV/AIDS and malaria epidemics. Huge amounts of people are suffering, while most of the hideous details are hidden deep inside the newspaper, where few will find it - unless they’re looking.

3. It’s (at least partly) our fault.

Though I am leaving out a great deal of complexity in this simple pronouncement, it nonetheless goes without saying that the broader forces at work in these tragedies are more or less a direct result of the alleged ‘free market’ and American policies that place corporate cronies in very powerful places. Again, this is a simplification of a very complex situation - but is essentially true. Globalization and a short-sighted oil dependent policies have finally shown themselves to be disastrous. US agriculture corporations essentially run the world food system, and are, by design, concerned with feeding profits, rather than feeding the hungry. It has been this way for a very long time, and the domination of Western finance on local food economies in developing countries is close to being beyond dispute. Think I’m overstating the case? If you do a little research (start here) your inquiries will also be rewarded with thousands of horror stories: indigenous farmers pressured to produce cash crops or American farmers asked to destroy food to keep prices high. Things like corn ethanol are merely microcosms of an ideology gone awry. This is food wasted, while people literally starve to death.

4. The next administration will have the power to change things - with our help.

The UN estimates that $40 billion a year is needed over the next three to five years to right the sinking ship. Try as they might, charities like World Vision and Oxfam are simply not capable of raising this sort of money. But the government is. (See: $700 billion bailout.) Throwing money at a problem is usually not the solution. But it is certainly better than doing nothing, and while we can raise ungodly amounts of cash for Merril Lynch and Bank of America, certainly we can throw a little money to those who cannot afford a cup of rice. Wall Street and Main Street will be fine. What about the places where the streets have no name? Or where they have no streets at all?

Which brings us to forward motion, already put into action by Senators Lugar and Casey: The Global Food Security Act, S.3529. It is an update of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, and a forceful plan to “promote food security and…improve emergency response to food crises.” It includes the appointment of a Special Coordinator for Global Food Security, responsible directly to the President, as well as a board of advisors composed of members from NGOs and Universities. The ‘food czar’ will be the point person in coordinating NGO and government (both foreign and domestic) involvement into a comprehensive policy to prevent such catastrophes as we see occurring today. The only drawback is the paltry sum, $500 million, appropriated for such a panoramic cause. It is at least a step in the right direction, and one that will place global hunger squarely in the priorities of the President. Congress won’t consider it until next year, which is why we must get behind it now.

While we were reading the Times, the Eternities slipped by unnoticed. It is a humiliating shame, because those who run the West hold a negative birthright: the world owes us nothing. We owe the world everything.

Our middle-class existence is not an excuse for hubris, but rather a prerogative for altruism. Moved to act? Call your Congressperson. Send an email to the President-Elect, asking him to get behind the Global Food Security Act.
Support groups like Oxfam and the World Food Programme as they so headily and steadily attempt to right one of the grievous wrongs of our generation.

Sources:
Compassion
Washington Post
The Nation
http://www.friendsofwfp.org/site/pp.asp?c=7oIJLSOsGpF&b=4701003
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=s110-3529

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