[div class="excerpt"]

The “world food crisis” of 2007-08 was the tip of an iceberg. Hunger and food crises are endemic to the modern world, and the eruption of a rapid increase in food prices provided a fresh window on this cultural fact. Much like Susan George’s well-known observation that famines represent the final stage in an extended process of deepening vulnerability and fracturing of social reproduction mechanisms, this food “crisis” represents the magnification of a long-term crisis of social reproduction stemming from colonialism, and was triggered by neoliberal capitalist development.1

The colonial era set in motion an extractive relation between Europe and the rest of the world, whereby the fruits of empire displaced non-European provisioning systems, as the colonies were converted into supply zones of food and raw materials to fuel European capitalism.

In recent history, liberalization policies have deepened the conversion of the global South into a “world farm” for a minority of global consumers, concentrated in the global North and in strategic states and urban enclaves of the South. The combined appropriation and redirection of food production and circulation underlies the socially constructed food scarcity and permanent hunger experienced by, at conservative estimate, nearly one billion humans (approaching 14 percent of the world’s population).

The “agflation” that brought this crisis to the world’s attention at the turn of 2008 saw the doubling of maize prices, wheat prices rising by 50 percent, and rice increasing by as much as 70 percent, bringing the world to a “post-food-surplus era.”2 In an article in the Economist titled “The End of Cheap Food,” the editors noted that, by the end of 2007, the magazine’s food-price index reached its highest point since originating in 1845. Food prices had risen 75 percent since 2005, and world grain reserves were at their lowest, at fifty-four days.3 According to the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), agflation from rising agrofuels production “would lead to decreases in food availability and calorie consumption in all regions of the world, with Sub-Saharan Africa suffering the most.”4

The current conjuncture is associated with the intensification of energy and food demand in an age of peak oil. A rising class of one billion new consumers is emerging in twenty “middle-income” countries “with an aggregate spending capacity, in purchasing power parity terms, to match that of the U.S.”5 This group includes new members of the OECD — South Korea, Mexico, Turkey, and Poland, in addition to China and India (with 40 percent of this total) — and the symbols of their affluence are car ownership and meat consumption. These two commodities combine — through rising demand for agrofuels and feed crops — to exacerbate food price inflation, as their mutual competition for land has the perverse effect of rendering each crop more lucrative, at the same time as they displace land used for food crops.

Simultaneously, financial speculation has compounded the problem. For example, the price of rice surged by 31 percent on March 27, 2008, and wheat by 29 percent on February 25, 2008. The New York Times of April 22, 2008, reported that, “This price boom has attracted a torrent of new investment from Wall Street, estimated to be as much as $130 billion.” According to the same article, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission noted that “Wall Street funds control a fifth to a half of the futures contracts for commodities like corn, wheat and live cattle on Chicago, Kansas City and New York exchanges. On the Chicago exchanges…the funds make up 47 percent of long-term contracts for live hog futures, 40 percent in wheat, 36 percent in live cattle and 21 percent in corn.”6

Conventional explanations bring together the pressure on food cropland with extreme weather patterns and ecological stress. In November 2007, as summed up by John Vidal in the Guardian,

The UN Environment Program said the planet’s water, land, air, plants, animals and fish stocks were all in “inexorable decline.” According to the U.N.’s World Food Program (WFP) fifty-seven countries, including twenty-nine in Africa, nineteen in Asia, and nine in Latin America, have been hit by catastrophic floods. Harvests have been affected by drought and heat waves in south Asia, Europe, China, Sudan, Mozambique and Uruguay.7

With respect to agrofuels, there is in addition the so-called “knock-on” effect, outlined by the OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook 2007-2016, where expanding U.S. corn production for ethanol reduces oilseed acreage, such that “oilseed prices then also increased as a result of tightening supplies and this price strength was enhanced by rising demand for meals as a cereal feed substitute and increasing demand for vegetable oils for bio-diesel production.”8 In these terms there appears to be a perfect storm.

The “perfect storm” metaphor, however, suggests a conjunction of seemingly uncontrollable forces, with transformations in demand threatening and threatened by dwindling supplies.9 For example, the Financial Times editorial of April 9, 2008, offered a simplistic economic view of problem and solution:

While the market may signal resource limits, the structure and politics of the market are ultimately responsible for this situation, and for its interpretation as requiring better market practices. And for this reason it was unsurprising that the crisis served as an opportunity for corporate and multilateral financial institutions to deepen their control and management of the global food system. In the meantime, governments with varying resources have resorted to food import liberalization, price controls and/or export controls on domestically produced food to quell civil unrest, and a global land grab has ensued as governments scramble to secure food supplies offshore.11 At bottom, however, rising food prices signal a more fundamental structural process at work, manifest in both famine and food riots — pheneomena with long genealogies.

http://www.monthlyreview.org/090713mcmichael.php[/quote]

A lot more....

That is an excellent article, and there are many more there on the food crisis.

Agriculture and Food in Crisis

In 2008 people woke up to a tsunami of hunger sweeping the world. Although the prospect of rising hunger has loomed on the horizon for years, the present crisis seemed to come out of the blue without warning. Food riots spread through many countries in the global South as people tried to obtain a portion of what appeared to be a rapidly shrinking supply of food, and many governments were destabilized.
The causes for the extraordinary spike in food prices in 2008, doubling over 2007 prices, brought together long-term trends, at work for decades, with a number of more recent realities.1 The most important long-term trends leading to current situation include:

* increased diversion of corn grain and soybeans to produce meat as the world’s per capita meat consumption doubled in about forty years. As much as 95 percent of calories are lost in the conversion of grain and soybeans to meat.

* decreased food production associated with poor countries adopting the neoliberal paradigm of letting the “free market” govern food production and distribution;

* widespread “depeasantization,” partially caused by neoliberal “reforms” and International Monetary Fund (IMF) mandated “structural adjustments,” as conditions forced peasant farmers off the land and into urban slums, where one-sixth of humanity now lives; and

* increasing concentration of corporate ownership and control over all aspects of food production, from seeds, pesticides, and fertilizers, to the grain elevators, processing facilities, and grocery stores.

http://www.monthlyreview.org/images/090701-mt-cartoon1.jpg

http://www.monthlyreview.org/090701magdoff-tokar.php

Food Wars

The food price crisis, according to proponents of peasant and smallholder agriculture, is not due to the failure of peasant agriculture but to that of corporate agriculture. They say that, despite the claims of its representatives that corporate agriculture is best at feeding the world, the creation of global production chains and global supermarkets, driven by the search for monopoly profits, has been accompanied by greater hunger, worse food, and greater agriculture-related environmental destabilization all around than at any other time in history.

Moreover, they assert that the superiority in terms of production of industrial capitalist agriculture is not sustained empirically. Miguel Altieri and Clara Nicholls, for instance, point out, that although the conventional wisdom is that small farms are backward and unproductive, in fact, “research shows that small farms are much more productive than large farms if total output is considered rather than yield from a single crop. Small integrated farming systems that produce grains, fruits, vegetables, fodder, and animal products outproduce yield per unit of single crops such as corn (monocultures) on large-scale farms.”31

When one factors in the ecological destabilization that has accompanied the generalization of capitalist industrial agriculture, the balance of costs and benefits lurches sharply towards the negative. For instance, in the United States, notes Daniel Imhoff,

[div class="excerpt"]the average food item journeys some 1300 miles before becoming part of a meal. Fruits and vegetables are refrigerated, waxed, colored, irradiated, fumigated, packaged, and shipped. None of these processes enhances food quality but merely enables distribution over great distances and helps increase shelf life.32

Industrial agriculture has created the absurd situation whereby “between production, processing, distribution, and preparation, 10 calories of energy are required to create just one calorie of food energy.”33 Conversely, it is the ability to combine productivity and ecological sustainability that constitutes a key dimension of superiority of peasant or small-scale agriculture over industrial agriculture.

Contrary to assertions that peasant and small-farm agriculture is hostile to technological innovation, partisans of small-scale or peasant-based farming assert that technology is “path dependent,” that is, its development is conditioned by the mode of production in which it is embedded, so that technological innovation under peasant and small-scale farming would take different paths than innovation under capitalist industrial agriculture.

But partisans of the peasantry have not only engaged in a defense of the peasant or smallholder agriculture. Vía Campesina and its allies have actually formulated an alternative to industrial capitalist agriculture, and one that looks to the future rather than to the past. This is the paradigm of food sovereignty, the key propositions of which are discussed elsewhere in this collection.[/quote]

http://www.monthlyreview.org/090706bello-baviera.php

Free Trade in Agriculture
A Bad Idea Whose Time Is Done

A number of principles should guide the establishment of a stronger framework for trade as part of a fairer and more sustainable food system. The following are informed by an international project of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Misereor (a development NGO), and the Wuppertal Institute (a German environmental think tank) called EcoFair Trade.8 They echo many of the points made by the four hundred experts who met as the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development in their final report:

1. Protect, promote, and fulfill the universal human right to food.

2. Respect and promote agriculture’s non-monetary roles. Agriculture plays a vital role not only in meeting material but also social, cultural, and environmental objectives. Food policies should respect goods that have no market price, such as air and water quality. They should also reflect the spiritual and cultural values associated with specific foods such as maize in Mexico, or rice in much of Asia. Agriculture and an understanding of the land (including the gathering of uncultivated plants) is essential for biological diversity, human health (medicinal knowledge of plants), resilience (knowing which seeds do best in what growing conditions), natural resource management, and so much more.

3. Build local food systems. Local food systems do not imply a prohibition on trade. This approach builds food security by starting at the local level, respecting environmental constraints, and paying attention to the overall demands made on the world’s resources (something ignored in a trade-dominated food system).

4. Privilege local knowledge and technologies. Not only will this promote biological and cultural diversity, it will also better ensure that humanity has the resources it needs to confront the uncertainty that climate change and the scarcity of energy and water will bring.

5. Create agricultural systems with lower carbon emissions. Agricultural production, land use, packaging, and transportation of food make industrialized agriculture and the associated food systems significant contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.

6. Cut waste. The Stockholm International Water Institute recently estimated that the world wastes about half the food it grows. With close to one billion living in hunger and the planet’s natural resources stretched as thin as they are, this is a problem that can and must be addressed with urgency.

7. Integrate trade policy into wider development planning. The WTO should not be apart from the rest of the multilateral system.

Principles and objectives matter: governments need to know what it is that their policies and laws are meant to build. But we have more than principles. There are also hundreds if not thousands of examples of how to build a fairer more resilient food system.

http://www.monthlyreview.org/090801murphy.php

Origins of the Food Crisis in India and Developing Countries

India has had a growing problem with food output and availability for the mass of the population since the inception of neoliberal economic reforms in 1991. A deep agricultural depression and rising unemployment rates resulting from “reform” policies have made the problem especially acute over the past decade. There has been a sharp decline in per capita grain output as well as grain consumption in the economy as a whole. Income has been shifting away from the majority towards the wealthy minority and a substantial segment of the population is being forced to eat less food and wear older clothing than before. This is exacerbated by the current global depression, which is further constraining mass consumption because of rising unemployment.

In a complex and changing scenario it is useful to distinguish the long-term and immediate factors giving rise to the food problem, which are not unique to India but affect other developing countries including China. Policies that divert food grains to feeding livestock take food away from the already poor through a dual route: increasingly unequal distribution of income (and food) both within developing countries and between advanced and developing countries. The latter route is strongly associated with a second contradiction: between food consumption and exports. Under free trade policies that pressure developing countries to remove barriers to trade and shift their land use increasingly to exports, there is a contradiction between food for domestic consumption versus exports for the benefit of others. Finally, agriculture’s growing reliance on energy presents a third contradiction. We will see how these circumstances, taken together, thoroughly refute many popular assumptions about the causes of rising global food prices.

...

The model of free trade and export specialization that has been thrust on developing countries now stands explicitly discredited. The question is where the developing countries are to go now, with the large-scale diversion of food grains to fuel production in the North and the resulting disappearance of global food stocks and food price inflation. For India there is only one alternative, to launch a campaign to grow more food with the same urgency that it had after the Second World War, because per capita food output has plunged back to the level of fifty years ago and it can only import now at an exorbitant price. While India, in the last fifteen years of neoliberal reforms and trade liberalization, has gone quite a long way along the same slippery path of falling agricultural investment and export focus that other smaller countries have followed for three decades, it is still in a position to reverse a worsening situation provided the goal of growing more food is addressed on an urgent basis and mass purchasing power is restored.

Fortunately India’s public procurement and distribution system has not been completely dismantled as in many other developing countries. This has the potential for protecting poor consumers, provided that it is revived on a larger scale. This requires appropriately higher procurement prices for crops including the commercial crops, and the active setting up of cooperative groups to reclaim waste land and to cultivate jointly for food production, as is being done in Kerala, a traditionally food-deficient state, with positive results. Farmers seem to be responding to the substantial rise in the central procurement price for wheat and rice, belatedly announced in late 2007, and there was some, though so far inadequate, revival of food grains output during 2007–08.

http://www.monthlyreview.org/090727patnaik.php