The gloomy gus of economics, the
Rev. Thomas Malthus, was the guy who put the dismal into the “dismal science,”
predicting that the market in homo sapiens would periodically seek equilibrium
through famine and widespread mayhem. Malthus didn’t foresee that humankind could
innovate its way out of the 19th-century numbers game: more people+limited
arable land=hunger and death. Our preindustrial ancestors eventually came up
with a new food formula: more people+better agricultural technology=good
eatin’.
It would seem, however, that
Malthus may have the last laugh (mirthless and sinister though it might be).
Food riots in Haiti and Africa, rice shortages in Asia, Sam’s Club quotas in
America, and anxiety-inducing U.N. and World Bank pronouncements highlight an
astonishing early 21st century extreme Malthusian makeover. Food prices are
escalating beyond the pocketbooks of the poor, and spot shortages even in the
industrialized world indicate a breakdown in the developed world’s capacity to
maintain adequate food supplies. The World Food Program currently monitors a
food crisis watch list of 30 nations and is seeking billions more from donors
just to get through anticipated food crises this year.
Broadly speaking the price of
wheat has doubled in less than a year, while other staples—corn, maize, and
soy—trade well above 1990s levels. According to Catholic Relief Services (CRS),
a 110-pound sack of wheat that cost about $8 two years ago in Egypt now costs
$25. Rice, the staple food for about 3 billion people worldwide, has tripled in
cost in the last 18 months. Lisa Kuennen-Asfaw, a CRS food policy analyst, says
the world’s most vulnerable people are now making choices not only between food
and fuel but between food and shelter. Poor families are going homeless in
order to eat.
A number of large-scale
structural and cultural changes have converged to stir up 2008’s food fight.
World demand for basic commodities has skyrocketed as families in fast-emerging
economies like China convert to a Westernized diet centered around grain-fed meat
products. High oil prices drove up transport costs for food and commodities and
spurred an abrupt lurch into alternative biofuels. About 30 percent of U.S.
corn production in 2008 will be used for ethanol, according to the
International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington. The coup de grace,
perhaps permanently, on affordable food has been climate change. Drought in big
agricultural nations such as Australia means diminished global rice supplies
and increased costs on existing reserves.
Though the poor in developing
economies, who traditionally commit the greatest percentage of their daily
income to their daily bread, are already the casualties of the global food
crunch, Kuennen-Asfaw is certain that rising costs have similarly hurt
low-income people in the industrialized world. This slow-boil crisis may have
so far gone less observed since folks in the West have a lot farther to fall,
she says, even as most of us may be wondering why our wallets and cupboards are
going bare earlier in the month than usual.
How best to respond? A real
growth sector in terms of global food supply could actually be located in the
epicenter of the crisis. Kuennen-Asfaw says 2008’s “sudden” food crisis is
actually the result of years of underinvestment in agriculture in the
developing world. While the developed world responds to the current food
emergency, it must make a deeper commitment to a long-term solution that
includes rebuilding capacity in the developing world and an immediate
reappraisal of the West’s biofuels strategy.
