Coming soon: The Hunger Tsunami
Claude Arpi
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If you ask experts what is the ‘number one’ issue facing the planet today, you will receive different answers from different people.
Some will vociferously argue that US ‘imperialism’ is the problem, others will tell you that it is the rise of China; still other will say it is terrorism or global warming. Everyone has valid arguments to press his or her points.
For me however, the most critical issue is the food shortage, which is itself linked to worldwide water scarcity.
Last week, the Director General of the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), Jacques Diouf was in Delhi. During an interaction with the press, he acknowledged that “the world had just about enough cereal stocks to feed the global population for two to three months.”
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He had just met the Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar. Like every good Indian Minister, Pawar “expressed confidence that India's food situation was comfortable”.
Confidence is an interesting trait of Indian ministers: China intrudes in Arunachal and Ladakh, the Defence Minister remains ‘confident’; prices are soaring, the Finance Minister ‘confidently’ announces that the financial crisis will not touch India; it goes on and on.
The new Sports Minister is probably confident that India will get a lot of medals during the Beijing Games, because the Prime Minister must have explained to him that “the Chinese are our friends, not competitors.”
But Diouf was more precise. He said the world has only 4-5 million tonnes of cereal stocks, and that can feed the planet’s population for only 8-12 weeks.
Also read: ‘No short-term relief in world food prices’
“The world food situation is very serious today with food riots reported from many countries like Egypt, Cameroon, Haiti, Burkina Faso and Senegal. We fear that this may spread to other countries. World food prices have risen 45 per cent in the last nine months," he said.
Worse, UN officials acknowledged that that the price rise of food commodities is not a short-term crisis; it is here to stay.
Who is going to suffer first? It will be the ‘submerged’ (in contrast with the ‘emergent’) nations, where people spend 50 to 60% of their income on food. Any rise in food prices automatically affects African and Asian populations first.
While Tibet witnessed ‘resentment riots’ (which rightly got a lot of media coverage), several African and Asian nations are experiencing ‘hunger riots.’ But who cares?
One of the first states touched by the world hunger wave was Haiti. The capital, Port-au-Prince saw several violent manifestations. The United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) had to deploy armed vehicles and troops to protect the Presidential palace. Several persons lost their lives while hundreds of shops were looted and vehicles burned.
The unrest was sparked by the dramatic rise in price of essential commodities such as rice, maize or sugar over the past weeks.
Soon after, the first signs of what experts describe as a ‘hunger tsunami’ spread to the African continent. Serious unrest was reported from Douala (Cameroon), Abidjan (Ivory Coast), Cairo (Egypt) and Dakar (Senegal).
During the last few months, the price of the daily commodities has rocketed. On the world markets, the price of cereals, cooking oil and other food items has dramatically increased, while in several cases the local harvests have drastically declined. The absence of price controls has made things worse. The UN has now woken up: the political stability of the nations touched by the wave is endangered.
Diouf had already prophesied ‘hunger riots’ in October 2007, after the cost of a meal in Africa had increased an average 40% in a year. The rise of the food prices is just the tip of the iceberg, other basic products such as milk, meat, or soap are soaring, creating an incontrollable inflation spiral.
The weakness of the dollar is another compounding factor. Of course, Chidambaram remains cool: “it is not India’s problem”.
But it is India’s problem, as well as China’s.
Diouf was frank enough to admit it in Delhi. He said that the problem of the escalating prices across the planet came “from the increasing demand from developing countries, particularly China and India” and the diversion of food grains towards production of bio-fuels.
In 1995, a controversial book Who Will Feed China? Wake-Up Call for a Small Planet written by the agronomist Lester R. Brown was published by the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington D.C.-based environmental institute.
At that time, the press release said: “Within a span of two years, China has gone from being a net grain exporter of 8 million tonnes to being a net importer of 16 million tonnes. China's overnight emergence as a leading importer of grain, second only to Japan, is driving up world grain prices, promising to raise food prices everywhere.”
Brown believed that “as incomes rise, the Chinese people are quickly diversifying their diet, shifting from heavy dependence on a starchy staple, such as rice, to one that contains more livestock products.”
Figures were quoted: “consumption of pork has climbed from 7 million tonnes in 1978, the year economic reforms were launched, to 30 million tonnes in 1994… Consumption of poultry, including chicken and duck, has climbed from 3.2 million tonnes in 1990 to 6.6 million tonnes in 1994, more than doubling in 4 years.”
This is where India has a great advantage over China, her population has by large remained vegetarian.
The book created a great splash worldwide and even forced the Chinese leadership to rethink their agricultural strategies. It was however completely ignored in India, where ‘experts’ remained ‘confident’ (I remember talking to one of the foremost Indian experts who told me: “Don’t worry, science will find a solution!”).
The problem is very simple. In October 1996, the Beijing Review had admitted: “China’s total coverage of cultivated land dropped by an astounding 21 million hectares between 1958 and 1995, while the nation’s population grew significantly from 660 million to 1.2 billion during the same period.”
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With the growth in population in China, which will stabilise only in 2045 at 1.6 billion and the escalation in industrial development, the arable lands shrink, while the needs of the population increase exponentially. As a result, China has to import more and more food grain resulting in the price of cereals increasing on the world market.
Brown had prophesised that it will reach a point when the planet will not be able to produce enough grain for the world demand and the poorer nations will not be able to buy their food.
One of the solutions would be to increase the yield, but that is not easy, given that China’s (and India’s) yield is already quite high.
One way to step up production is to increase the quantum of irrigation. However, aquifers may soon become depleted (today, the mythic Yellow River is dry 250 days a year). The problem is further compounded with irrigation water being used by industries.
A few figures explain the problem. In China, one thousand tonnes of water produce one tonne of wheat (equivalent to $200) while in the industrial sector, the same quantity of water can bring a revenue of $14,000, which is 70 times more. For the planners, the choice is simple: water is synonymous with economic growth and job generation.
“China’s dependence on massive imports will be a wake-up call that we are colliding with the earth’s capacity to feed us. It could well lead us to redefine national security away from military preparedness and toward maintaining adequate food supplies,” Brown concluded.
Since then, India has also emerged as another development pole of the planet. The same consequences of untamed development are becoming visible in India too. Nandigram was a first sign of what lies ahead in the years to come.
Photo feature: The Red Star over Nandigram
For years China pretended that it had no problem to feed its people. But it is now accepted that the nation will face a 4.8 million tonnes grain shortage in 2010, almost nine per cent of the nation’s consumption; for Premier Wen Jiabao, “It is more difficult than ever to steadily increase grain production and keep rural incomes growing.”
The predictions made by Lester Brown in 1995 are coming true. It is undoubtedly the most serious strategic issue faced by the planet.
An internal note of the UN disclosed by the French daily Le Monde said that “one of the [UN] major worries is the possibility that the entire food support system will be unable to cope with the demand”. Some emergency plans will have to be put in place.
According to this ‘working note’, the price rise, which is ‘structural’ (in other words, not temporary), will plunge millions across the world into food insecurity. The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs of the UN foresee that while there will be less to distribute, it will be unable to respond to the needs of new groups of population.
The question is simple, for each price rise of 1 per cent of food stuff, 16 million human beings are ‘plunged in the insecurity zone’. The question for the UN today is: how to select the population to be supported in priority. One-and-half billion people will suffer from hunger by 2025.
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The European Union has already reacted by offering to promote more investment in farming. French agriculture minister Michel Barnier — France is due to take over the EU's Presidency in July — wants a coordinated response to the issue. He will soon urge his EU counterparts to develop a "European initiative on food security" for the world.
Will it work? Who will feed one-and-half billion poor in 15 years? It is probably too late. In the meantime, the Indian Agriculture minister is busy pushing ‘cricket’ files.
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