Abolish the Food Industry

FEB 6 2012, 8:07 AM ET 161

Which brings us to Gingrich’s racial coding of ‘food stamp president’. Larry Wilmore deconstructs this nicely on The Daily Show.

While Gingrich’s comments are vile and reprehensible, the abandonment of the poor is wholly bipartisan. The fiasco over last year’s Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act demonstrates this amply. I wrote about this in 2010, arguing that, given the 100+billion dollar annual cost of hunger, a watered down $8 billion-dollar-over-ten-years bill to feed children was a bargain. The total amount that the government authorized: $4.5 billion, paid for by raiding the SNAP entitlement funds. Taking money from adults to feed their children is craven, but as Gingrich’s comments, and the rhetoric of deserving and undeserving poor suggests, our politicians are becoming increasingly Victorian.

Beneath this, the conversation that isn’t happening is, of course, about why poverty flourishes, and how to end it. As the documentary ‘Finding North’ – slug line: One Nation, Underfed – points out, that many hundreds of thousands more people want to be on assistance but can’t qualify. One in four children are food insecure in the US, and – I was shocked to learn – half of children in the US will be on assistance at some point in their lives. Hence the documentary’s title. The beautiful title track, written by The Civil Wars tells of a country that has lost its compass, and is having trouble finding north.

[Click herefor the KPFA player's own page]

It’ll give you goosebumps no matter how much you hear but, for the rushed, jump on in at 39:30, which is where he says:

Ghana has something to say to us. It says to us first that the oppressor never voluntarily gives freedom to the oppressed. You have to work for it….If there had not been an Nkrumah and his followers in Ghana, Ghana would still be a British colony. If there had not been abolitionists in America, both Negro and white, we might still stand today in the dungeons of slavery. And then because there have been, in every period, there are always those people in every period of human history who don’t mind getting their necks cut off, who don’t mind being persecuted and discriminated and kicked about, because they know that freedom is never given out, but it comes through the persistent and the continual agitation and revolt on the part of those who are caught in the system. Ghana teaches us that.

Bigger isn’t always better. By 2030, half of Americans won’t just be overweight, but obese. By then, nearly a fifth of our healthcare dollars will be spent treating the diseases that come with being bigger. Our lifestyles, rich in fat, sugar and inactivity, are creating a debt that’ll become the planet’s most expensive public health issue.

So what to do? One battle centers on how to make us better eaters and, especially, drinkers. Half of the sugar in US diets comes from sweetened beverages. Advocates of what gets called a soda-tax look like they’ve a strong case. Tax the sugar in the drink and the consumption goes down, right? Well yes, but a study from Northwestern University recently found that overweight people prefer diet drinks. You can almost hear the soda industry snickering.

But this oughtn’t to make us give up on the idea of taxation in the name of public health. Think about tobacco. A dollar tax on a pack of cigarettes makes some people smoke less, but that’s not the only thing we’ve done to curb smoking. We have changed regulation to target not just cigarettes but anything containing tobacco. We limited marketing to children. We’ve confronted the companies who profit from tobacco with a coherent public health push, and made them pay for their ill-gotten profits.

So why can’t taxes together with other ideas work with sugar? One in three kids born in America today will develop some form of diabetes, one in two kids of color. A meaningful soda tax – say a penny per ounce on sugary drinks – is an important part of a bigger policy strategy. We can, for example, take back the billions we spend subsidizing commodity and processed food production, and gives it to those most harmed by these products.

The food industry has responded by trundling out its experts – most notably Derek Yach, formerly an anti-tobacco hero at the World Health Organization, now a pro-Pepsi pundit at Pepsi – but also running adverts castigating soda taxes as a toll on the poor. “I can choose what to buy without help from the government”, offers TVs hapless and put-upon mother. That obesity is the result exclusively of a personal failing is a perception widely shared. As I argued in Stuffed and Starved, if the perception were true, you’d have a hard time explaining why Mexican teens are more overweight the closer you get to the US border.

So let’s just say that the individual interpretation of obesity is only part of the story. Advocates of a comprehensive public health strategy around obesity have to answer another charge -that they’re mongers of class war. This looks harder to evade – taxing food is always going to affect the poor disproportionately because poor people spend a greater proportion of household budgets on food than the rich. With poverty, energy dense foods become a rational way to “provide daily calories at an affordable cost”. As one researcher argues, “obesity is the toxic consequence of economic insecurity and a failing economic environment.”

But if that’s true, a soda tax sounds like it’s blaming the victim, part of a culture war between the rich who can afford not to drink Coke, and the poor who can’t afford anything else. And, certainly, if the move to tax soft drinks were an end in itself, then I’d want nothing to do with it. There’s far too long a history of culture war around food, with everything from white bread to Coca-Cola conscripted into a great battle over class and identity.

That said, if a soda tax can work as part of a bigger programme to rein in food companies and provide real choices to everyone across the food system, I’m all for it. That a tax falls disproportionately on the poor is reason to worry, of course. But tobacco taxes are like that too. What’ll make the difference is whether the tax is part of a bigger project to make the food industry pay for the health costs that will fall disproportionately on poor people. Ultimately, what we need an end to is not soda, but poverty. That’s a conversation long overdue.

In the meantime, though, don’t hate the soda tax. Local and regional governments are already experimenting with it, and the sky has yet to fall. This isn’t the nanny state as much as it is a response to the wild excess of Daddy Market. It’s just leveling the playing field back away from big food, so we’ll have fewer big people.

________________________

The world’s demographers this week increased their estimates of the world’s population through the coming century. We are now on track to hit 10 billion people by 2100. Today, humanity produces enough food to feed everyone but, because of the way we distribute it, there are still a billion hungry. One doesn’t need to be a frothing Malthusian to worry about how we’ll all get to eat tomorrow. Current predictions place most of the world’s people in Asia, the highest levels of consumption in Europe and North America, and the highest population growth rates in Africa — where the population could triple over the next 90 years.

There are, however, plans afoot to feed the world. One of the countries to which the world’s development experts have turned as a test bed is Malawi. Landlocked and a little smaller than Pennsylvania, Malawi is consistently among the world’s poorest places. The latest figures have 90 percent of its 15 million people living on the equivalent of less than two dollars a day. By century’s end, the population is expected to be nearly 132 million. Today, some 40 percent of Malawians live below the country’s poverty line, and part of the reason for widespread chronic poverty is that more than 70 percent of Malawians live in rural areas. There, they depend on agriculture — and nearly every farmer grows maize. “Chimanga ndi moyo” — “maize is life,” the local saying goes — but growing maize pays so poorly that few people can afford to eat anything else.

If you arrive in Malawi in March, just after the rainy season, growing food seems like a fool’s game. It’s hard to find a patch of red soil that isn’t a tall riot of green. From the roadside you can see maize about to ripen, with squash and beans planted at the base of the thick stalks. Even the tobacco fields are doing well this year. But there’s a rumble in this jungle. Malawi’s swaying fields are a battleground in which three different visions for the future of global agriculture are ranged against one other.

The first and most venerable development idea for Malawi sees these farmers as survivors of a doomed way of life who need to be helped into the hereafter. Oxford economist Paul Collier is the poster child for this “modernist” view, one that he presented in a scathing November 2008 Foreign Affairs article in which he cudgeled the “romantics” who yearned for peasant agriculture. Observing both that wages in cities are higher than in the countryside, and that every large developed country is able to feed itself without peasant farmers, Collier argued the virtues of big agriculture. He also called on the European Union to support genetically modified crops and for the United States to kill domestic subsidies for biofuel. He was one-third right: biofuel subsidies are absurd, not least because they drive up food prices, siphoning grains from the bowls of the poorest into the gas-tanks of the richest — with limited environmental gains, at best.

Collier’s contempt for peasants seems, however, to rest on something other than the facts. Although international agribusiness has generated great profits ever since the East India Company, it hasn’t brought riches to farmers and farmworkers, who are invariably society’s poorest people. Indeed, big agriculture earns its moniker — it tends to work most lucratively with large-scale plantations and operations to which small farmers are little more than an impediment.

It turns out that if you’re keen to make the world’s poorest people better off, it’s smarter to invest in their farms and workplaces than to send them packing to the cities. In its 2008 World Development Report, the World Bank found that, indeed, investment in peasants was among the most efficient and effective ways of raising people out of poverty and hunger. It was an awkward admission, as the Bank had long been trumpeting Collier’s brand of agricultural development. Farmers organizations from Malawi to India to Brazil had been pointing out that access to land, water, sustainable technology, education, markets, state investment in processing, and — above all, access to level playing field on domestic and international markets — would help them. But it took three decades of lousy policy for the development establishment to realize this, and they’re not quite there yet.

Because of its colonial legacy, Malawi had long been following conventional economic wisdom: exporting things in which the country had a comparative advantage (in Malawi’s case, tobacco) and using the funds to buy goods on the international market in which it didn’t have an advantage. But when tobacco prices fall, as they have of late, there’s less foreign exchange with which to venture into international markets. And being landlocked, Malawi also faces higher prices for grain than its four neighbors — Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Zambia, and Tanzania — simply because it costs more to transport into the country. According to one estimate, the marginal cost of importing a ton of food-aid maize is $400, versus $200 a ton to import it commercially, and only $50 to source it domestically using fertilizers. Particularly at a time when food and fertilizer prices are predicted to rise, Malawi is wise to consider how vulnerable to the caprices of international markets it wants to be.

This partly explains why, in the late 1990s, almost a decade before it became fashionable, Malawi bucked the advice of its international donors and decided to spend the majority its agriculture budget on fertilizer, the first and perhaps most necessary ingredient in prepping the soil for producing viable crops. The government gave farmers a “starter pack,” with enough beans, improved seeds, and fertilizer to cover about a fifth of an acre. International donors weren’t pleased. A USAID official decried the program as consigning farmers to a “poverty treadmill” in which farmers would be stuck growing just enough maize to survive, but never enough to get rich. Although the program had modest success, it took off when Malawian President Bingu wa Mutharika expanded the program over the 2005-2006 growing season, quadrupling the amount of fertilizer available. Although driven by domestic political promises, his international timing was perfect — he was embarking on a policy whose time had come. And this is why what happens in Malawi’s fields today matter so much beyond its borders.

To understand why, we need a quick history of agricultural policy in developing countries. Many developing countries were, especially before World War II, pantries to be raided by their colonizers. Post-independence, rural areas were often net contributors to government revenues, but there were some assurances of stability, with government schemes to buy crops at guaranteed prices. Internationally — especially in Asia — the post-war era saw governments pressured to feed a restive population that was increasingly wondering whether their lot wouldn’t be improved through socialism and a change in land ownership. In order to fight the Cold War in foreign fields, the U.S. government and key foundations invested heavily in agricultural technologies such as improved seed and fertilizer. These technologies were designed to keep land in the hands of its feudal owners, food plentiful, and communists at bay. In 1968, William Gaud, the USAID administrator, dubbed it a Green Revolution, because it was designed to prevent a red one.

For a range of mainly geopolitical reasons, the Green Revolution was implemented with less fervor and success in Africa than in Asia. The International Fertilizer Development Center observed in 2006 that $4 billion worth of soil nutrients were being mined from the African soil by farmers who, struggling to make ends meet, weren’t replenishing the nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorous in the ground beneath their feet.

The prescription for declining soil quality lay, however, not in addressing the policy causes of farmer’s environmental panic — a systematic neglect since the 1980s to which the World Bank itself admitted in an internal evaluation — but to fix the soil with technology. So in 2006, the Rockefeller Foundation (the original sponsors of the Green Revolution in Asia) joined the Gates Foundation to launch The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, or AGRA. This is the second brave new development policy that hopes to feed Africa.

AGRA claims to have learned the lessons of history, rejecting Collier’s view and focusing on policies that “unlike the Green Revolution in Latin America, which mostly benefited large-scale farmers because they had access to irrigation and were therefore in a position to use the improved varieties … [are] specifically geared to overcome the challenges facing smallholder farmers.”

So did it work in Malawi? It depends on the goal. If the aim was to increase output, then yes. Although economist and Earth Institute Director Jeffrey Sachs recently over-egged the data by suggesting that production had doubled because of the fertilizer subsidy (it only increased by 300,000 – 400,000 tons or up to 15 percent, the rest being mainly due to the return of the rains), the amount of maize in Malawi has undoubtedly gone up.

As the 50 million people food insecure in the United States know all too well, though, having enough food in the country doesn’t necessarily mean that all people get to eat, and Malawi still has more than its fair share of glassy-eyed and underweight children. Chronically hungry kids have low height for their age and the number of children malnourished in this way — “stunted” is the term in the statistics — has remained stubbornly high since the subsidies began.

Measuring increased yields of maize from fertilizer and starter kits doesn’t necessarily translate into a society that is well-fed and economically viable in terms of agriculture. Rachel Bezner Kerr, a professor of geography at the University of Western Ontario who also works in Malawi as a project coordinator for the Soils, Food and Healthy Communities Project, isn’t surprised. “Any nutritionist would scoff at the notion that increased yield automatically leads to increased nutrition,” she says.

Bezner Kerr told me that having more crops in the fields and bigger yields can actually be a bad thing, taking “women out of the home and away from domestic work. Particularly if they are doing early childcare feeding, this can lead to poorer nutritional outcomes.” What happens within the household is crucial in translating increased output into better nutrition.

Indeed, gender matters when it comes to food and farming. Sixty percent of the world’s malnourished people are women or girls. Yet the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization recently pointed out that by increasing access to the same resources as men, women could boost their farm’s output by up to 30 percent, leading to a 4 percent increase in total agricultural output in developing countries. In Malawi, 90 percent of women work part time, and women are paid some 30 percent less than men for similar jobs. Women are also burdened with care work, especially in a country ravaged by HIV/AIDS. Even if they own land and have access to the same resources as men, women find themselves torn between the demands of child and elder care, cooking, carrying water, finding firewood, planting, weeding, and harvesting.

These problems are better addressed through social change — abetted by programs like the Soils, Food and Healthy Communities Project — than chemistry. Yet these are precisely the kinds of programs that are crowded out by fertilizer subsidies. The fertilizer program has been a jealous child, sucking resources away from other programs. The opportunity cost of fertilizer for farmers is money that might have been spent on something else — a serious concern when global fertilizer prices are going through the roof. Research by the World Bank in Latin America and Southeast Asia has suggested that it’s smarter for government to subsidize public goods like agricultural research and extension services and irrigation, rather than directing money at private inputs like fertilizer.

Again, this matters beyond Malawi’s borders, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. The world’s population growth is scheduled to be driven by “high fertility countries” — most of which are in Africa. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier de Schutter, recently argued that the world might be better fed not by pumping the soil with chemicals, but by using cutting-edge “agroecological” techniques to build soil fertility, and using policy to achieve environmental and social sustainability. In a review of 286 sustainable agriculture projects in 57 developing countries covering 91 million acres, a team led by British environmental scientist Jules Pretty found production increases of 79 percent — again, far higher than the fertilizer subsidy in Malawi, and with a far broader range of ecological and social benefits than increased food production.

These programs succeed, in part, because they don’t see hunger as the consequence of a surfeit of peasants or a deficit in soil, but as the result of complex environmental, social, and political causes. You don’t just need chemists to solve hunger — you need sociologists, soil biologists, agronomists, ethnographers, and even economists. Paying for their skills is the opportunity cost of spending precious dollars on imported fertilizer. Of course, agroecology is an entirely different paradigm than one in which technology is dropped into laps from foreign laboratories accompanied by a sheet of instructions. The programs require much more participatory education work, and much more investment in public goods, than the Malawian government and donors currently seem inclined to provide.

Agroecology is the third development vision battling for the future. In Malawi, it works. By growing cowpeas and groundnuts with maize — expanding the range of crops — Bezner Kerr’s program has beat the fertilizer program’s yield by 10 percent and increased nutrition outcomes too. Yet even agroecology has its limits. Fifteen percent of Malawians remain ultra poor, living on less than a dollar a day and unable to buy enough to eat. They tend to be people who are landless, or who have poor quality land and have to sell their labor at harvest time, just when they need it the most. They remain untouched by the Malawian miracle.

The future doesn’t look terribly promising for agroecology. Concerned about the financial sustainability of its fertilizer subsidy program, the Malawian government is about to embark on a Green Belt project, in which thousands of acres will be irrigated to induce foreign investors to begin large-scale farming of sugar cane and other export crops. The foreign exchange brought in by this program, it is hoped, will bankroll the fertilizer spending. The result will help balance the country’s current account, but as a consequence, thousands of smallholders are scheduled to be displaced to clear lands that will attract the kind of large-scale agriculture of which Collier would approve.

Particularly in the light of the new population projections for the 21st century, it seems foolish to stick to 20th century agricultural policy. Recall that the agroecological interventions in Malawi turned on women’s empowerment. Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen has famously argued that there are few policies better placed to improve individual, family, and community lives (and lower fertility rates) than education — particularly the education of women and girls. The prophesies presented to us by demographers vary widely — change the assumptions, and you end up with a world of between 8 billion and 15 billion people. No matter what the future holds, though, it’s clear that a world in which everyone gets to eat depends on women’s empowerment — and rather than treating that fact as something irrelevant to feeding the world, agroecology puts it right in the middle.

A great deal of past agriculture policy has been designed either economically to bomb villages in order to save them, or to administer a technological quick fix in order to postpone politics. Collier wants to get rid of peasants. New fads want to keep them, but keep them knee-deep in chemicals. Yet if we are serious about feeding the hungry, in Malawi or anywhere else, we need to recognize that the majority of the hungry are women, and that we need more public, not private, spending on those least able to command rural resources. Because when it comes to growing food, those who tend the land are anything but fools.

On Symphony Way

For those outside South Africa, particularly for the generation of activists who fought apartheid, it’s tempting to imagine that after Mandela was freed from Robben Island, and lines snaked outside polling booths in the first free elections, and after the ANC won, and the national anthem became Nkosi Sikelele Afrika, and after Nelson Mandela held high the Rugby World Cup trophy, that even while the Soviet Union collapsed and capitalism crowed triumphantly from the United States, all was well in the Rainbow Nation.

But despite the close-harmony singing and the holding aloft of leaders, South Africa isn’t The Lion King. It’s more like Animal Farm. Orwell ends ‘Animal Farm’ with a scene in which we see the pigs and the humans whom they displaced, sharing a meal together, and it being hard to tell pig from human. Over the past two decades, a few black South Africans have become very wealthy, as Steve Biko predicted in 1972:

“This is one country where it would be possible to create a capitalist black society, if whites were intelligent, if the nationalists were intelligent. And that capitalist black society, black middle class, would be very effective … South Africa could succeed in putting across to the world a pretty convincing, integrated picture, with still 70 percent of the population being underdogs.”

For many, the struggle against apartheid never ended, because apartheid continues to live. The introduction of neoliberal economic policies have led to falling levels of social welfare for the poorest. In South Africa, human development levels are now lower than in Palestine.[1] The ascent of a new black capitalist class isn’t, however, the end of the narrative. The state itself, in trying to stamp out the uncomfortable appearance of poverty, and in behaving in ways similar to the Apartheid regime, has done much to fan the flames of dissent, and to continue the story of the fight against apartheid.

Think, for instance, of over one hundred families living in backyards across Delft, who thought that Christmas had come early in 2007. They received letters from their local councilor inviting them to move into the houses they had been waiting for since the end of Apartheid. They left their backyard shacks, to occupy their new homes along the N2 highway. For a brief moment, all was as well as can be expected. The quality of housing on the N2 project is an ongoing scandal, but at least the homes were theirs. Then the families received another notice. They were to be evicted. The original letters authorizing them to move into their new homes had been sent illegally. The local councilor who sent them suffers the modest indignity of being suspended for a month. The N2 residents are treated altogether more harshly. They are kicked out of their homes with nowhere to go – their former backyard shacks having been rented to new families the moment the old ones left. The city tried to move them to the temporary relocation areas, many kilometers away from the communities they have grown up with. The units that pass for housing here are tin shacks, ‘blikkies’, ramshackle blocks of metal in the sand, wind and baking sun, sealed in by armed police yet beset with crime. The evicted families refused to move to ‘Blikkiesdorp’. They organized, setting up a temporary camp on the pavement of Symphony Way. The government threw its might into the legal system, extracting an eviction order that, by October 2009, soon after the letters in this book were written, moved all 136 families to the sandy wastes of Blikkiesdorp, in time for the tin shacks to bake in the summer heat.

Apartheid ends and apartheid remains.[2]

The squires of the new order bicker among themselves for the spoils.

The poor, who fought and died for justice, wait for it long after its arrival has been announced. Movements arise to hasten the day when apartheid’s remains can be swept away. The movements are crushed. At the beginning of 2010, when this preface is being written, the South African government has gone on the offensive against organizations of poor people across the country, from refugee camps to mob attacks against the leadership of the Kennedy Road Development Committee in Durban, to the residents of Symphony Way in Cape Town.

So why should you care about the pavements of Symphony Way when there’s no one there anymore, just in time for the 2010 World Cup tourists? The readiest answer is that while the government can take the people out of Symphony Way but they can’t take Symphony Way out of the people. As the residents themselves announced, “Symphony Way is not dead. We are still Symphony Way. We will always be Symphony Way. We may not be living on the road, but our fight for houses has only just begun. We warn government that we have not forgotten that they have promised us houses and we, the Symphony Way Anti-Eviction Campaign, will make sure we get what is rightfully ours.”

This book is testament to what it is to be Symphony Way. Written toward the end of the struggle on the pavements, this anthology of letters is both testimony and poetry. The power of the words comes not simply from confession, but through the art with which these stories are told. Every struggle has its narrators, but some on Symphony Way are wordsmiths of the highest order. When Conway Payn invites you to “put your shoes into my shoes and wear me like a human being would wear another human being,” he opens the door to a world of compassion, of fellow-suffering, that holds you firm.

The letters do not make for easy reading. Lola Wentzel’s story of the Bush of Evil, of the permanent geography of sexual violence, will haunt you long after you close the pages of this book. In here you will find testimony of justice miscarried, of violence domestic and public, of bigotry and tolerance, of xenophobia and xenophilia. There’s too much at stake shy from truth, and the writers here have the courage to face it directly, even if the results are brutal. Amid this horror, there is beauty, and the bundle of relationships between aunties, husbands, wives and children, of daughters named Hope and Symphony. All human life is here.

A few visitors have seen this already. Indeed, Kashiefa, Sedick, Zakeer and Sedeeqa Jacobs remark on the cottage industry of visitors, students and fellow travelers who visit —  “Everyday there is people that come from everywhere and ask many questions, then we tell them its not lekker to stay on the road and in the blikkies.” But this book isn’t an exercise in prurience. It’s a means to dignity, a way for the poors to reflect, be reflected and share with you. This book is testimony to the fact that there’s thinking in the shacks, that there are complex human lives, and complex humans who reflect, theorise and fight to bring change. This book is a sign of that fight, and in reading it, you have been conscripted. Mon semblable, mon frère[3] – you are addressed, reader, not as a voyeur, but as a brother or sister, as someone whose eyes dignify the struggle.

If your tears fall from your eyes as did from mine, you have will have been touched by the idea, the incredible realization!, that the poor can think for themselves, write for themselves, and will continue to fight for their humanity to be recognized. Whether or not you’re going to the 2010 World Cup, come to this book with open eyes, and you’ll leave with an open heart.

[2] This ambiguity is one soon to be explored by Sharad Chari in his ‘Apartheid Remains’ project.

[3] T his is a line from the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, whose finger-pointing to the reader was a little more accusatory. http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/039250.html

The last time we heard of a record prices was 2008, and food inflation is back for many of the same reasons: the demand for meat has returned with the recovery of middle-income economies; the price of oil is up, which both raises the cost of food production and transport, and stokes the diversion of food crops into biofuel production; speculators are taking pounds of flesh in the commodity exchanges. And, of course, there have been freak weather events disrupting production in key export zones.

But what makes the weather matter? This is hardly the first La Niña weather cycle, after all, and every human civilization has understood the need to plan for climate’s vicissitudes. Over centuries, societies developed the tools of grain stores, crop diversification and ‘moral economies’ to guarantee the poor access to food in times of crisis. International economic liberalisation discarded these buffers in favour of lean lines of trade. Safety nets and storage became inefficient and redundant – if crops failed in one part of the world, the market would always provide from another.

Climate change turns this thinking on its head. A shock in one corner of the world now ripples to every other. The economic architecture that promised efficiency has instead made us all more vulnerable. Little has changed in this crucial respect since the last food crisis. But this isn’t simply a re-run of 2008.

While the recession has turned a corner for some, unemployment remains stubbornly high for many, and hunger has trailed it. There are 75 million more people food insecure now than in 2008. At the same time, governments are cutting back on entitlement programs for the poor as part of austerity drives to fight inflation. Urban families are unable to afford food and fuel, and governments are unresponsive to their plight. Under such circumstances, as Egyptians know too well, food prices and climate change are revolution’s kindling.

‘That Witch, Inflation’
Raj Patel
The Guardian
18 January 2011

Anyone in Britain alarmed by rising inflation should look to an Indian villager for understanding about the latest worry in the global economy. Last year a village schoolteacher wrote a cracking song – featured in this year’s Indian Oscar entry for best foreign film, Peepli Live – that distils the world’s macroeconomic worries: “Friend, my husband earns good money but inflation, that witch, eats it all away. / Every month petrol leaps, diesel is on a roll, sugar forever soars, rice flies out of reach too. Inflation, that witch, eats it all away.”

The poor spend a greater proportion of their income on food and fuel, and so, when the prices of both start to rise, poorer households suffer more. Petrol, diesel, sugar and cereal prices are all up. Poor women, invariably responsible for household food purchases, are hurt far more than men – which is why they’ve protested in India, where food inflation soared to 19.8% just last month.

In the UK, today’s inflation figures of just 3.7% caused alarm – containing much higher rises in food and fuel costs and disproportionately hitting poorer families there as elsewhere. Of course, it’s not just Britain or the subcontinent where staples are becoming more expensive. The UN announced that its global food price index is now higher than it has ever been. Already this year, protesters have taken to the streets in India,Jordan and Algeria.

Whence the price rises? One of the reasons for food and fuel inflation lies in bullish views of the economy. The price of oil is nudging $100 a barrel again. Not only does this bump the price of fossil fuels directly, but it hits food too. When the price of oil is high, it becomes economically attractive to divert crops from use in food to use in biofuels.

Others blame the weather for the inflation: La Niña, the periodic wobble in Pacific ocean weather that ripples across the planet, hasn’t only been blamed for the catastrophic floods in Brazil. Argentina has experienced unusually dry conditions, which have lowered the expectations for their exports of corn and soybeans. Floods in Australia and Indonesia have also stymied production, and last year’s wildfires in Russia only made things worse.

It’s true that weather events have had an impact on global markets, but this is hardly the first La Niña. The historian Mike Davis, in his magisterial work Late Victorian Holocausts, looked at how the world responded to the cyclical El Niño/La Niña shocks throughout the 19th century. In the 1800s, the effects were survivable – but by the 1890s, in the so-called “golden age of liberal capitalism”, weather shocks were being transmitted directly to the poor through the newly established system of global commodity markets. And it’s these markets that have recently gone into overdrive.

Deborah Doane of the World Development Movement has noted that more than $200bn has been poured into food markets since the financial crisis by speculators hunting for profit, creating volatility. The leading international grain-trading companies are doing well as a result. The US agricultural giant Cargill reeled in $1.49bn in windfall profits in its last quarter, three times its profits the year before.

It might seem like there’s nothing new here. Climate shocks, shoddy government policy, scalping by traders, speculation by bankers, biofuels, and a rising oil price. We’re not in 2008, though. The oil price isn’t quite in the $150-a-barrel recession-precipitating territory yet – but that’s as far as the good news goes. There are other reasons to worry. More than a billion people went hungry in 2009, and the shock of the past two years has stripped assets away from the poor – in order to survive poverty, many have been involved in distress sales. The last two years’ hunger and malnourishment will have indelibly affected an entire cohort of children. The recession has meant that more people are vulnerable to systemic shocks.

But governments are less ready to buffer those shocks. Perhaps the most significant difference between 2008 and now is that governments are no longer in recession-fighting mode – they’re in inflation-fighting mode. That’s a problem when you look at the kinds of policies that worked to feed the poor over the past two years. The World Bank’s Robert Zoellick calls for freer markets, but researchers at, er, the World Bank found that it’s government spending that helps most.

Free market policies such as cutting import tariffs on food can sometimes help to lower the price in urban areas. This helps but only, as urban Tunisians understand too well, if there are jobs and money with which to buy the food in the first place. Well-designed public-feeding and public works programmes are much better than free market policies at feeding people. But these programmes require government spending. They’re inflationary.

Now that governments’ great enemy is inflation, the policies that feed the hungry are precisely the ones under the knife in a global push for market-friendly austerity. India’s home minister, P Chidambaram, recently admitted that he didn’t “have all the tools to control food inflation”. Although countries are scrambling to find ways of bridging the gaps, the great worry in 2011 is not only that inflation will eat away everyone’s earnings through higher food prices, but that the institutions and policies that might ward off the worst effects will be hexed by the markets too.