AP
A demonstrator eats grass in front of a United Nations Brazilian peacekeeping soldier during a recent protest against the high cost of living in Port-au-Prince. Some aid organisations are warning of a widening nutritional crisis in Haiti, where spiralling food prices sparked more than a week of protests.
Myrtha Désulmé, Contributor
"Control oil and you control nations.
Control food, and you control the people."
- Henry Kissinger
A massive revolution is under way: It is a global rebellion of the people against unfair trade practices, the high cost of living, and unaffordable food.
A seismic groundswell of rebellion has built up all over the so-called Third World against the dominant global economic system. Haitians, whose trail-blazing War of Independence established the foundations of universal freedom in the modern world, were the first to go to the barricades.
Unprecedented challenge
It has been galling to watch some of the architects of this global crisis, whose institutions have violated the dignity of the world's poor and brought our world to the brink of food wars, finally waking up to the disastrous consequences of the free trade policies they have been driving for decades on the fragile economies of the developing world. What were they thinking all of these years?
Reacting to the world's first global food crisis, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon declared the skyrocketing food prices an unprecedented challenge which will have multiple effects on the most vulnerable, and could touch off a cascade of related crises affecting trade, economic growth, social progress, and even political security around the world.
On April 22, the UN World Food Programme announced that rising food prices were creating the biggest challenge the agency has faced in its 45-year history, threatening to plunge more than 100 million people into hunger.
World Bank President Robert Zoellick urged immediate action to deal with mounting food prices, but only after 13 countries had erupted in protests, lives had been lost, and hundreds had been injured. Several Asian countries, such as Pakistan and Thailand, deployed troops to guard food stocks, and prevent seizure of grain from warehouses. Brazil, Vietnam, India and Egypt have all imposed food export restrictions, which could exacerbate the famine.
'New deal' food policy
Launching a US$1.2 billion fast-track facility for the crisis, Zoellick reported that the development committee had endorsed his call for a 'New Deal for Global Food Policy', which aims to boost agricultural productivity in poor nations, improve access to food, and help small farmers.
He warned that 37 countries were at risk of social upheaval, because when people spend three-quarters of their daily income on food, there is no margin of survival.
"This is not a natural disaster," he stressed, "This crisis isn't over once the emergency needs are met."
Indeed, it is estimated that food prices will remain high for the next 10 years. Now that food prices, and the number of people who need food for survival, are rising, and global stocks and production are declining, an ideal opportunity for speculative investment has been generated, and there is no ready solution to bring down the inflation rate of agricultural commodities.
The International Monetary Fund managing director, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, acknowledged that it was not only a humanitarian question, as the rising food prices, which are leading to starvation and shaking the stability of governments, could also create trade imbalances, which would impact on major advanced economies through inflation.
The UN has declared that a combination of record fuel prices, rising demand from emerging markets such as China and India, United States farmers switching out of cereals to grow biofuel crops, deepening climate change, which generates harvest-destroying floods, droughts and heatwaves, and speculation on futures markets, have pushed up food prices worldwide.
'Paying for 20 years of mistakes'
But the UN's special rapporteur for the right to food blamed two decades of wrong-headed policies by world powers. In a stinging interview published on his first day in office, he declared that the failure to anticipate the current crisis was unforgivable.
"We are paying for 20 years of mistakes. Nothing was done to prevent speculation on raw materials, though it was predictable investors would turn to these markets following the stock market slowdown. The World Bank and IMF gravely underestimated the need to invest in agriculture, and forced indebted developing countries to invest in export cash crops at the expense of food self-sufficiency. This is a call to order. The days of cheap food are behind us."
He also joined a growing chorus denouncing biofuels, until recently cast as a miracle alternative to polluting fossil fuels, for usurping arable land, and distorting world food prices.
Nearly one-third of corn acreage in the US has been diverted to ethanol production. While crop production is being reduced and increasingly diverted for fuel, world grain reserves are falling, and prices, stimulated by corporate and state intervention, and rampant commodity speculation, continue to soar.
Millions are starving for profit, and governments are floundering vis-a-vis their responsibility to ensure food security.
The previous UN Special Rapporteur for the Right to Food had gone even further, calling the food crisis a "crime against humanity", decrying that over the past two decades, World Bank and IMF policies had dismantled systems put in place to protect Third World farmers.
Instead of promoting economic growth, the IMF and the World Bank have institutionalised economic stagnation in the developing world, and become irrelevant to the central goal of eliminating global poverty.
The crucial factor in the current crisis sweeping the globe is the dependence of Third World countries on food imports.
From Haiti to India, through Senegal and Burkina Faso, as a consequence of the free trade agenda, developing countries are largely hitched to an international economy where they have to import grain in order to consume it. The US produces a significant proportion of globally traded corn, wheat, and rice, and most traded food grain is priced in dollars.
As the dollar slides against other currencies, the cost of imported food rises. The machinations behind international market movements have driven the price of basic staples like rice and corn out of the reach of many.
Revolution of the hungry
Since developing countries have also been forced, through 'policy-based loans' to lower their tariff barriers, and remove protection from their farmers, they have no local production to fall back on, and can no longer get enough to eat. People who used to provide for their needs through their own labour, are now forced to fulfil those needs through purchase. No money, no food. Hence, this revolution of the hungry.
According to the World Bank, food prices have doubled in three years. Since January, the price of rice, the food staple for half the world, has risen by 141 per cent, while wheat has risen by 130 per cent.
In Cameroon, more than 100 people were killed in protests, because the price of cooking oil increased by 140 per cent in one month.
The Economist reports that a billion people worldwide lived on US$1 a day, and were suffering from hunger before the latest round of price increases, concluding that the food crisis may become a challenge to globalisation. Capitalist globalisation and the ideology of progress are being questioned today, as was imperialism 100 years ago.
The proud, resilient and resourceful Caribbean people do not want charity aid, or to be mendicants in the global marketplace. They demand a vigorous regional food production plan, so they can return to the dignity of self-sufficiency, and of owning their own markets.
All over the world people are rediscovering the tastiness and juiciness of their indigenous products, as opposed to the fertilised, processed, hormone-laden foreign imports.
We need policies in place which make it financially viable to become what people the world over should be - sovereign stewards of our local environment.
Myrtha Désulmé is president of the Haiti-Jamaica Society. Email:myrtha2004@yahoo.com or columns@gleanerjm.com.
