Crossposted on Blog de Ford
Last semester (I'm in my final weeks of an MA in Philanthropic Studies), James Morris, the former head of the UN World Food Program spoke to my History of Humanitarian Assistance class about his role in that program. He was an engaging, compassionate speaker whose best line was: "When I took the job, I was moderate Republican. I left it as a radical feminist." That line was in reference how hard the women of the world have to work and how much they have to sacrifice just to make sure that their families are fed.
He ended his talk with us on a hopeful note by saying how easy it would be to end world hunger. Wealthy countries would have to give so many billions of dollars (I can't remember the figures, so I don't want to make them up, but the amount was pretty low compared to how much the US spends in Iraq each year) to end global hunger.
Unfortunately, it seems that Morris didn't take into account the developed world's move to ethanol. Mark Lynas in the UK's New Statesman writes:
The irony is extraordinary. At a time when world leaders are expressing grave concern about diminishing food stocks and a coming global food crisis, our government brings into force measures to increase the use of biofuels - a policy that will further increase food prices, and further worsen the plight of the world's poor.
What biofuels do is undeniable: they take food out of the mouths of starving people and divert them to be burned as fuel in the car engines of the world's rich consumers. This is, in the words of the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, nothing less than a "crime against humanity."
How right he is.
In the US, farmers are doing all they can to get into ethanol. And who can blame them? Ethanol was to bring us cheap energy while revitalizing agricultural communities and saving rural America. Ethanol is good for not only American farmers, but also for those in other grain-producing nations like Brazil.
This is not to say that ethanol is entirely responsible for global food shortages. Rising fuel prices, bad weather, and other factors also have a lot to do with the increased problem of hunger.
But the New York Times puts things in perspective a little:
Saint Louis Meriska’s children ate two spoonfuls of rice apiece as their only meal recently and then went without any food the following day. His eyes downcast, his own stomach empty, the unemployed father said forlornly, "They look at me and say, ‘Papa, I’m hungry,’ and I have to look away. It’s humiliating and it makes you angry."
That anger is palpable across the globe. The food crisis is not only being felt among the poor but is also eroding the gains of the working and middle classes, sowing volatile levels of discontent and putting new pressures on fragile governments.
In Cairo, the military is being put to work baking bread as rising food prices threaten to become the spark that ignites wider anger at a repressive government. In Burkina Faso and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, food riots are breaking out as never before. In reasonably prosperous Malaysia, the ruling coalition was nearly ousted by voters who cited food and fuel price increases as their main concerns.
Need a little more perspective?
In Haiti, where three-quarters of the population earns less than $2 a day and one in five children is chronically malnourished, the one business booming amid all the gloom is the selling of patties made of mud, oil and sugar, typically consumed only by the most destitute.
"It’s salty and it has butter and you don’t know you’re eating dirt," said Olwich Louis Jeune, 24, who has taken to eating them more often in recent months. "It makes your stomach quiet down."
In Haiti, they are eating dirt.
I live a damn comfortable first-world life, and if you're reading this, chances are that you do, too.
What, then, shall we do?
Update
From the Guardian:
The European commission is backing away from its insistence on imposing a compulsory 10% quota of biofuels in all petrol and diesel by 2020, a central plank of its programme to lead the world in combating climate change.
Amid a worsening global food crisis exacerbated, say experts and critics, by the race to divert food or feed crops into biomass for the manufacture of vehicle fuel, and inundated by a flood of expert advice criticising the shift to renewable fuel, the commission appears to be getting cold feet about its biofuels target.