That is the title of this Washington Post story, which is subtitled "As Global Prices Soar, More People Go Hungry".
Yesterday I wrote about our domestic poor, and how our political campaigns seem to ignore them, in a diary entitled Rich and Poor, Poor and Rich, and the Middle Class. . . that was honored by being rescued. As important as the issue of our domestic poor is, in many cases those poor here still live far better than people in other nations.
And a crisis in food production can have catastrophic effects - disease, starvation, disorder, even warfare. Thus I want to use my diary this morning to point you at the article and to offer a few comments of my own.
Please keep reading.
The article begins by noting that one of the actions taken by China in the midst of our current world-wide credit meltdown was to impose an export tax to keep grain and fertilizer from leaving the country. Think about that, at least momentarily. The first, the limits on grain, will place those countries that depend upon Chinese food stuffs in immediate jeopardy. And for some nations they may have no other sources for fertilizer.
Even beyond that - the world is so interconnected that a refusal to export is equivalent to pulling another leg out from under the table of the international economic system. It should be very scary.
But perhaps we need to understand it in a more personal fashion, so the article continues with the story of Kenyan farmer Stephen Muchiri:
It's planting season now, but he can afford to sow amaranthus and haricot beans on only half of the 10 acres he owns because the cost of the fertilizer he needs has shot up nearly $50 a bag in a matter of weeks. Muchiri said nearly everyone he knows is cutting back on planting, which means even less food for a continent where the supply has already been weakened by drought, political unrest and rising prices.
The next paragraph is brief, and quite blunt:
While the world's attention has been focused on rescuing investment banks and stock markets from collapse, the global food crisis has worsened, a casualty of the growing financial tumult.
Aid organizations worry that the attention being given to banks and stock markets means that the near-term or even immediate needs of millions of people are being ignored, with possible catastrophic effects. the organization Oxfam
estimates that economic chaos this year has pulled the incomes of an additional 119 million people below the poverty line.
That is a total equal to more than 1/3 the population of this nation. And those numbers may well be out of date and too low.
Here is the reaction of the leader of an African group:
"The amount of money used for the bailouts in the U.S. and Europe -- people here are saying that money is enough to feed the poor in Africa for the next three years," said Muchiri, head of the Eastern Africa Farmers Federation.
And consider this:
The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that 923 million people were seriously undernourished in 2007. Its director-general, Jacques Diouf, said in a recent speech that he worries about cuts in aid to agriculture in developing countries. He said he is also concerned by protectionist trade measures intended to counteract the financial turmoil.
Let's try that figure one more time 923 million people were seriously undernourished in 2007. That is BEFORE the current financial crisis, and was in part a result of the soaring energy prices. But if nations, understandably, pull back from food aid to less fortunate nations in the attempt to shore up their economies, millions will suffer, even die, as a result.
There are at least 36 nations in dire need of immediate food aid. And while prices are, fortunately for some, now dropping (in part perhaps because of the lower costs of energy), that also means that food production will also drop, as for some farmers their incentives to plant crops is also dropping.
I know this will not be an issue during the remaining 9 days of our election cycle. I would not expect that it would. Americans are scared about their own - and our national - economic security.
But I do hope - even pray - that as soon as possible we give some consideration to issues like access to sufficient food and to potable water and to fuel other than destroying the remaining woodlands: deforestation of the foothills of the Himalayas leads to erosion, and the burning of wood is not only an inefficient source of energy but also contributes to our problems with global warming.
Ultimately we cannot solve our problems, be the economic, energy, or environmental, in isolation from the rest of the world. Some acknowledge this as they argue against stricter rules on emissions while pointing to the additional Chinese coal plants coming on line at the rate of one a week. But that is a self-destructive approach. Instead we need to cooperate internationally to address all of these issues. We have known for some time that air pollution is no respecter of national boundaries. It has been equally obvious that if a country upstream uses too much of a major river or allows it to be polluted that there is little the downstream nations can do short of initiating military conflict to protect a resources basic to the survival of their population. And given how the world economy is now structured, there seems little nations can do to isolate the effects of international economic crises.
Our housing mess has been toxic - and that toxicity has now spread globally. We have a moral responsibility to help address the negative impacts it has helped create.
And we always have a moral obligation to ensure that the basic needs of people around the world are met. If they are not, it becomes far easier for "leaders" to arise who will use those unmet needs as an occasion for taking actions that are clearly not in our national interest. That should be sufficient reason for us to be willing to act. Refusal to acknowledge our interconnectedness internationally is nothing more than the kind of selfishness we have seen among some in this country only writ far larger, and thus far more destructive.
Keep this in mind. When this historic election is over, begin to demand that our new leadership recognize that we cannot fix our problems by ourselves, and that the international cooperation in which we must participate should include our helping those in critical need in other nations. Otherwise we have no expectation of sympathy for the problems we have helped create.
And millions will suffer, and die.
923 million people were seriously undernourished in 2007. How many will be in the number for this year? And will an increasing part of that be Americans?
Peace.