quote:
Originally posted by M. Spector:
[b][url=http://in.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idINIndia-33134320080420]Source[...
That's astonishing. (I mean that someone so apparently "mainstream" is actually saying these things.)
quote:
Ziegler said he believed that one day starving people could rise up against their persecutors. "It's just as possible as the French Revolution was," he said.
[url=http://www.nbc11.com/news/15953044/detail.html]Shoppers Asked To Limit Rice Purchases[/url]
[url=http://www.newstatesman.com/200804170025]How the rich starved the world[/url]
by Mark Lynas
17 April 2008
quote:
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.[b]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.[/b] This is, in the words of the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, nothing less than a [b]"crime against humanity"[/b]. It is a crime the UK government seems determined to play its part in abetting. The Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO), introduced on 15 April, mandates petrol retailers to mix 2.5 per cent biofuels into fuel sold to motorists. This will rise to 5.75 per cent by 2010, in line with European Union policy.
The message could not have been clearer if the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, had personally put a torch to a pyre of corn and rice in Parliament Square: [b]even as you take to the streets to protest your empty bellies and hungry children, we will burn your food in our cars.[/b] The UK is not uniquely implicated in this scandal: the EU, the United States, India, Brazil and China all have targets to increase biofuels use. But a look at the raw data confirms today's dire situation. According to the World Bank, global maize production increased by 51 million tonnes between 2004 and 2007. During that time, biofuels use in the US alone (mostly ethanol) rose by 50 million tonnes, soaking up almost the entire global increase.
Next year, the use of US corn for ethanol is forecast to rise to 114 million tonnes - nearly a third of the whole projected US crop. [b]American cars now burn enough corn to cover all the import needs of the 82 nations classed by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) as "low-income food-deficit countries".[/b] There could scarcely be a better way to starve the poor.
quote:
Originally posted by Jerry West:
[b][url=http://www.nbc11.com/news/15953044/detail.html]Shoppers Asked To Limit Rice Purchases[/url][/b]
I think that with my next paycheck I'm going to start building up a little reserve of food goods, particularly rice, lentils and canned goods.
[stupid remark deleted]
[ 23 April 2008: Message edited by: RosaL ]
quote:
Originally posted by RosaL:
[b][stupid remark deleted][/b]
Ever wish you could do that on posts other than your own?
quote:
Originally posted by M. Spector:
[b]Ever wish you could do that on posts other than your own?[/b]
[img]biggrin.gif" border="0[/img]
At least where soya is concerned, apparently Monsanto isn't going to be of much help, contrary to its pr.
[url=http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/exposed-the-great-... the great GM crops myth[/url]
quote:
Genetic modification actually cuts the productivity of crops, an authoritative new study shows, undermining repeated claims that a switch to the controversial technology is needed to solve the growing world food crisis.The study – carried out over the past three years at the University of Kansas in the US grain belt – has found that GM soya produces about 10 per cent less food than its conventional equivalent, contradicting assertions by advocates of the technology that it increases yields.
quote:
Monsanto said yesterday that it was surprised by the extent of the decline found by the Kansas study, but not by the fact that the yields had dropped. It said that the soya had not been engineered to increase yields, and that it was now developing one that would.
...which they will of course market as "new, improved, Roundup-ready soybeans," at a slightly higher price.
quote:
Several forces that have shielded Canadians from serious food inflation are losing their effectiveness.The loonie soared 17 per cent against the U.S. dollar last year, but few experts expect it to rise much more. That means Canadians will start feeling the full impact of record high prices for commodities such as wheat, corn and soybeans, which are priced in U.S. dollars. Rising fuel costs will also pump up shipping costs.
Meat prices have been low because of a glut of livestock, particularly hogs, in Canada and the United States. But herds on both sides of the border are starting to come down in size because farmers have been losing so much money. The futures market is indicating that meat prices will rise by next fall.
Costs for farmers have also skyrocketed. The price of fertilizer has more than doubled since last fall, while diesel fuel and other chemicals have also gone way up. Meanwhile, commodity markets have gyrated wildly in recent weeks, sending the price of wheat, canola and corn soaring one day and plummeting the next. That has added more risk for farmers and left many wondering if the markets are working at all.
"It's been very disruptive," said Eric Fridfinnson, a farmer in Manitoba who has been trying to figure out how much he might get for his crops this year. "I think that there really does need to be an examination of all futures markets."
Many farmers blame the growing influence of investment funds for distorting commodity prices. According to figures compiled by Gresham Investment Management, a commodities brokerage in New York, the amount of speculative money in commodities futures - that is, investors such as big funds that don't buy or sell the physical commodity but merely bet on price movements - was less than $5-billion (U.S.) in 2000. Last year, it ballooned to roughly $175-billion.
By some estimates, investment funds control 50 per cent of the wheat traded on the Chicago Board of Trade and Chicago Mercantile Exchange, the world's biggest commodity markets. - [url=http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20080425.FOOD25//TPStor...
So on top of drought, soil depletion, diversion of cropland into biofuel production, and rising prices for fossil fuels, we have an additional factor contributing to the world food crisis: commodities speculators.
Isn't capitalism just marvellous in its ability to extract private profit from the most dire crises of human suffering?
[url=http://larouchepub.com/other/2008/3517kill_wto.html][b]To Defeat Famine: Kill the WTO[/b][/url]
by Marcia Merry Baker
quote:
The World Trade Organization—the agency and the thinking behind it—must be killed. We are at the point of famine today, because only 13 years ago, in January 1995, the WTO was allowed to come into existence, resulting from ten years of UN GATT talks (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), 1984-94, on "reforming" world agriculture for free trade. This culminated a process of drastic takedown of world food production potential, from its prior build-up during the FDR period and after World War II. The inevitable result was today's worldwide food crisis. . .The WTO crime record can be best understood by looking back to the decades and locations where policies to promote agro-industrial production once were in effect—from the 1930s anti-Depression farm programs in the United States, to the food self-sufficiency programs of India, undertaken after its independence from the British Empire in 1947. But then, over the decades, a series of policy downshifts undercut the goal and the gains made, and decreased the volume of available food. Former high-productivity farm regions were depopulated, from the High Plains of North America, to Europe, Australia, and South America. [i]Now one-seventh of the world's population lacks enough to eat.[/i] Against this backdrop, the story of the WTO is one of crimes against humanity, and not an academic "economics" debate.
How to stop the WTO? Nullify it. Withdraw membership. Suspend its codicils, and also those of its multilateral clones, such as NAFTA, CAFTA, and all the rest. [b]There is no way to make any of this so-called "free" (rigged) trade fair or useful.[/b] In the face of today's food emergency, recall what the core WTO liturgy is: Nations must not keep food reserves, because this would be trade-distorting.
quote:
In Haiti, where most people get 22% fewer calories than the minimum needed for good health, some are staving off their hunger pangs by eating [url=http://www.haitiaction.net/News/HIP/2_10_8/2_10_8.html]“mud biscuits”[/url] made by mixing clay and water with a bit of vegetable oil and salt.Meanwhile, in Canada, the federal government is currently paying $225 for each pig killed in a mass cull of breeding swine, as part of a plan to reduce hog production. Hog farmers, squeezed by low hog prices and high feed costs, have responded so enthusiastically that the kill will likely use up all the allocated funds before the program ends in September.
Some of the slaughtered hogs may be given to local Food Banks, but most will be destroyed or made into pet food. None will go to Haiti.
This is the brutal world of capitalist agriculture — a world where some people destroy food because prices are too low, and others literally eat dirt because food prices are too high.
[url=http://www.socialistvoice.ca/?p=274]Read the whole article[/url]
quote:
Originally posted by Stephen Gordon:
[b]The biofuels story is clearly a factor, but the scale of these things is pretty big. Biofuels account for a significant fraction of US agricultural output, but as a fraction of world output, it's pretty small.I don't think that subsidising production is the way to go: farmers are already getting good prices for their crops. The danger is the reflex of many govts (ex: Argentina) to respond to the crisis by forcing farmers to accept artificially low prices. That would just make things worse: money-losing farmers would just cut back production.
[/b]
Here's why I don't trust economists, even ones who seem to have some real smarts. They are so stuck in book models they don't get the real world. Farm prices have rebounded to a certain extent, but they are still mostly below the cost of production.
Farmers have been accepting, with no choice artificially low prices for some time now. Thanks to such issues as captive supply in the livestock sectors and massive buyer concentration in the grains and oil seed
sectors.
The real answers to these sort of thing is orderly marketing or collective marketing yet that is the very thing that governments and Chicago school economic group think 'experts' are attacking. This is about who controls food production and the food system and the lack of sovereignty for people over their own food systmes.
quote:
"So," says the Wisconsin dairy farmer, "they finally figured out, after all these years of pushing globalization and genetically modified [GM] seeds, that instead of feeding the world we've created a food system that leaves more people hungry. If they'd listened to farmers instead of corporations, they would've known this was going to happen." ...Beyond humanitarian responses, the cure for what ails the global food system - and an unsteady US farm economy - is not more of the same globalization and genetic gimmickry. That way has left thirty-seven nations with food crises while global grain giant Cargill harvests an 86 percent rise in profits and Monsanto reaps record sales from its herbicides and seeds. For years, corporations have promised farmers that problems would be solved by trade deals and technology - especially GM seeds, which University of Kansas research now suggests reduce food production and the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development says won't end global hunger. The 'market,' at least as defined by agribusiness, isn't working. We 'have a herd of market traders, speculators and financial bandits who have turned wild and constructed a world of inequality and horror,' says Jean Ziegler, the UN's right-to-food advocate. But try telling that to the Bush Administration or to World Bank president (and former White House trade rep) Robert Zoellick, who's busy exploiting tragedy to promote trade liberalization. 'If ever there is a time to cut distorting agricultural subsidies and open markets for food imports, it must be now,' says Zoellick. 'Wait a second,' replies Dani Rodrik, a Harvard political economist who tracks trade policy. 'Wouldn't the removal of these distorting policies raise world prices in agriculture even further?' Yes. World Bank studies confirm that wheat and rice prices will rise if Zoellick gets his way.
[url=http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/17465]ZNet[/url]
[url=http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/04/13/8405/]Exposed: The Great GM Crops Myth[/url]
excerpt:
Genetic modification actually cuts the productivity of crops, an authoritative new study shows, undermining repeated claims that a switch to the controversial technology is needed to solve the growing world food crisis.
The study - carried out over the past three years at the University of Kansas in the US grain belt - has found that GM soya produces about 10 per cent less food than its conventional equivalent, contradicting assertions by advocates of the technology that it increases yields.
excerpt:
Last week the biggest study of its kind ever conducted - the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development - concluded that GM was not the answer to world hunger.
Professor Bob Watson, the director of the study and chief scientist at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, when asked if GM could solve world hunger, said: “The simple answer is no.”
quote:
On December 14, 1981 a resolution was proposed in the United Nations General Assembly which declared that "education, work, health care, proper nourishment, national development are human rights". Notice the "proper nourishment". The resolution was approved by a vote of 135-1. The United States cast the only "No" vote.A year later, December 18, 1982, an identical resolution was proposed in the General Assembly. It was approved by a vote of 131-1. The United States cast the only "No" vote.
The following year, December 16, 1983, the resolution was again put forth, a common practice at the United Nations. This time it was approved by a vote of 132-1. There's no need to tell you who cast the sole "No" vote.
These votes took place under the Reagan administration.
Under the Clinton administration, in 1996, a United Nations-sponsored World Food Summit affirmed the "right of everyone to have access to safe and nutritious food". The United States took issue with this, insisting that it does not recognize a "right to food". Washington instead championed free trade as the key to ending the poverty at the root of hunger, and expressed fears that recognition of a "right to food" could lead to lawsuits from poor nations seeking aid and special trade provisions.
The situation of course did not improve under the administration of George W. Bush. In 2002, in Rome, world leaders at another U.N.-sponsored World Food Summit again approved a declaration that everyone had the right to "safe and nutritious food". The United States continued to oppose the clause, again fearing it would leave them open to future legal claims by famine-stricken countries. - [url=http://members.aol.com/bblum6/aer57.htm]Source[/url]
[url=http://www.wsws.org/articles/2008/apr2008/hedg-a24.shtml][b]Financial speculators reap profits from global hunger[/b][/url]
quote:
On Tuesday, April 22, a UN spokesperson referred to a “silent tsunami” that threatens to plunge more than 100 million people on every continent into hunger. Josette Sheeran, executive director of the UN World Food Programme (WFP), noted: “This is the new face of hunger—the millions of people who were not in the urgent hunger category six months ago but now are.”A recent article in the British New Statesman magazine, entitled “The Trading Frenzy That Sent Prices Soaring,” notes that increases in global population and the switch to bio-fuels are important factors in the rise of food prices, but then declares:
[i]“These long-term factors are important, but they are not the real reasons why food prices have doubled or why India is rationing rice, or why British farmers are killing pigs for which they can’t afford feedstocks.It’s the credit crisis.”[/i]
Bubble economics again? I think it's past time sovereign nations repo'd democratic control of money creation and told global money and near-money and commodities speculators where to get off.
[ 01 May 2008: Message edited by: Fidel ]
They're hungry in Haiti, and Ottawa is paying pig farmers to [url=http://www.winnipegsun.com/News/Canada/2008/04/14/5283361.html]kill 150, 000 pigs by Fall[/url] Some will go for pet food, but none will go to Haiti.
quote:
An acute food crisis has struck the world in 2008. This is on top of a longer-term crisis of agriculture and food that has already left billions hungry and malnourished. In order to understand the full, dire implications of what is happening today it is necessary to look at the interaction between these short-term and long-term crises. Both crises arise primarily from the for-profit production of food, fiber, and now biofuels, and the rift between food and people that this inevitably generates.
[url=http://www.monthlyreview.org/080501magdoff.php]The World Food Crisis: Sources and Solutions[/url] by Fred Magdoff.
[ 02 May 2008: Message edited by: RosaL ]
Good article, RosaL!
quote:
Hunger and malnutrition generally are symptoms of a larger underlying problem — poverty in an economic system that recognizes, as Rachel Carson put it, no other gods but those of profit and production. Food is treated in almost all of the world’s countries as just another commodity, like clothes, automobiles, pencils, books, diamond jewelry, and so on. People are not considered to have a right to purchase any particular commodity, and no distinction is made in this respect between necessities and luxuries. Those who are rich can afford to purchase anything they want while the poor are often not able to procure even their basic needs. Under capitalist relations people have no right to an adequate diet, shelter, and medical attention. As with other commodities, people without what economists call “effective demand” cannot buy sufficient nutritious food. Of course, lack of “effective demand” in this case means that the poor don’t have enough money to buy the food they need.
Oh, and it's [b]Fred[/b] Magdoff, by the way.
[img]wink.gif" border="0[/img]
quote:
Originally posted by M. Spector:
[b]Good article, RosaL!
Oh, and it's [b]Fred[/b] Magdoff, by the way.
[img]wink.gif" border="0[/img] [/b]
argh! Thanks. I'm about to fix it ....
(I was up all night with a vomiting dog - that's my excuse. heh.)
[ 02 May 2008: Message edited by: RosaL ]
quote:
Hunger and malnutrition generally are symptoms of a larger underlying problem — poverty in an economic system that recognizes, as Rachel Carson put it, no other gods but those of profit and production.
Generally is the key word here. This is true if there is a surplus of sustainable resources. In the present case both the above and the ratio of population to resources are part of the problem.
No matter what economic system we have, if there isn't enough there will be hunger and malnutrition, and if we over consume the resource base, reducing its sustainability level, as we are doing, we reduce the size of the population that can be indefinitely supported at any given level of support.
[url=http://atamanenko.ndp.ca/page/211]There are those trying to bring some reason to this discussion.[/url]
quote:
Originally posted by Loretta:
[url=http://atamanenko.ndp.ca/page/211]There are those trying to bring some reason to this discussion.[/url]
Some reason? Have you found reason to be lacking in this discussion thread so far?
Sorry, I didn't mean in this thread but the overall debate.
Ok, thanks, Loretta. [img]wink.gif" border="0[/img]
It's still morning where I live and I'm not quite awake yet...? [img]biggrin.gif" border="0[/img]
quote:
Giant agribusinesses are enjoying [b]soaring earnings and profits[/b] out of the world food crisis which is driving millions of people towards starvation... And [b]speculation[/b] is helping to drive the prices of basic foodstuffs out of the reach of the hungry.The prices of wheat, corn and rice have soared over the past year driving the world's poor – who already spend about 80 per cent of their income on food – into hunger and destitution.
The World Bank says that [b]100 million more people are facing severe hunger. Yet some of the world's richest food companies are making record profits. Monsanto[/b] last month reported that its net income for the three months up to the end of February this year had more than doubled over the same period in 2007, from $543m (Ј275m) to $1.12bn. Its profits increased from $1.44bn to $2.22bn.
[b]Cargill[/b]'s net earnings soared by 86 per cent from $553m to $1.030bn over the same three months. And [b]Archer Daniels Midland[/b], one of the world's largest agricultural processors of soy, corn and wheat, increased its net earnings by 42 per cent in the first three months of this year from $363m to $517m. The operating profit of its grains merchandising and handling operations jumped 16-fold from $21m to $341m.
[url=http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/multinationals-mak... Independent[/url]
quote:
“When the Americans came to occupy Iraq, they promised us a better life,” Ina’m Majeed, a teacher at a girls school told IPS in Fallujah. “After killing our sons and husbands, they are killing us by hunger now. The food ration that was once enough for our survival is now close to nothing, and the market prices are incredibly high. It is impossible for 80 percent of Iraqis now to buy the same items they used to get from the previous regime’s food rations.” - [url=http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=42216]Source[/url]
[ 05 May 2008: Message edited by: M. Spector ]
I heard a short bit on the Ceeb this morning about how potatoes are being touted as a possible replacement for rice, or as a partial solution to the food crisis in poorer countries.
I found that odd considering growing potatoes is fairly hard on soil and to attain decent yields is also water intensive.
I like to ask the "security" guard at the local safeway what he's going to do when the food riots come here. It's obviously something he'd never considered before.
good piece on Monsanto on democracynow.org today
"Multinationals make billions in profit out of growing global food crisis: Speculators blamed for driving up price of basic foods as 100 million face severe hunger"
[url=http://tinyurl.com/5pks9p]http://tinyurl.com/5pks9p[/url]
quote:
Giant agribusinesses are enjoying soaring earnings and profits out of the world food crisis which is driving millions of people towards starvation, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. And speculation is helping to drive the prices of basic foodstuffs out of the reach of the hungry.The prices of wheat, corn and rice have soared over the past year driving the world's poor – who already spend about 80 per cent of their income on food – into hunger and destitution.
The World Bank says that 100 million more people are facing severe hunger. Yet some of the world's richest food companies are making record profits. Monsanto last month reported that its net income for the three months up to the end of February this year had more than doubled over the same period in 2007, from $543m (Ј275m) to $1.12bn. Its profits increased from $1.44bn to $2.22bn ...
Gee, that looks [url=http://www.rabble.ca/babble/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic&f=45&t=000489#0....
[url=http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article4486.html]US Federal Reserve to blame for world food crisis[/url]
quote:
The World Food Program is warning of widespread famine if the West doesn't provide emergency humanitarian relief. The situation is dire. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez summed it up like this, "It is a massacre of the world's poor. The problem is not the production of food. It is the economic, social and political model of the world. The capitalist model is in crisis."Right on, Hugo. There is no shortage of food; it's just the prices that are making food unaffordable. Bernanke's "weak dollar" policy has ignited a wave of speculation in commodities which is pushing prices into the stratosphere. The UN is calling the global food crisis it a "silent tsunami", but its more like a flood; the world is awash in increasingly worthless dollars that are making food and raw materials more expensive. Foreign central banks and investors presently hold $6 trillion in dollars and dollar-backed assets, so when the dollar starts to slide, the pain radiates through entire economies. This is especially true in countries where the currency is pegged to the dollar. That's why most of the Gulf States are experiencing runaway inflation. This doesn't mean that oil depletion, biofuel production, over-population, and giant agribusinesses don't add to the problem. They do. But the catalyst is the Fed's monetary policies; that's the domino that puts the others in motion.
[url=http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/amr160508.html]India's Emerging Food Security Crisis: The Consequences of the Neoliberal Assault on the Public Distribution System[/url]
quote:
The consequences of over a decade of neoliberal hunger are what make the current conjunction of global foodgrain price rise and severe weather events, such as the recent Burmese cyclone, the Australian drought, the extraordinarily severe Chinese winter, a matter requiring urgent attention. Famine is not the result of a failed monsoon or other extraordinary extreme shortage ... Only when a population has been nutritionally deprived for an extended period does the year of extraordinary shortage become the year of famine ....For most Indians a persistent decline in available calories has marked the neoliberal era. ...
A link is provided outlining the undernourishment of the Indian population during rapid (capitalist) economic growth.
India's public distribution system (PDS), which has been the subject of WTO, World Bank and IMF atrocities over the last number of years, has been targeted and attacked by the neoliberal dominated Bretton Woods institutions.
quote:
[b]This introduction of "free market forces" into food production and distribution has amounted to, in fact, murder. At first, as was inevitable in a market system subjected to strong deflationary pressures from World Bank, IMF and governmental authorities, prices shot down and small farmers lost in sequence their profits, their lands and their lives.[/b] Then as world market prices for essential foods shot up -- the result of the U.S. exporting its inflation to the rest of the world to finance its aggression in Iraq and the U.S. provision of vast subsidies to turn foodgrains into fuel -- masses living in hunger are driven to the verge of starvation while foodgrains they cannot afford to buy accumulate in the warehouses. We know that no long-term solution is possible absent revolutionary land reform, but neoliberal policies have brought the nation to the point where the vagaries of climate could produce famine not experienced in two generations. This desperate situation demands the immediate abolition of targeting and the introduction of universal PDS with an effective system for public supervision.
That's capitalism for ya. And we're told, ad nauseum, that [i]there is no alternative.[/i]
[url=http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/051508E.shtml]Interview with Raj Patel, author of new book, [i]Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System [/i][/url]
quote:
Q. Explain for whom the free market works and what "free market" means in the context of food.A. Free markets in food and certainly global markets in food are a very new thing. They are barely 200 years old and their origins have everything to do with colonialism. The world's first free market in grain was the market in wheat in the 1880s. This market was forged in imperialism and conquest, particularly by the British over the grain baskets of South Asia.
The social safety nets that existed in India under feudal society had been knocked away by the British. If people couldn't afford food, they didn't get to eat and if they couldn't buy food, they starved. As a result of the imposition of markets in food, 13 million people across the world died in the 19th century. They died in the golden age of liberal capitalism. Those are the origins of markets in food.
We shouldn't be surprised, then, that in those markets today, there are basically just a handful of corporations that control the truck and barter of goods. In any major market, you'll see that it's basically four or five corporations that control upwards of 50 percent of the market. In tea, it's just one corporation, Unilever, that controls 90 percent of the market and in coffee there are just a couple of firms that have 80 percent of the market.
This is a very important article that bears reading in full. I’m saving my copy for future reference.
[url=http://www.tni.org/detail_page.phtml?&act_id=18285]How to manufacture a global food crisis: lessons from the World Bank, IMF, and WTO
How "free trade" is destroying Third World agriculture - and who's fighting back[/url]
by Walden Bello
16 May 2008
quote:
The global rise in food prices is not only a consequence of using food crops to produce biofuels, but of the "free trade" policies promoted by international financial institutions. Now peasant organisations are leading the opposition to a capitalist industrial agriculture.When tens of thousands of people staged demonstrations in [b]Mexico[/b] last year to protest a 60 percent increase in the price of tortillas, many analysts pointed to biofuel as the culprit..…However, an intriguing question escaped many observers: how on earth did Mexicans, who live in the land where corn was domesticated, become dependent on US imports in the first place?
The Mexican food crisis cannot be fully understood without taking into account the fact that in the years preceding the tortilla crisis, the homeland of corn had been converted to a corn-importing economy by "free market" policies promoted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and Washington….
That the global food crisis stems mainly from free-market restructuring of agriculture is clearer in the case of rice. Unlike corn, less than 10 percent of world rice production is traded. Moreover, there has been no diversion of rice from food consumption to biofuels. Yet this year alone, prices nearly tripled, from $380 a ton in January to more than $1,000 in April….
[b]The Philippines[/b] provides a grim example of how neoliberal economic restructuring transforms a country from a net food exporter to a net food importer. The Philippines is the world's largest importer of rice….
The broad contours of the Philippines story are similar to those of Mexico….
And the cutback in agricultural programs was followed by trade liberalization, with the Philippines' 1995 entry into the World Trade Organization having the same effect as Mexico's joining NAFTA….
The consequences of the Philippines' joining the WTO barreled through the rest of its agriculture like a super-typhoon. Swamped by cheap corn imports--much of it subsidized US grain--farmers reduced land devoted to corn from 3.1 million hectares in 1993 to 2.5 million in 2000. Massive importation of chicken parts nearly killed that industry, while surges in imports destabilized the poultry, hog and vegetable industries….
The experience of Mexico and the Philippines was paralleled in one country after another subjected to the ministrations of the IMF and the WTO. A study of fourteen countries by the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization found that the levels of food imports in 1995-98 exceeded those in 1990-94….
As then-US Agriculture Secretary John Block put it in 1986, [b]"The idea that developing countries should feed themselves is an anachronism from a bygone era. They could better ensure their food security by relying on US agricultural products, which are available in most cases at lower cost."[/b]….
Developing countries are being integrated into a system where export-oriented production of meat and grain is dominated by large industrial farms like those run by the Thai multinational CP and where technology is continually upgraded by advances in genetic engineering from firms like Monsanto. And the elimination of tariff and nontariff barriers is facilitating a global agricultural supermarket of elite and middle-class consumers serviced by grain-trading corporations like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland and transnational food retailers like the British-owned Tesco and the French-owned Carrefour….
De-peasantization is at an advanced state in Latin America and Asia. And if the World Bank has its way, [b]Africa[/b] will travel in the same direction. As Bryceson and her colleagues correctly point out in a recent article, the World Development Report for 2008, which touches extensively on agriculture in Africa, is practically a blueprint for the transformation of the continent's peasant-based agriculture into large-scale commercial farming. However, as in many other places today, the Bank's wards are moving from sullen resentment to outright defiance.
At the time of decolonization, in the 1960s, Africa was actually a net food exporter. Today the continent imports 25 percent of its food; almost every country is a net importer. Hunger and famine have become recurrent phenomena, with the past three years alone seeing food emergencies break out in the Horn of Africa, the Sahel, and Southern and Central Africa.
Agriculture in Africa is in deep crisis, and the causes range from wars to bad governance, lack of agricultural technology and the spread of HIV/AIDS. However, as in Mexico and the Philippines, an important part of the explanation is the phasing out of government controls and support mechanisms under the IMF and World Bank structural adjustment programs imposed as the price for assistance in servicing external debt….
As in Mexico and the Philippines, structural adjustment in Africa was not simply about underinvestment but state divestment. But there was one major difference. In Africa the World Bank and IMF micromanaged, making decisions on how fast subsidies should be phased out, how many civil servants had to be fired and even, as in the case of Malawi, how much of the country's grain reserve should be sold and to whom. In other words, Bank and IMF resident proconsuls reached to the very innards of the state's involvement in the agricultural economy to rip it up….
Farmers' groups have networked internationally; one of the most dynamic to emerge is [b]Via Campesina (Peasant's Path)[/b]. Via not only seeks to get "WTO out of agriculture" and opposes the paradigm of a globalized capitalist industrial agriculture; it also proposes an alternative-food sovereignty. [b]Food sovereignty[/b] means, first of all, the right of a country to determine its production and consumption of food and the exemption of agriculture from global trade regimes like that of the WTO. It also means consolidation of a smallholder-centered agriculture via protection of the domestic market from low-priced imports; remunerative prices for farmers and fisherfolk; abolition of all direct and indirect export subsidies; and the phasing out of domestic subsidies that promote unsustainable agriculture. [b]Via's platform also calls for an end to the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights regime, or TRIPs, which allows corporations to patent plant seeds; opposes agro-technology based on genetic engineering; and demands land reform.[/b] In contrast to an integrated global monoculture, Via offers the vision of an international agricultural economy composed of diverse national agricultural economies trading with one another but focused primarily on domestic production.
Once regarded as relics of the pre-industrial era, peasants are now leading the opposition to a capitalist industrial agriculture that would consign them to the dustbin of history. They have become what Karl Marx described as a politically conscious "class for itself,"contradicting his predictions about their demise. With the global food crisis, they are moving to center stage - and they have allies and supporters. For as peasants refuse to go gently into that good night and fight de-peasantization, developments in the twenty-first century are revealing the panacea of globalized capitalist industrial agriculture to be a nightmare.
(This article appears in the June 2, 2008, edition of [i]The Nation[/i])
Dani Rodrick replies to this point: [url=http://rodrik.typepad.com/dani_rodriks_weblog/2008/05/does-the-food-p.ht... the food price crisis enhance the case for self-sufficiency?[/url]
quote:
I must say that I do not quite understand the argument of those who criticize the earlier liberalization. It seems to me odd to fault the World Bank for advice some 15 years ago to eliminate import protection--so that domestic prices could come down at the time--while at the same time complaining about high prices now, even with the benefit of hindsight. If developing countries had all kept their import protection, the global supply of food would have been lower today, not higher. (That is because import protection would have led global production to be reallocated from efficient exporters to inefficient importers.) If you are for self-sufficiency, you must be willing to live with high prices.Unless that is you believe in a combination of dynamic learning effects with externalities, in which case temporarily high prices may be worth it because they result in low prices eventually. But it would be hard to make this case for food crops.
So the answer to the question in the title seems to me to be "no".
And yet, if it wasn't for the dictates of the World Bank and IMF and cheap rice imports flooding the Haitian market, Haitians might still be eating their own home grown rice instead of dining on mud cakes.
What "liberalization" has managed to do is take the Irish potato famine global.
For some reason it escapes economists that more plentiful, cheaper food to an obese Westerner cruising the aisles at a Super Store or bellying up to an all-you-can-eat buffet, is still nothing in the empty bowl of a starving Haitian (or African or Asian).
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Originally posted by Stephen Gordon:
[b]Dani Rodrick replies to this point: [url=http://rodrik.typepad.com/dani_rodriks_weblog/2008/05/does-the-food-p.ht... the food price crisis enhance the case for self-sufficiency?[/url][/b]
Stephen Gordon,
It is very fallacious to argue for a free market in agriculture. There is no such thing. Western countries subsidized their farmers and crippled third world agriculture.
The effect of those subsidies was to artificially lower prices, and that hurt exporters. But for food importers like Haiti, low food prices is good news.
I find it hard to believe that rice would be cheap and plentiful in Haiti if foreign imports had been kept out of the market.
quote:
I find it hard to believe that rice would be cheap and plentiful in Haiti if foreign imports had been kept out of the market.
Uhm, Stephen, maybe "believing" rather than knowing isn't such a good idea. It doesn't work well for anyone in the long run.
quote:
Although her countrymen can no longer afford the imported rice that has come to dominate their diet, Josiane Desjardin sees little hope of reviving the domestic crop that once grew abundantly in the fertile estuary of the Artibonite River.There's no turning back the clock, farmers here say dejectedly, in a countryside ravaged by floods, soil erosion, misguided trade policy and ongoing landownership disputes.
Subsidized U.S. rice began flooding in 30 years ago, so cheap that Haitians began eating it instead of the corn, sweet potatoes, cassava and domestic rice that had sprouted from plains and mountainsides from the colonial era to the late 1980s.
"Miami rice," as Haitians call the U.S. import, drove rice farmers out of business and incited a rural exodus that swelled the slums of the capital, Port-au-Prince.
[url=http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-rice13-2008may13,0,3... Times[/url]
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Hermite Joseph, a mother working in the markets of Port au Prince, told journalist Nick Whalen that her two kids are “like toothpicks” they’ re not getting enough nourishment. Before, if you had a dollar twenty-five cents, you could buy vegetables, some rice, 10 cents of charcoal and a little cooking oil. Right now, a little can of rice alone costs 65 cents, and is not good rice at all. Oil is 25 cents. Charcoal is 25 cents. With a dollar twenty-five, you can’t even make a plate of rice for one child.”
[url=http://www.counterpunch.org/quigley04212008.html]Counter Punch[/url]
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The discs are made from dried yellow clay mixed with water, salt and vegetable shortening or margarine.The mud, which comes from Haiti's central plateau region, is first strained and then shaped into biscuits which are left in the sun.
The pale brown biscuits, known by locals simply as "terre", have traditionally been eaten by pregnant Haitians and children as an antacid and source of calcium.
However, for some Haitians unable to afford even a plate of rice, terre has become their staple diet.
[url=http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1577057/Haiti%27s-rising-food-... Telegraph[/url]
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Over the last 30 years, the IMF and the World Bank have pushed so-called developing countries to dismantle all forms of protection for their local farmers and to open up their markets to global agribusiness, speculators and subsidised food from rich countries. This has transformed most developing countries from being exporters of food into importers. Today about 70 per cent of developing countries are net importers of food. On top of this, finance liberalisation has made it easier for investors to take control of markets for their own private benefit.Agricultural policy has lost touch with its most basic goal: that of feeding people. Rather than rethink their own disastrous policies, governments and think tanks are blaming production problems, the growing demand for food in China and India, and biofuels. While these have played a role, the fundamental cause of today's food crisis is neoliberal globalisation itself, which has transformed food from a source of livelihood security into a mere commodity to be gambled away, even at the cost of widespread hunger among the world's poorest people.
[url=http://www.enn.com/ecosystems/article/35510]Making a killing from the food crisis[/url]
None of that suggests that rice would be cheap and plentiful if rice tariffs remained high. It makes the point that Haiti is a desperately poor country, not that it would have been better off without cheap rice imports.
What it would mean is that they would have rice. It would mean they could grow rice. It would mean they could ration and distribute rice. Low prices for rice are no benefit in the absence of rice.
Prior to "liberalization", rice was more expensive, but they had a varied diet and they ate. The fact they now riot over food, don't eat, and when they do eat have a much narrower diet, suggests "liberalization" was a dramatic failure. Unless the only measurements are market control and profits generated.
quote:
Originally posted by Frustrated Mess:
What it would mean is that they would have rice. It would mean they could grow rice. It would mean they could ration and distribute rice. Low prices for rice are no benefit in the absence of rice.Prior to "liberalization", rice was more expensive, but they had a varied diet and they ate. The fact they now riot over food, don't eat, and when they do eat have a much narrower diet, suggests "liberalization" was a dramatic failure. Unless the only measurements are market control and profits generated.
This makes no sense. High food prices are not a good thing for extremely poor countries such as Haiti.
Who's arguing for high food prices? High food prices are the problem.
Bello's article explains very clearly how opening the door to cheap foreign food imports and removing government subsidies destroys the local agricultural economy, turning net food exporters into net food importers, and ultimately leading to both lack of self-sufficiency and higher food prices. Economically marginalized farmers and peasants are displaced from the land and move to the cities, where they become urban poor, turned from producers of food into consumers.
As for Haiti, cheap rice imports have been a disaster:
quote:
Haitian rice which is most likely of West African origin has been cultivated in Haiti for over 200 years. Rice is the staple food of Haiti and up until the 1980s Haiti was self-sufficient in its production. In the mid-1980s Haiti's domestic rice production decreased rapidly. By the 1990s rice imports outpaced domestic rice production. This displaced many Haitian farmers, traders, and millers whose employment opportunities are extremely limited. Two factors are identified as being the most significant causes for the decline in Haitian rice production: the adoption of trade liberalization policies and environmental degradation. The trade liberalization policies at their center have involved the lowering Haiti's lowest tariffs on rice imports. Currently the rice import tariff is 3%, which is much lower than rice import tariffs of all other nations in the Caribbean Community. The Haitian market is now flooded with US rice imports ("Miami rice") and some have accused the US of dumping its rice in Haiti. The impact of the decline of rice production in Haiti has been devastating to its rural population which is already desperately poor.
quote:
This makes no sense. High food prices are not a good thing for extremely poor countries such as Haiti.
It makes sense if you can grasp the idea that the price of rice is immaterial if their is none to be had.
Cheap rice imports to Haiti destroyed Haitian agriculture. Let's make that clearer: Liberalization as dictated by the World Bank and the IMF destroyed Haitian agriculture. Haiti has become dependent on rice imports and, by extension, the agricultural policies of the US which now favours grain for automobiles rather than people (the market preference for subsidized want rather than need). The result is that initially cheap rice is now overly expensive rice with no domestic agricultural system to fall back upon.
In essence, liberalization has left Haitians starving and eating mud.
[ 18 May 2008: Message edited by: Frustrated Mess ]
Just as cheap energy from the Middle East, Africa, and South America has prevented the local markets from developing alternatives and has created a dependancy on imported energy in many so called 'developed countries'. The same has happened in many places with localy produced food. Cheap imports bleed productive capacity out of the country to pay for those imports. And creates unhealthy boom cycles in the exporting countries.
The world bank promotes free trade because it is in its interest to have money flow, that is their kind of pyramid scheme, where a few win and the rest are losers. It leads to conflicts. Oil wars, water wars and now food fights. Those promises of riches are the world banks version of the seventy virgins waiting in heaven. Unfortunately there are way too many that belief that spiel.
[i]"At the heart of our problem [is] the need of a serious economic theory. What passes for one today is little more than a decoy."[/i] --Canadian [url=http://www.comer.org]William Krehm[/url]
The western world has to start eating a lot less meat.
Reducing our global meat consumption would free up a great amount of food and land resources, and also reduce global warming gases such as methane.
Yet the true cost and effect of our meat-centered diet doesn't get as much attention as hybrid cars and other consumer products. Yet reduction in meat consumption could have a much bigger beneficial impact than hybrid cars.
Another helpful thing would be growing more hemp for food, fuel and fibre. A single hemp crop can be harvested for seed protein cake, seed oil for food or fuel, plus the pulpy core can be used for biomass fuel and the outer fibres can be used for textiles. Under the right circumstances, hemp can provide both a cash crop and a food crop in one harvest.
