EnMasse

[Tehanu]

Well, not really a surprise, what with the rush to biofuels (discussed extensively over here). Plus droughts and severe weather conditions (global warming, anyone?). Add in an ever-growing world population, and an increasing demand, particularly in China, for meat.

[Hephaestion]

By now, you've prolly all heard about the skyrocketing price of cereal grains around the world -- particularly wheat. In part, this is due to the recent craze for producing fuel from food crops, but there are numerous other causes, too.

Now comes word of an even more devastating development... according to CBC Radio this morning, global rice prices are zooming upward-- a 30% increase in the last week alone, at a time when global ricve supplies are at their lowest since the 1970s.

This has the potential to cause massive widespread suffering throughout Africa, Asia, and any number of so-called "developing countries". According to CBC Radio, it even has the potential to cause "widespread political unrest and instability" (darn those unruly peasants with their food riots) and could lead to waves of violence and repression.

With "global warming" (a.k.a. climate change) just barely getting going yet, it has the potential to get a WHOLE lot worse before it ever gets even slightly better.

This is not good news.
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"The dignity of an animal is measured by his capacity to revolt in the face of oppression." -- Mikhail Bakunin

[Tehanu]

Er ... shall I merge?

[Hephaestion]

Darn... I guess I didn't look carefully enough. Sure, go ahead and merge...
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"The dignity of an animal is measured by his capacity to revolt in the face of oppression." -- Mikhail Bakunin

[Tehanu]

The World Bank is urging food donations. Yeah, like that'll solve anything. Definitely when people are starving get food to them, but can we count on the World Bank to actually examine systemic issues? Nah.

[DSquared]

Of course food rationing would never happen in a democracy:

[elmateo]

Financial speculation a source of increased food prices? Another reason to close down the stock market:

AGRICULTURE: What is Really Causing ‘Agflation’?
By Mario Osava

[elmateo]

I cannot help but see the rise in global food prices as the "market adjustment" of the massive amounts of inequality growth in the past decade, despite statistically some improvement in "poverty" (thanks China and India!). That means the global economy is readjusting to massive inequalities and pushing the increased bottom back into severe poverty: the inability to feed oneself which has knock-on effects in terms of housing, economic and social stability. The rise in food prices is the result of an unequal relationship between the global north food suppliers and the global south that has put many small local producers in the south "out of business" as protections in the south were dropped but rigorously maintained in the north. Now as a myriad of forces (food-to-oil, oil prices, speculation, rising middle class in India and China) cause a sharp rise in the price, those at the bottom of the massive inequality are going to be made poor again as their real income gets eaten up by a price inflation on the most basic life-necessities.

[HAHL]

[TS.]

How about capitalist profiteering?
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"Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear." - Thomas Jefferson

[elmateo]

Here is a few interesting articles on the subject:
Making a Killing from Hunger:
We Need to Overturn Food Policy, Now!
by GRAIN

[Hephaestion]

Thanks for those articles, elmy... Y'know who I'd desperately love to read an article by about all this, is Brewster Kneen, who wrote THE authoritative expose on Cargill, "Towers of Gold, Feet of Clay" -- I don't for one second believe that Cargill and Monsanto are not *deeply* complicit with all of this.
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"The dignity of an animal is measured by his capacity to revolt in the face of oppression." -- Mikhail Bakunin

[sparqui]

There was an interesting discussion on The Current this morning, ostensibly on GM seeds that morphed into the discussion of corporate control of the world food supply. The Sask prof (now with a California university) got quite defensive as he wanted to stick to just the potential merits of gene splicing seeds to add nutrients and anti-allergens and increase yields. The Guelph prof basically called it a failure and outlined a number of reasons why GMOs should be abandoned.

I think that the combination of environmental degradation (eg. droughts), decades of economic restructuring to focus on export crops and stock market speculation are responsible for this food crisis. The push for bio-fuels and GM seeds are probably contributing factors as well.

From the IUF site:

[elmateo]

Just to put the financial side into context, this is what happened during the Asian financial crisis: first other markets slowed/collapsed, in particular Mexico and Brazil in the early-mid 90s that lead to investors finding "new" places to park their money. And they put it in mass amounts, after initial testers find that it is all good in small amounts. They then barrel over any modesty and regulations looking to to cash in on the next big thing - in Asian they put way more money than there was value, overvaluing the market, over extending themselves in terms of loans... everyone pretends that its okay, no problem here - just don't go digging... till someone does a little digging, just to make sure and finds the horrible tangled mess. And rather than take the time to right the wrong, with patience, caution, and awareness there is a panic - massive amounts of money, beyond any reasonable limit, moves out because the investors have to get their money out lest they lose all of the value they falsely created. And they then park their mass amounts of wealth (often they still make some value through this process) into something new... Now we are seeing financial institutions pull money out of some stockmarkets and morgages and put it down on resources/primarly commodities. Look at the yearly stock market changes - the ones that are are around or above 0% change over the year, despite the loss of nearly $1 trillion (according to the IMF) in the markets are located in Brasil, Mexico, and Toronto (there is one or two others doing alright). Those three are deeply connected to resources and commodities.

A lot of money has moved towards resources, including food, creating an unstable market price because investors have no regulation and move their money about at will. It is one thing when they do this with countries economies, it is a completely another thing when they do it with peoples stomachs. This is why something like what ALBA is proposing: cross border price setting by governments is so critical - it is taking the benefits of ISI, namely stronger regulation of trade flows, by covering some of its problems related to isolation. Essentially the EU has developed an cross-border enabled ISI model.

Brasil, I think potentially, is securing its reserves and then will begin using its agricultural production for trade leverage. As the Real News indicated, Brasil produces more rice than it consumes, but they want to ensure an 8 month supply is stockpiled before resuming rice exports. During this period the price of rice increases drastically, and Brasil returns to the market after a period of time ready to export controlled amounts. And with regional trade networks, they can cut the price of rice for access to other resources Brasil wants/needs.

Brasil has extensive knowledge about manipulating and using the price of commodities - soy and coffee being their training grounds. Both of these commodities they have a history with south east Asia as well...

In terms of the US - agriculture besides guns is one of their only major exports left. They are more than happy to watch prices skyrocket, after all they have already forsaken their poor (if we need a better example than New Orleans, there is of course the millions of Americans going bankrupt and losing their homes without much of a peep).

[Tehanu]

The United Nations is setting up a special task force on food prices. Let's hope it amounts to something.

[elmateo]

Food aid is also horrendously dangerous over the long term. USAID has dumped food aid on African economies and they haven't recovered. Food "aid" creates dependencies where they do not necessarily have to exist.

In this case, I really do not see food aid as any help at all. It is designed for internal "consumption" in the media, and does nothing about the fundamental problems leading up to the food price increase.

[elmateo]

Alternet has an interesting interview with Raj Patel, who has recently written Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System. His website: http://www.rajpatel.org/ .

What makes the interview really interesting is that he is attacking the underlying capitalist structure of the current food crisis - in particular the neoliberal idea that "individual rational choice" in a "free" market will save the day, and that while we have "free choice" now, we don't have enough and the problem to overcome is that we need more. Which is complete bullshit. Sorta unrelated, but I heard an interview with Jack Layton on CBCR1 yesterday morning concerning curbing carbon emissions and the interviewer kept pressing Jack as to why the NDP focuses on "big" emitters and not on the consumer with carbon taxes and such things - Jack should have just let loose on this, instead he tried to dance around saying that some of the costs will trickle down, that big producers make up 50% by themselves, and that poor people can't afford to make the changes. It was a valient attempt, and a horrible interview because the interviewer tried to keep making it sound like the "consumer" was the problem and we just have to find the "market" solution to making them more environmental consumers... passing the collective problem onto the shoulders of the individual. This has the consequence of making the individual feel guilty, helpless, and ultimately powerless in the face of an economic system. Yes they can effect some "changes" but not the major ones that bring around the systematic changes needed. Here is the relevant quote from the interview with Raj Patel:

[Tehanu]

Great post, elmateo.

"Rational choice" is also made mockery of when considering food distribution. So when we say we have enough food to feed the world, the problem is access to it. Particularly when swathes of substinence food farming in developing countries are being displaced for corporate agriculture (and in that I include cash crops, biofuels, and raising grain for North American beef!).

Walden Bello in The Nation argues at length, and it's worth reading the entire article, that the food crisis is largely manufactured. He goes into some depth about corn in Mexico and rice in the Philippines, with a brutal combination of IMF, WTO (and NAFTA in the case of Mexico), economic restructuring, and multinational agritech companies ... all combining to destroy the capacity of small producers to be self-sufficient. And a success story from Malawi.

[elmateo]

You could compare that with the articles that go up in the globe and mail business section (why G&M still has subscriber privileges strikes me as stupid and arrogant) - I believe yesterday there was an article about how the rising food price and oil price wasn't the fault of speculative investors. The underlying conclusion stank of fundamentalist liberal economics - we are just seeing supply and demand work it out, and those speculative investors are after quick money nothing here...

Found the article, one of the non-subscriber (surprised!):
http://www.reportonbusiness.com/servlet/story/LAC.20080519.RREGULY1...

[elmateo]

Reading the Bello article a bit more closely, the words "enclosure of the commons" keep springing to mind. When they did that in England in the early/mid 1600s they had a revolution. The 1990s have been about turning over large swaths of property held by small farmers and collectively over to corporations who are now maximizing their "profit" at the expense of food security for the majority of the world's population. The only way this is possible is because of huge inequality between the wealthy and the poor. If one north american = 1000s of poor (at $1/day, a north american only has to make $36 500 to be worth 1000 poor "consumers" to a multinational corporation) then it is quite easy to forsake the numbers of poor in favour of one wealthy person. We aren't even talking about our "wealthy" in comparison. So a multinational is enticed to make its profit from the one north american (or equivalent "rich" person) at the expense of 1000 poor (there are much more costs in scale to providing for 1000 people).

Another interesting comment from Bello about the "evil investment" of China:

[HAHL]

[elmateo]

What ideological quest is China on? This is the thing, they don't really seem to care what the "ideology" of it is at this point - they have their basic wants (access to resources) and seem content to deal wherever to get this. Some, like "human rights activists" see this as a problem since China has been against Western boycott plans of the evil states.

It is not a very good solution, I'll admit, but it is better than what we have. And I would also argue that the longer term potential for growth of African economies was higher when the Soviet Union and the US were playing ideological games even. We see the inequality grow massively in the 1980s and 1990s into the present when there was no other financing alternative to the neoliberals. The problem was that both investors also were trying to make money off of their exobatent military industry complexes, considering they didn't have their own war to fight.

Similarly the concern with China is not that it is investing in these countries, it is that the US (and Europe) are willing to turn the economic tussle into another proxy war for their military industries, a game that China would be willing to play as well. But I don't think this is necessarily the game China, at this point, really wants to play. Personally I think China's current uncertainty of place in the world can be used positively to strengthen the economies of the global south by providing a channel for wealth, particularly from the US, back to countries where it was taken from. As we can see with Venezuela, Brasil, Russia, and Iran (not to include China and India), it does not take a lot of stabilization and growth in underdeveloped economies to upset the balance of political-economic hegemony. Which, to ensure there isn't a thread drift, is a vitally critical issue in terms of food security. The rules that have been set that have created this current food crisis have been set by a small group of interested players, up setting their hegemony is ultimately critical to providing a solution. China's investment presence, as long as it does not lead to violent instability in the favour of gun sales, provides a potential opening up of the hegemony on the rules that could potentially (and to some extent is being) exploited by countries in Africa, South East Asia and Latin America - areas that are going to be hard hit by rising food prices.

[HAHL]

[TS.]

[HAHL]

[elmateo]

I would actually argue that most of the developed countries got to where they are through exploitation, if not directly as is the case of imperial states, indirectly (for the most part) as supported economies (this would be many of the smaller EU states, Canada, and to a certain extent Taiwan and South Korea). Not to say the supported economies do not do their own international exploitation, but they more often than not piggybacked on the rules and channels of global exploitation set by empires (UK, France, Germany, US, Japan being the main culprits). The state intervention, especially post WWII was devised as a way of maintaining a level of social stability and security at home. Protectionism I think is better connected to the competition of major economies than to the levels of global inequality.

I do not think in today's economy, with the problems we face, that a protectionist economy is going to be beneficial. Fair trade, honest, participatory and ethical investment, and political empowerment of developing states so that they have a more equal say about the structure and rules of the global economy is fundamentally important. I personally think that a "regional" ISI model with regional solidarity allows for a better bargaining position against international financing. The critical component about Latin America is that there is a mutual dependency forming - and with the recent ALBA fund for food and the CAN-EU conference that pledged food as a major concern we can see how a regional approach in developing economies may prove to be a successful (if left unimpeded by core interests) way of dealing with the severe impacts of rising food prices.

[HAHL]

[sparqui]

Some very good articles. I don't think the WB, IMF or WTO gives a rat's ass about real poverty reduction/eradication. They are motivated by profit and the best the developing world can hope for is to develop a bit of a middle class, while the disparity between rich and poor grows in developed countries. As long as there are enough global consumers consuming free market products, corporations and their investors are happy.

The amount of money controlled by a handful of agri-food giants is obscene:

[TS.]

[elmateo]

With holes punched in them... Sometimes we drop bombs into boats as well - a big bomb is the intellectual property trojan horse that is in a lot of the WTO requirements and is much worse in bilateral/multilateral trade agreements.

It allows these companies to pirate the knowledge of farmers cultivated over generations and privatize it then having legal (and thus state-supported violence) supports to ensure their ownership of the paper that says they own the knowledge makes them a profit.

This is one neoliberal regime I really hope a country with a lot of weight in these matters (India and Brasil I am looking at you!) says a big "fuck you" to and just starts selling seeds, drugs, etc. to destroy this regime. It is a horrible, nasty, and simply unethical legal framework. Patents on life! Like their little bio engineering projects and the bullshit they pull to pretend these are all good is of any real value to anyone! Talk about fake and exploitative capitalist wealth...

[Hephaestion]

The shit hits the fan in the UK when the "Environment" Minister says GM crops might help solve The Global Food Crisis™...

[sparqui]

Amazing how corporate interests always find a silver lining for every crisis. GM crops are already changing agriculture in Africa and that hasn't helped much at all. Bogus promises that only benefit Monsanto and Cargill's bottom lines.
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“If my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a tractor.”

-- Gilles Duceppe

[munroe]

Sparqui, you pessismist. That's why we have Wal-Mart to step into the breach....
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Out of Afghanistan, NOW!

[Tehanu]

A leaked World Bank report says that biofuel production is responsible for three quarters of the 140% increase in food prices. As opposed to the percentage claimed by the Bush administration: 3%.

Slight disparity there.

And yes, rumour has it that this report has been suppressed so as not to call the White House into question.

[Hephaestion]

Food crisis? Try rats, says Indian state government

[Senor Magoo]

Beats dented tuna.
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[bshmr]

Eating wild stuff has risks which differ from the risks of eating domesticated plants or animals. Safe preparation and cooking may be problematic for some but the official(s) have a point though one wonders whether the officials do as they ask outside of superficial, momentary photo opportunities.

[Cartman]

[Doug]

[Senor Magoo]

I imagine it was snapped up by a Japanese businessman.

Check the prices on watermelons and other similar fruits in Japan.
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[Sibjyn]

I remember Urban Fare selling square watermelons from Japan for $100 apiece a few years back.

[Hephaestion]

Ingredients Costs Bankrupting Eateries

[abnormal]

[Tehanu]

Interview with Vandana Shiva about farmer suicides in India ... a problem that's getting worse and worse.

[DSquared]

Venezuela launches food sovereignty program

[sparqui]

That's really impressive. Meeting the UN Millennium Development Goal for food security 5 years ahead of time is quite the feat, especially given that most other developing nations are way behind targets.
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“If my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a tractor.”

-- Gilles Duceppe

[Senor Magoo]

State appropriation certainly gets the job done in ways that namby-pamby "rule of law" cannot.
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[Searosia]

Soy and corn crop prices have shot up after the snowstorms throughout the US....seems the snow is harshly effecting some crops, highest prices in a few years anyway.
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Now is not the time for you Liberal fools, its time for a witch hunt. - Bloc Party

[TS.]

[Senor Magoo]

Fair enough. Given that the state makes the laws, I guess it's likely to be in compliance with them (and if not, well, make one you like better).

I wonder how many cents on the dollar they pay?
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