Is there an impending food crisis?

In the mist of time, humans would be differentiated by rapid development centered on one activity: the procurement of food.

More than 100,000 years later, getting something to eat through the elaborate processes, sophisticated technology, and complex relationships of production in modern industrial society is still a focus of human-social development.

Food is not only important. It is the most critical of all requirements for man to live. Its importance cannot be overemphasized.

Other deprivations in the composite whole called poverty may be tolerable. But hunger is not. To go hungry is to agonize. Not having food to eat is equivalent to being denied existence.

Crisis situation

Food overrides other basic needs in the maintenance of life. When the condition of being deprived of it is magnified by millions of people sinking into prolonged episodes of hunger, society has a crisis.

Last February, various circles raised alarm of a looming food crisis the world over. International non-government organizations like Oxfam warn of humanitarian disasters due to unavailability of food.

The Horn of Africa reportedly stares into mass famine. Around 30 million in Bangladesh are said to be descending into hunger. Such is one reason why riots break out and streets become restive.

Representatives of the Food and Agriculture Organization recently talked to government officials in the Philippines. Their topic is the global food crisis in the offing.

The country should be forewarned and ready should this come true. Japan, to date still the second largest economy in the world, is putting in measures to prepare for worst-case scenario.

But the Philippine government shows an attitude of nonchalance with regards to the forecast. Agriculture Secretary Proceso Alcala when told of the imminent hardship said: “If that is true, we should even be glad.”

The top official jokingly meant that since the country is food producing, the problem is actually an opportunity in work clothes. The farmers particularly can cash in by selling more commodities than they have ever done. There was though a bit of insensitivity and callousness to the wit.

To most Filipinos, the grim scenario is farthest from the mind. Recent survey showed that hunger by self-assessment went down from 21 percent to 15 percent of families throughout the archipelago.

Nobody yet seems to be worried about having no food to eat in absolute terms. The dire prediction is entirely debatable. But it certainly has basis.

Nature of the problem

The said crisis is usually thought of as not having enough food. It isn’t so. Stocks may be as ample as ever, but prices keep shooting up to levels most people can no longer afford. Such is the nature of the crisis.

The US Department of Agriculture estimated the total production of rice, wheat, corn, soya and other coarse grains and oil seeds to have increased from 1.78 billion tons in 2006/2007 to 1.96 billion tons in 2010/2011, an increase of 10 percent. World population grew by 5 percent over the same period.

Global food output has been rising more than twice the population. But the specter that looms on the horizon is about prices of food spiraling so fast and so high that more and more people especially in the ranks of the poor are hard put to bring it to their table.

Food prices have doubled in the last three years, the fastest of which in cereals, sparking fears of global food shortage. They have gone up almost on an average of 50 to 60 percent year to year.

FAO recently announced food prices have reached an all-time high. This has hit most the poor who have to spend as much as 80 percent of earnings on food.

Among the poor, food takes up nearly two thirds of total spending. The World Bank in a statement said that 44 million more people had slid into hunger due to inflation.

Skyrocketing food prices are blamed to have partly fuelled the spreading political turmoil in the Middle East. In places like Egypt and Ethiopia, the people already spend more than half of their income on food.

The Philippines shows a grimmer picture. The shelf price of rice has increased sharply from P17 to P37 over the period of 2007 to 2010. Fish has also risen by 200 percent, so did other foodstuff.

Among the lower income groups, especially those earning P30,000 and below, food takes up 70 percent of costs, according to a Family Income and Expenditure Survey conducted by the government.

The problem hits worse countries with high incidence of poverty and large urban population. Big ratios of unemployment coupled with high food prices pose an explosive combination.

The circumstance is vastly different in rural areas where most of the population farm, and have the chance to produce their own food.

Why the increases

What factors drive food prices up? “Well, the most important factor was weather developments in 2010,” FAO Senior Economist Abdolreza Abassian said.

“We had unfavorable weather during critical growing period or at harvest like the drought in Russia…. Weather reduced the yield or cut production here and there and all of these happened while demand continues to increase, net result is for prices to rise.” Abassian further said.

Experts claimed that extreme weather events due to climate change have destroyed crops, such as the recent droughts in Russia and China, floods in Australia, India and Pakistan. Drought in wheat-producing regions like Australia and Kazakhstan impacted on supply.

The Philippines experienced switches from el Nino (long dry spell) to la Nina (long period of wet weather and heavy precipitation), both damaging agriculture especially the production of rice. Flash floods in particular have wiped out palay either at the planting or harvest stages.

Diminishing forests or vegetations along watersheds on the other hand have reduced the volume of water flowing on irrigation canals. In many cases, large tracts of croplands fail to be planted, because irrigation water could no longer reach them.

Natural calamities, environmental degradation, as well as shifts in weather pattern have cut down yields and upped costs of production. Their net result would be a continuous upswing in the price of food.

If climate continues to shift towards extreme temperatures, and droughts and floods become regular effects, growing food crops will be more uncertain and expensive.

Production and Market trends

So-called “peak oil” impinges on prices. Unceasing spikes in the price of oil have steadily jacked up expenses on transport, machinery, storage and handling. Energy factors recently generated upward movement in production as well as marketing costs that find their way into higher prices of food.

Rice production in the Philippines is now generally mechanized and absorbs more chemical inputs from the preparation of soil, to nurturing and harvest. Operators of hand tractors and threshing machines, which are in common use, spend more for fuel. They collect higher rents.

Freight from farm gate to markets in urban centers, as well as industrial processing like drying and milling, entails greater costs by the difference of half a year, because of unabated oil price increases.

Weather has driven up food prices. Yet the world has more per capita yield than before, as the USDA report shows. A crazy thing has emerged to impel uptrend.

The ethanol subsidy in the United States diverted 100 million metric tons of corn into ethanol processing in 2010. The purpose of reducing global warming registered negligible result, but it made grains and meat more expensive to ordinary folks.

Governments such as the USA and United Kingdom have jumped in on the bio-fuels bandwagon. A third of the US corn is now used for fuel. Brazil is liberating large tracts of land for the same purpose.

Meanwhile, demand for meat has been growing in many developing countries, increasing the demand for grains and oil seeds. A pound of packaged beef, for instance, contains up to five pounds of grain.

With growing numbers in India and China, for example, rising from poverty because of unprecedented economic boom, diets change to more meat and dairy consumption. But a pound of beef necessitates the production of 10 pounds of grain, forcing the price of staples higher.

Exploitative regimes

Big capital outlays, interests on loans and other financial costs, as well as predatory market regimes set the cost of procuring food at unprecedentedly high level. These have figured in food becoming more and more out of reach of the common people, especially among developing countries.

Ironically, even the farmers themselves who are the primary food producers lose food security. Right after harvests, they are forced to sell crops at very low trader-dictated prices to pay debts, recover costs and buy urgent needs. In the next three months, they have nothing left to cook.

Once the traders and money-lenders take hold of the farm yields, the farmers naturally no longer have any control over them. The grains can be hoarded in warehouses, held for long to simulate shortage, and in the opportune time sold at prices that chalk big profits.

The farmers themselves unfortunately fall victims of such manipulation. When they have no more grains and are going hungry, they buy at exorbitant prices the same food bought very cheap from them.

Another discussion on this topic will delve deeper and in detail into production systems that make food most costly and producing it less and less economically viable, socially unjust, generally destructive to the environment, hence, unsustainable.

The current paradigms in agriculture, the penetration of capitalism of rural frontiers, the obsessive drive to reorient the natural self-sufficient economy of farmers to single-minded cash generation, may be a root cause of the greater precariousness of feeding society with its now more numerous members.