If the question “did you eat today?” was posed to every person on earth, you might be surprised how many would answer in the negative. Not everyone wakes up to the privilege of a decent meal – or any meal at all.
As global food prices soar, the number of hungry people will rise even higher and as we have seen in Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt, people will voice their frustration.
As heads of state met at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, at the end of January, the mood in Africa’s Arab nations was restive following a spate of demonstrations over unemployment and rising food prices.
At the meeting, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon expressed concern about increasing world food prices, conceding that it was responsible for the chaos that has erupted in a number of countries. “We are looking for ways to overcome this crisis,” he said.
But how grave is the problem? In an effort to regulate local supplies, countries such as India and Vietnam placed bans on rice exports in the past few years, threatening price stability of the commodity on world markets. Russia had similar export bans on wheat this past summer.
The most worrying concern is that behind such critical shortages lurks a sinister economic underworld that speculates on agricultural commodities. Banks and hedge funds bet on food price increases and on the contracts of crucial foods like wheat, driving up prices and leaving behind more hungry mouths with every coin they earn.
On Jan. 22 at a Farm Ministers’ Summit in Berlin, German Agriculture Minister Ilse Aigner told delegates that food must not be “the object of gamblers.”
The rich are unmoved because their pockets are thick with cash. Yet the thin line between who eats and who does n't is narrowing as we continue depleting more food resources, misappropriating agricultural land in favor of urban development and pushing indigenous people off their land abroad to plant our own crops.
And that isn’t just an issue abroad; recently, Quebec’s agricultural producers’ union fought off Chinese investors’ bid to buy large tracts of land in the province, seeing this as a threat to the province’s food security.
Even with all this, with global grain shortages running rampant, there is still increasing investment in biofuels. In 2008, a World Bank report revealed that biofuels had pushed up food prices by 75 per cent, at a time when the US government claimed that they contributed no more than three per cent to global food price hikes.
Against this background, what is the future of humanitarian aid?
World Trade Organization Director-General Pascal Lamy noted that if current policies continued unchecked, by 2019, about 13 per cent of global coarse grain production will be diverted towards ethanol production, as well as 16 per cent of vegetable oil and 35 per cent of sugarcane.
Developed nations such as Canada would be fooling themselves if they believed this to be a distant problem. Yet such naïve thinking is reflected in Canada’s largest research council’s decision to cut funding for food-related research. The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council removed food from its target areas in favor of projects concerning the environment, natural resources, information technologies and manufacturing. Talk about bad timing.
Meanwhile, according to Statistics Canada, the price of consumer goods rose by 2.4 per cent in the last year.
If the government is not wary of these issues and doesn’t act to correct the trend, prices will continue to rise until Canadians too will signal that they’ve had enough – for that , it's only a matter of time.
But for attitudes to change, it is only a matter of reason.