COMMONDREAMS – If all the food in the world were shared out evenly, there would be
enough to go around. That has been true for centuries now: if food was
scarce, the problem was that it wasn’t in the right place, but there
was no global shortage. However, that will not be true much longer.
The food riots began in Algeria more than a week ago, and they are
going to spread. During the last global food shortage, in 2008, there
was serious rioting in Mexico, Indonesia, and Egypt. We may expect to
see that again this time, only bigger and more widespread.
Most
people in these countries live in a cash economy, and a large
proportion live in cities. They buy their food, they don’t grow it.
That makes them very vulnerable, because they have to eat almost as
much as people in rich countries do, but their incomes are much lower.
The poor, urban multitudes in these countries (including China and
India) spend up to half of their entire income on food, compared to
only about ten percent in the rich countries. When food prices soar,
these people quickly find that they simply lack the money to go on
feeding themselves and their children properly – and food prices now
are at an all-time high.
“We are entering a danger territory,”
said Abdolreza Abbassian, chief economist at the Food and Agriculture
Organisation, on 5 January. The price of a basket of cereals, oils,
dairy, meat and sugar that reflects global consumption patterns has
risen steadily for six months, and has just broken through the previous
record, set during the last food panic in June, 2008.
“There is
still room for prices to go up much higher,” Abbassian added, “if for
example the dry conditions in Argentina become a drought, and if we
start having problems with winter kill in the northern hemisphere for
the wheat crops.” After the loss of at least a third of the Russian and
Ukrainina grain crop in last summer’s heat wave and the devastating
floods in Australia and Pakistan, there’s no margin for error left .
It was Russia and India banning grain exports in order to keep domestic
prices down that set the food prices on the international market
soaring. Most countries cannot insulate themselves from this global
price rise, because they depend on imports for a lot of domestic
consumption. But that means that a lot of their population cannot buy
enough food for their families, so they go hungry. Then they get angry,
and the riots start.
Is this food emergency a result of global
warming? Maybe, but all these droughts, heat waves and floods could
also just be a run of really bad luck. What is nearly certain is that
the warming will continue, and that in the future there will be many
more weather disasters due to climate change. Food production is going
to take a big hit.
Global food prices are already spiking
whenever there are a few local crop failures, because the supply barely
meets demand even now. As the big emerging economies grow, Chinese and
Indian and Indonesian citizens eat more meat, which places a great
strain on grain supplies. Moreover, world population is now passing
through seven billion, on its way to nine billion by 2050. We will need
a lot more food than we used to.
Some short-term fixes are
possible. If the US government ended the subsidies for growing maize
(corn) for “bio-fuels”, it would return about a quarter of US crop land
to food production. If people ate a little less meat, if more African
land was brought into production, if more food was eaten and less was
thrown away, then maybe we could buy ourselves another fifteen or
twenty years before demand really outstripped supply.
On the
other hand, about a third of all the irrigated land in the world
depends on pumping groundwater up from aquifers that are rapidly
depleting. When the flow of irrigation water stops, the yield of that
highly productive land will drop hugely. Desertification is spreading
in many regions, and a large amount of good agricultural land is simply
being paved over each year. We have a serious problem here.
Climate change is going to make the situation immeasurably worse. The
modest warming that we have experience so far may not be the main cause
of the floods, droughts and violent storms that have hurt this year’s
crops, but the rise in temperature will continue because we cannot find
the political will to stop the greenhouse-gas emissions.
The
rule of thumb is that we lose about 10 percent of world food production
for every rise of one degree C in average global temperature. So the
shortages will grow and the price of food will rise inexorably over the
years. The riots will return again and again.
In some places the
rioting will turn into revolution. In others, the rioters will become
refugees and push up against the borders of countries that don’t want
to let them in. Or maybe we can get the warming under control before it
does too much damage. Hold your breath, squeeze your eyes tight shut,
and wish for a miracle.
The food riots began in Algeria more than a week ago, and they are
going to spread. During the last global food shortage, in 2008, there
was serious rioting in Mexico, Indonesia, and Egypt. We may expect to
see that again this time, only bigger and more widespread.
“Once
again Secretary Salazar has placed political expediency over sound science
and the rule of law, and polar bears and other arctic species will suffer
for it,” said Brendan Cummings, senior counsel at the Center for
Biological Diversity. 
ALTERNET