Opinion
Georgie Anne Geyer
FOOD, OR THE LACK OF IT, IS OUR NEWEST INTRACTABLE PROBLEM
Thu Apr 24, 7:57 PM ET
WASHINGTON -- In 1982, while visiting Haiti on a reporting trip, I found myself talking with the new U.S. AID director there, Harlan Hobgood. This experienced developmentalist was filled with good will toward that misbegotten little country in the Caribbean, but he was also very much aware of the realities of the situation.
"Triage is not something that is 'going' to happen here," he told me then, referring to the controversial idea that certain poor and hopeless countries would have to be thrown out of the human and ecological lifeboat so that human energies could be applied to those countries that could make it. "It is happening. But we have one last chance. This is it."
It didn't take any special brilliance to recognize a last-chance place when you saw one. Population was soaring then (it's more than 8.3 million today). The once-green mountainsides of Haiti had been scoured by poor Haitians cutting down trees for fuel. As I flew into the country, the once-beautiful island looked like a barren desert.
Hobgood's goodwill efforts did not, of course, work. This last week, Haiti erupted in food riots, the government (if you can call it that) fell, U.N. troops were busy firing upon the Haitian gangs that now rule the country (if you can call it that), and Haiti became, once again, the example of everything that should NOT be done.
But this time, it is not only Haiti, that perpetual basket case, that is starving; so is much of the world. Indeed, this last week, human hunger -- and all the sordid, stupid acts that cause it -- has become the lead story. The next American president may find that he or she is primarily confronting this new ogre, making the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and even the fuel shortage (to which the food problem is directly related) secondary issues.
A few figures from the United Nations: Food prices in general have gone up by more than 40 percent in the last 12 months, sparking riots and unrest from Egypt to Uzbekistan. Violent protests in Ivory Coast and price riots in Cameroon in February left 40 people dead. The prices for wheat and rice, diet staples the world over, have risen more than 50 percent in the last 12 months and are moving steadily upward.
More than l00 million people are being driven deeper into poverty by a "silent tsunami" of sharply rising food prices, which could threaten U.N.-backed feeding programs for 20 million children. Josette Sheeran, executive director of the World Food Program, said this week that "the world's misery index is rising."
The World Bank reports that surging commodity prices have pushed up global food prices 83 percent in the past three years, putting huge stresses on some of the world's poorest nations. In Pakistan and Thailand, army troops have been deployed to deter food theft from fields and warehouses, and countries such as India are refusing to release their excess stocks of rice in anticipation of a worsening food shortage at home.
World Bank President Robert Zoellick said this week that surging food costs could translate into "seven lost years" in the fight against worldwide poverty, and that 33 countries are at risk of social upheaval. What's more, this "moment" is not merely a passing one.
"This is not just ... a sort of quick blip in prices that will return to normal shortly," John Holmes, the senior U.N. humanitarian coordinator, said this week. "It's because there are these fundamental factors of the populations rising, crops being used for biofuels, more sophisticated diets in places like India and China. (There is also) the lack of strategic grain reserves, and maybe the effects of climate change and, for example, the drought in Australia affecting wheat production in recent years."
Once again in the saga of the long human march, there were wise and experienced people who foresaw this coming. As early as 1995, environmentalist Lester Brown wrote a groundbreaking paper, "Who Will Feed China?" In asking how China would feed its population, growing then by 14 million a year and consuming immensely larger amounts of grain (with every glass of beer or piece of pork), while grain prices in China's 35 major cities were shooting up by 41 percent, Brown extrapolated:
"It will not be in the devastation of poverty-stricken Somalia or Haiti, but in the booming economy of China, that we will see the inevitable collision between expanding human demand for food and the limits of some of the Earth's most basic natural systems."
Brown was bitterly attacked in China -- but in fact, even the Chinese have had to come around to his position. (His recent book, "Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization," makes it clear that the crisis is even more threatening than what is being reported.)
In a notable article printed this week in The Washington Post, "Ethanol's Failed Promise," Brown carries his analysis further and argues that, as right as it sounded when it was done, we have now gone too far in our federal "food-to-fuel" mandates, taking too much food out of people's mouths to create biofuels.
Any answers to these deep and probing problems are going to be difficult, indeed. Just as the world needs discipline and sacrifice to face these problems, it must confront populations that, in the West, are ferociously individualistic and greedy, and, in the underdeveloped world, given to violence, chaos and self-destruction.
What to do? Last week, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown urged the Western industrialized nations to develop a comprehensive strategy for the food problem, encompassing trade, agricultural productivity, technology, biofuels and short-term aid for poor countries. Add to that, above all, population control that is so needed in the overpopulated countries, and it would be a start, but only a start, for a world that desperately needs to do some hard thinking about these issues.
