Food: A hungry world

Charities and development economists necessarily focus so much attention on hungry people that you might be forgiven for thinking this was a problem only and always getting bigger. Not so. The number of hungry people worldwide actually fell between 1969 and 1997; and it dropped sharply after the great food-price spike of 2008. Those are headline statistics, of course, but they show one thing: this is not an intractable problem.

It is, however, a resurgent one. An Oxfam report published yesterday forecasts that a billion people will go undernourished this year. It is not the only one to sound the alarm: last week the UN warned that spiralling food prices could well lead to riots, as happened in 30 countries three years ago. Then there is Christian Aid, which recently put out its own report on hunger, and the World Bank, which has talked more and more of late about food poverty. However alarming Oxfam's predictions this week about the future of food might be – that the average price of staples will more than double in the next couple of decades, hitting the world's poorest hardest – few of the other NGOs working in this field would sharply disagree with them. Nor would Oxfam's description of the food-supply system as "bust" be too controversial. Any system that produces enough food for the entire world and yet fails to feed one in seven people, which is subject to rampant speculation and land-grabbing, and where crops and land that could be used to feed people are instead turned into fuel for Hummers, is patently not working.

The question is what to do about it. Typically, the solutions divide into three. The first is to leave the market to sort it out: financiers and an open trading system will supposedly shunt more cash into agriculture. This may be the case over the long term, but this logic completely failed in 2008 and the resulting disaster cost human lives. Free-traders sometimes point to the export bans instituted by Egypt, Malawi and so many others as being the prime culprit of the price spiral, but they were really a response.
The second is at the opposite extreme, and consists of wailing about population growth. Yet it is not African villagers who are eating more than their fair share. The British eat 85kg of meat a year; in newly rich but often vegetarian India, that figure falls to 3kg. The problem is not population numbers but consumption, and here the west punches well above its weight.
Finally, there is an answer that lies in treating food security as a priority, rather than as a soft commodity to be traded like any other. Its production and trading should be much more heavily regulated, and protected.

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/01/food-a-hungry-world-editorial