Pouring Fuel on the Food

July 29, 2008
By Eric Holt-Giménez,
Executive Director, Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy

Reports of a recently-leaked World Bank paper indicating agrofuels contribute up to 75% to food price inflation contrasts with the shifting figures presented by the USDA; 2% or 10%, depending on who is talking that day. However, for people living on less than $2 a day, any figure between these wide-ranging estimates is enough to push them from malnutrition to starvation. For the poor, a pinch of agrofuels is as bad as a pound.

The World Bank’s agrofuels alarm is well-placed, but not completely disinterested. It is a mistake to confuse the immediate possible causes of the world food crisis with the root causes. Though the agrofuels boom may have created the spark the ignited the food price inflation, the food crisis did not begin with recent food riots. Paradoxically, a thirty-year global trend in declining food prices still left 860 million of the world’s population hungry—largely because most of the world’s poor are small farmers who were plunged further into poverty by low prices for their crops.

Throughout the 1980s and 90s, the World Bank’s conditional lending broke down trade barriers and dismantled government agricultural supports in the Global South, while the United States and Europe were ramping up their subsidies, over-producing and dumping surpluses in poor countries. The combination of unfair global competition, lack of government support, and a twenty-year trend in declining aid to agriculture destroyed national food systems in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Forty years ago, the countries of the Global South had yearly food trade surpluses of US $7 billion. Today, their food deficit has ballooned to US $11 billion a year. The rise of food deficits in the South mirrors the rise of food surpluses and corporate market expansion by the industrial North. Global markets have destroyed national food security by destroying rural livelihoods worldwide.

Emergency measures are urgently needed to make food accessible to poor people. But so are profound changes to a globalized food system that has become highly vulnerable to economic and environmental shocks. The industrial food system produces, processes, transports, and consumes food in ways that depend on vast amounts of petroleum, focus on three or four commodities, use up 70% of the world’s water and contribute from 20-50% to greenhouse gas emissions. Putting the brakes on agrofuels development is necessary, but insufficient to fix an unregulated global food system dominated by a handful of giant grain, seed and chemical companies—all of which are enjoying record profits with the food crisis.

Instead of just wagging a finger at the agrofuels industry The World Bank would do well to assume responsibility for creating the food crisis. It would do even better to read and heed another of its recent reports—The International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology (IAASTD) recently released in Johannesburg, South Africa. The result of an exhaustive thre-year international consultation similar to that of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IAASTD calls for an overhaul of agriculture dominated by multinational companies and governed by unfair trade rules. The report warns against relying on genetic engineered "fixes" for food production and emphasizes the importance of locally-based, agroecological approaches to farming. The key advantages to this way of farming—aside from its low environmental impact—is that it provides both food and employment to the world's poor, as well as a surplus for the market. On a pound-per-acre basis, these small family farms have proven themselves to be more productive than large-scale industrial farms. And, they use less oil, especially if food is traded locally or sub-regionally. These alternatives, growing throughout the world, are like small islands of sustainability in increasingly perilous economic and environmental seas. As industrialized farming and free trade regimes fail us, these approaches will be the keys for building resilience back into our food systems.

648 words

Eric Holt-Giménez is executive director of the Institute for Food and Development Policy, also known as Food First. He is author of the book, Campesino a Campesino: Voices from Latin America’s Farmer to Farmer Movement for Sustainable Agriculture.
e-mail: eholtgim [at] foodfirst.org