"This is the new face of hunger," said Josetta Sheeran, director of the World Food Program, launching an appeal for an extra $500 million US so it could continue supplying food aid to 73 million hungry people this year. "People are simply being priced out of food markets.... We have never before had a situation where aggressive rises in food prices keep pricing our operations out of our reach."
The WFP decided on a public appeal a month ago because the price of the food it buys to feed some of the world's poorest people had risen by 55 per cent since last June. By the time it actually launched the appeal last week, prices had risen a further 20 per cent, so now it needs $700 million US to bridge the gap between last year's budget and this year's prices.
In Thailand, farmers are sleeping in their fields after reports that thieves are stealing the rice, now worth $600 US a tonne, straight out of the fields. Four people have died in Egypt in clashes over subsidized flour that was being sold for profit on the black market. There have been food riots in Morocco, Senegal and Cameroon.
Last year, it became clear that the era of cheap food was over: food costs worldwide rose by 23 per cent between 2006 and 2007. This year, what is becoming clear is the impact of this change on ordinary people's lives.
For consumers in Japan, France or the United States, the relentless price rises for food are an unwelcome extra pressure on an already stretched household budget. For less fortunate people in other places, they can mean less protein in the diet, or choosing between feeding the kids breakfast or paying their school fees, or even, in the poorest communities, starvation. And the crisis is only getting started.
It is the perfect storm: everything is going wrong at once. To begin with, the world's population has continued to grow, while its food production has not. For the 50 years between 1945 and 1995, as the world's population more than doubled, grain production kept pace — but then it stalled. In six of the past seven years, the human race has consumed more grain than it grew. World grain reserves last year were only 57 days, down from 180 days a decade ago.
To make matters worse, demand for food is growing faster than the population. As incomes rise in China, India and other countries with fast-growing economies, consumers include more and more meat in their diet. The average Chinese citizen now eats 50 kilograms of meat a year, up from 20 kilograms in the mid-1980s. Producing meat consumes enormous quantities of grain.
Then there is global warming, which is probably already cutting into food production. Many people in Australia, formerly the world's second-largest wheat exporter, suspect that climate change is the real reason for the prolonged drought that is destroying the country's ability to export food.
The worst damage is being done by the rage for "biofuels" that supposedly reduce carbon dioxide emissions and fight climate change. (They don't, really — at least, not in their present form.) Thirty per cent of this year's U.S. grain harvest will go straight to an ethanol distillery, and the European Union is aiming to provide 10 per cent of the fuel used for transport from bio-fuels by 2010. A huge amount of the world's farmland is being diverted to feed cars, not people.
This is the one element in the “perfect storm” that is completely under human control. Governments can simply stop creating artificial demand for the current generation of biofuels (and often directly subsidizing them). That land goes back to growing food instead, and prices fall. Climate change is a real threat, but we don't have to have this crisis now.
"If... more and more land (is) diverted for industrial biofuels to keep cars running, we have two years before a food catastrophe breaks out worldwide," said Vandana Shiva, director of the India-based Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy, in an interview last week. "It'll be 20 years before climate catastrophe breaks out, but the false solutions to climate change are creating catastrophes that will be much more rapid than the climate change itself."
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
