When someone says the writing’s on the wall you know that disaster is imminent. The phrase brings with it a sense of foreboding. I am not a prophetess of doom, but sorry to say the writing is on the wall as far as world hunger goes and whoever chooses to ignore it does so at his/her own peril.
It might not be as imminent as the writing on the wall in biblical times (from where I believe the saying was coined), film dramatisations of which saw the evil sinner stricken with an affliction or perhaps struck dead, but it will get worse before it gets better. More people, particularly women and children, are going to go hungry or die of hunger if something drastic is not done. Those of us who believe it will only happen in say Sudan or Malawi, have obviously never been in the depressed communities in this very city or in the many rural areas, where if there were no school-feeding programme, there would be utter starvation.
The price of food worldwide is probably at its highest ever since the barter system was done away with. In addition, food, particularly staple grains, is scarce and growing scarcer. Meanwhile, the cost of everything else has also gone up because of high oil prices. Down the road, in some places there will be no food and in others there will be no money to buy food, which, unfortunately, when you’re hungry amounts to the same thing.
In a tongue-in-the cheek column, published first in the Monterrey Herald in November, and then on the IJE Blog, Chris, a colleague, compared Americans who were “very fussy about food’s provenance”, to Zimbabweans: “the concern isn’t so much about where the grub originated, but if there is any. Is food available and is there any way of freezing it or cooking it in the face of frequent absences of electricity, water, non-availability or high cost of fuel, [and] the shortage of firewood as deforestation by so-called ‘new farmers’ denudes our once lovely land?” He confirmed what we had all seen on the BBC and CNN, that there were long queues and empty supermarket shelves in Zimbabwe.
Current news reports tell of food riots in Namibia, Zimbabwe, Morocco, Uzbekistan, Austria, Hungary, Guinea Conakry, Mauritania, Senegal and Mexico. In some cases, this is not because there is no food, but because the supply is threatened; there is no short-term solution and people feel vulnerable. This leads to hoarding and/or rioting.
I don’t believe things were ever as bad here as they are in some parts of Africa and Asia now. But I remember as a child queuing with my siblings for hours for items such as milk and margarine and cooking gas and kerosene oil only to hear, long before we got to the top of the line that there was no more and to “come back tomorrow” or “next week”. Or worse still, that the store still had the item but wasn’t “selling anything to children”.
And there was rationing in effect. You never got the quantity you required. Everyone, whether you had two or 32 people in your family, received just two or one of whatever was being sold. We can hope and pray that these times never return, but it will require action to ensure that they don’t, because the problem is a complex one.
It is not just the shortage of grains that we have to worry about, or whether they are being used for bio-fuel. Climate change is wreaking havoc with the world’s food supply. Extreme weather – droughts, storms, hurricanes, floods and so on – has in some instances wiped out entire harvests. And not just once or twice, this has been happening for years.
During the 2005 Great Flood in Guyana, the litany of woes of farmers, particularly in the Mahaica, Mahaicony and Abary creeks finally received public attention. At the same time, we also learned that they had been constant victims to flooding for several years prior.
Other farmers around the country were affected as well and they all lost not just crops, but livestock as well. Every year since then, more than once a year, we hear the same cries: “acres of rice, green vegetables and fruit trees; cows, sheep, chickens, ducks…,” all lost to flooding. The unpredictability and intensity of the wet weather makes the efforts being made to build and repair dams and dredge creeks seem akin to a band aid on a severed artery.
Last year, some farmers were relocated. However, they are still on the coast; still in an area that, given current trends, may, some years down the road, become just as vulnerable as the place they have left.
Guyana’s economy is heavily dependent on agriculture. Agricultural lands are predominantly in coastal and riverain areas. The coastland is below sea level. Sea levels are rising. You get the picture? Guyana does not stockpile its food. Whatever is harvested is consumed or exported. Look around you, do you see the canning factories, the solar or freeze-drying plants. Is the picture clearer now? Well, it is duplicated in many other agriculture-dependent countries.
The actions necessary here, and in other parts of the world to prevent further catastrophe among the already starving millions, and to keep the others who are at the edge of the abyss from falling off, is in-depth research and forward thinking. And as much as many of us dislike the idea, genetically modified foods could very well form a large part of our future diets unless we come up with an enlightened solution to what could be a crisis in a few years given the ongoing extreme weather.
