The political causes of the global food shortage should surprise no one who has lived in the Caribbean. For decades the world’s economic superpowers have forced the doctrines of the Washington Consensus – deregulation, the elimination of subsidies, and exposure to foreign investors – onto any developing country they could lay the IMF or World Bank’s hands on. In 2001, Life and Debt, an award-winning documentary about Jamaica’s ‘structural adjustments’ chronicled the human cost of these policies in poignant detail. As the IMF’s policies took effect, the Jamaican dairy industry could not compete against imported powdered milk and was soon wasting hundreds of gallons of fresh milk each day because of the collapse of the local market; farmers selling chickens for 50 cents a pound were put out of business by bulk imports from the US which sold at less than half that price, and the local labour market was restructured to facilitate sweatshops for American clothing manufacturers like Tommy Hilfiger, under the cover of a special trade-friendly zone.
When Michael Manley tried to shield local farmers from the full impact of these reforms, he recalled being told: “No, no, no. Your inflation last year was 18% and we are not allowing you to lend to your farmers at 12%. You must charge 23%.” Eventually his government had to accept that its domestic agenda would be scuttled by neoliberal ideologues in Washington. In the circumstances, economic survival was possible only with the wholesale adoption of trade agreements which ensured that countries like Jamaica could never compete successfully with better-established economies.
Jamaica’s woes have tended to be not the exception but the rule in developing world. The trade agreements which have arisen from these crises have allowed a handful of countries to gain what amounts to monopoly control of world markets for basic foodstuffs which feed hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest people. (The US, for example, produces 40% of the world’s total grain exports each year.) And so, faced with a perfect storm of crop failures, financial crises and rising transportation costs, few developing countries have the agricultural flexibility, or the economic clout necessary to protect themselves from the vicissitudes of international trade. The resulting dependency of poor countries on international relief is scarcely believable. Today 73 million people in 78 countries would starve if they didn’t receive handouts from the UN’s World Food Programme.
In the Great Hunger of 2008, 36 of these countries (21 of them in Africa) are facing a severe food shortage that will deteriorate significantly if the UN cannot raise the US$500M of extra aid needed to maintain its current relief efforts. Even before the present crisis, roughly one billion people suffered from chronic hunger. That figure has increased dramatically with the price shocks of the last two years. In January, the New York Times reported that the prices of sixty agricultural commodities traded on the world market had increased by 37 per cent in 2007 and 14 per cent in 2006. And yet, daunting as these increases are, speculation in futures markets, especially in the wake of the US credit crisis, will almost certainly continue to drive these prices even higher for months to come.
Late last year in a report on ‘The World Food Situation’ the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington recommended five actions be “undertaken immediately” to minimize the suffering of world’s poorest people. Two are especially interesting in light of the Caribbean’s longstanding subordination to its American and EU trading partners: the facilitation of “flexible responses to drastic price changes by eliminating trade barriers and programs [like the cultivation of biofuel] that set aside agriculture resources,” and the creation of “expanded social-protection measures… social safety nets… tailored to country circumstances.” The Institute also recommends greater investments in “rural infrastructure and market institutions,” “agricultural science and technology” and the addition of “agricultural and food issues onto the national and international climate-change policy agendas.”
If followed, most of these recommendations would essentially recreate, or restore, institutions and relationships which a generation of neoliberal bureaucrats have gone to great lengths to destroy. Is this likely to happen? Or will more one-sided deals be imposed under the guise of compassionate structural adjustments?
The stakes could not be higher. UN secretary general Ban Ki Moon recently warned that the current global food crisis threatens us with the “spectre of widespread hunger, malnutrition and social unrest on an unprecedented scale.” Appropriately striking language given the situation, for Mr Ban knows better than most that if the economic imbalances at the heart of global trade aren’t fixed soon, the apparition of the Great Hunger will be with us for many years to come.
