Breadbasket Dependence and the End of Cheap Food
By Tony Weis
Rapidly rising food prices around the world are casting tens of millions into increasingly desperate circumstances of malnourishment and hunger. Related to this have been intensifying social tensions in many places, witness food-price riots in more than 30 countries. In the Caribbean, the problems and tensions have been most dramatic in Haiti, where food riots and scenes of people eating mud-cakes to stave off pangs of hunger have recently made news.The rapid doubling in global market prices of cereals has occurred at a time when aggregate global grain production has never been greater, part of the reason why many believe higher food prices are not a short-term blip but rather are likely to mark a new era – what The Economist has called ‘the end of cheap food’ — posing deep questions about dominant approaches to food security.
A basic assumption associated with global market integration is that nations should focus their productive resources in sectors where they hold a comparative advantage in order to enhance their export capacity and foreign exchange earnings, and open their markets to maximize access to the most competitive goods and services, wherever these might be sourced from. This has been at the crux of the economic prescriptions of the World Bank and IMF, and the mandate of the WTO.
For adherents of this logic, food is no different; irrespective of all of the social, cultural, and environmental implications bound up in agriculture, it is to be treated as a commodity which should be sourced from global markets when cheaper than domestic production. In short, freer markets have been framed as the best means to food security.
Increasingly, food security on a world scale rests upon on a small number of agro-exporting countries. More than half of the world’s agro-exports and an even bigger share of all grain and livestock exports come from very large-scale, industrialized producers in a small number of countries such as the US, Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, and France, which are together home to a tiny fraction of the world’s farmers. The flipside of this global, industrialized ‘breadbasket’ is the precarious dependence upon grain imports in many developing countries, especially the poorest among them. The world’s low income countries collectively run a large net agro-trade deficit while struggling to generate foreign exchange, importation the FAO projects will increase in the coming decades.