Hunger and Anger in the Time of Food Riots

Half the world is starving and many are becoming hungrier and angrier. Millions more are impoverished daily. Many of these are poor mothers and children in poor nations of Africa and other developing countries.

The New Face of Hunger is not a stark picture of battered and malnourished children in Ethiopia. It is the rise of commodity prices and super inflation now biting all across the globe.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation predicted in October 2007: “If prices continue to rise, it would not be surprising if we began to see food riots.” World food prices have risen 45 percent in the last nine months and there are serious shortages of rice, wheat and maize, according to FAO.

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Now for the first time in history, FAO is finding it hard to live to its Latin motto Fiat Panis or “Let there be bread.” So it is calling world leaders to a mouthy parley - Food Security, Climate Change and Bioenergy Summit in Rome, Italy, between 3 and 5 June 2008 to address the crisis.

Speaking in Dubai this week, Sir John Holmes, undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs and the UN’s emergency relief coordinator, said the problem was escalated by rising prices, food scarcity and soaring energy costs, further compounding the damaging effects of global warming.

The FAO food price index is at its highest level since 1990. Wheat and milk are untouchables to the poor while other agricultural commodities, including corn and meat, are trading higher than averages in 1990s.

Last November, FAO said world prices for most staple foods had led to double digit inflation in China (18%), Indonesia and Pakistan (13%), and 10% or more in Latin America, Russia and India, and the figures keep rising.

Retail price controls are creaping back to forestall social and political unrest as witnessed in Russia. In India, the second-largest rice producer in the world, the government has banned rice exports to save enough staple grain for her own people, depriving the rest of the world of more than four million tonnes of rice a year.

But no country is safe, not even America. Don’t be surprised, Uncle Sam, to wake up and find your favorite oat meal missing from the supermarket shelves, or its price makes it untouchable. And John Bull take notice, riots in London are always bloody.

Since 2007, food riots have been experienced in Mexico, India, Morocco, Egypt, China, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Uzbekistan, Indonesia, Yemen, Guinea, Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Mauritania and Senegal…Several deaths have been reported in Haiti’s version of food riots as many more poor feast on mud cakes, just to survive!

Truly, the world has made steps back to the seventeenth century and the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when food riots were a reactionary form of collective action in protest of shortages and an unacceptable inflation in the price of basic necessities like foodstuffs.

Blame climate change, failing science or capitalism, but inflation is biting hard and food is becoming, sadly, a preserve of the rich.

In order for riots to break out the whole food supply doesn’t have to be wiped out. It just has to be threatened sufficiently, according to experts.

What is science doing about this? Is food as a basic necessity too commercialized that the poor cannot access it? Are world governments doing enough to address this crisis?

Have we got our priorities wrong? Is the world’s quest for cheaper sources of energy to blame when we allow the diversion of crops and farmland to producing fuel instead of food? Bio-fuels or food?

We are all trying to find the answers as the world continues to starve and more battle lines drawn daily.

Resources and further reading:
FAO: Steps to Reduce Food Prices, Guardian: Global Food Crisis, TIME: Food-Price Crisis

Photo credit: Mr. Kris via Flickr

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