The world is facing a hunger crisis unlike
anything it has seen in more than 50 years. 925 million people are hungry and
98 percent of them live in developing countries. Asia and the Pacific region is
home to over half the world’s population and nearly two thirds of the world’s
hungry people; women make up a little over half of the world's population, but
they account for over 60 percent of the world’s hungry.
One out of four children - roughly 146 million - in developing countries is
underweight. Every day, almost 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes.
That's one child every five seconds. In 2008, nearly 9 million children died
before they reached their fifth birthday. One third of these deaths are due
directly or indirectly to hunger and malnutrition.
India is home to nearly 50 percent of the world’s hungry population. 350
million Indians—about 35 percent of India’s population—are considered
food-insecure, consuming less than 80 percent of minimum energy requirements.
Nutritional and health indicators are extremely low. Nationally, nearly nine
out of 10 pregnant women between the ages of 15 and 49 suffer from malnutrition
and/or anaemia. And more than half of Indian children under five are moderately
or severely malnourished, or suffer from stunting.
Growing a Better Future
in a Resource Constrained World
"The food system is pretty well bust. All the signs are that the
number of people going hungry is going up."
The report predicts that the prices of food, already at a record high, will
more than double in the next 20 years. In addition, by 2050, demand for food
will rise 70 percent, yet the report says the world’s capacity to increase food
production is declining. A contributor to these issues: global climate change
and pro bio-fuel policies throughout the world.
So what's driving the inevitable hunger explosion? No guessing required -
the OXFAM report attributes this to the excessive use of fossil fuels;
contributing carbon emissions and a mindless exploitation of natural resources
that is at the heart of the unfolding disaster.
"Oxfam warned the current 900 million people who experience hunger
could rise within 20 years unless the world's food system is
overhauled."
This is an astonishing statement as it comes
from Oxfam with over 60 years of experience in the field and considered as
leader among international NGOs. Astonishing as it contradict global yield
growth data published so far. Astonishing as global yields continue to
progressively increase (see above graph) while Oxfam claims that farm systems
have gone bust as Matt Ridley in his article Why Oxfam Is
Wrong On Food published in The Times points out:
"In the long run, even after this year’s
price spike, according to data compiled by Daniel Sumner, of the University of
California Davis, maize and wheat prices are in real terms only about half what
they were in the 1940s and 25 per cent below what they averaged in the 1960s.
Relative to wages, they have fallen even farther. By far the most significant
reason for this long-term decline in food prices is that those beastly
plundering capitalists have been inventing things like fertilisers, tractors,
pesticides and new varieties to increase yields and cut costs.
The truth is that over the past 60 years the
world’s farmers have trebled the yield of the big three cereals (rice, wheat
and maize), which provide 60 per cent of human calories, without ploughing a
single net extra acre. (Incidentally, yields are probably 10 per cent higher
simply because of increased carbon dioxide in the air.) In some places, food
prices have been so low that land has come out of agriculture and back into
forest. Malnutrition and hunger persist, yes, but mass famine now happens
chiefly in countries with too much government, such as North Korea and
Zimbabwe."
The theory of population explosion is an
old argument, if not a slightly dubious one. According to this theory, people
go hungry simply because the population is growing so fast that food becomes
scarce as agricultural productive capacity become unable to keep up pace with
population growth.
The reality is that hunger often has little
to do with scarcity, being more driven by affordability criterion. OXFAM’s
warning of flat crop yields and weak harvests appears dubious as it contradicts
data available. If OXFAM has data to the contrary, well the report does not
reveal any source. In fact, the report contradicts itself later on by
stating “We produce more food than we
need.”
Oxfam simply got India wrong. There is ample
food in India. Read Economic Times article - India faces
problem of plentiful food. And yet, OXFAM portray the
causation of hunger in this country as follows:
“Despite doubling the size of it economy between 1990 and 2005 the
number of hungry people in India increased by 65 million - more than the
population of France - because economic development excluded the rural poor and
social protection schemes failed to reach them. Today one in four of the
world’s hungry people live in India."
The reasons extended by OXFAM for hunger may
be all peripherally true. However, hunger correlates highly to poverty
and for that reason, reducing poverty remains the long-term solution and not
raising agricultural productivity per se as OXFAM makes it out to be. It
is factors such as globalization; economic policies and the control of land etc
which are more significant factors to hunger rather than low agricultural
productivity which remains only of minor significance.
The sooner OXFAM recognize that world hunger is only a face of world poverty
the better it is for itself to be taken seriously in its touted mission to
eliminate hunger in this country. But to be fair to the OXFAM report it does
address some minor structural issues. It said that up to 90 per cent of global
grain trading happened between just three firms - each had made substantial
profits from price fluctuations since the 2008 food crisis. Oxfam
therefore called for regulators to place limits on trading in agricultural
futures - contracts designed to reduce uncertainty in prices, but which critics
say are perversely driving prices higher. The fact remains, commodity futures
speculation can be only a secondary cause for hunger and not the primary one.
The Report starts
with denial and a Freudian slip:
“Despite an overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change and a
robust economic basis for swift and decisive action, we continue pumping out
more and more greenhouse gases.”
From the extract from this report (given
above), the prism in which OXFAM chose to analyse the whole issue of global
hunger is from the anthropogenic climate change framework. It is funny however the OXFAM stress on “overwhelming scientific consensus on climate
change”. This coming in June 2011, suggests that OXFAM is still in the
denial mode.
Climategate punctured the credibility of the
science. Its credibility further nose dived after the Inter-governmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were forced to admit their findings were flawed,
taking steps to radically overhaul their systems and procedures, including
permitting more divergent opinions that challenged the “consensus”. 1,000
leading climatologists have signed a petition challenging the IPCC which is
almost 20 times the number of UN scientists (52) who authored the media-hyped
IPCC 2007 Summary for Policymakers.
The Kyoto Protocol is dead, save the official pronouncement with 4 big
polluters US, Canada, Russia and Japan confirming that they will not renew the
treaty next year. The international market in carbon credits has suffered an
almost total collapse, with only $1.5billion of them traded last year — the
lowest since the system opened in 2005, according to a report from the World
Bank. World leaders including Obama completely avoid climate change,
global warming and renewable energy from their vocabulary or in official
agreements.
There had been a spate of admissions by
leading global warmist media and climatologists that climate sceptics are
winning the argument with the public over global warming. The most significant
admission was by James Hansen of NASA as he heads NASA's Goddard Institute of
Space Studies, and is widely thought of as "the father of global
warming" – his dramatic alert about climate change in US Senate
hearings in July 1988 put the issue on the world agenda. Read here.
The overwhelming scientific consensus has
apparently little takers and fools no one and it remains a puzzle why an OXFAM
would like to live in a make believe world.
But it is second part of the statement that
proves more interesting - “robust economic basis for swift and decisive action”. Such a
narrative refers to a call for swapping the use of fossil fuels for renewable
energy sources including bio-fuels. But the report ironically reserves it
harshest condemnation for bio-fuels (part of the so-called robust economic for
swift and decisive action) by this surprising admission - “Bloated biofuel
lobbies, hooked on subsidies that divert food from mouths to cars.”
Now how can we interpret this? It pretty much looks a Freudian slip as
OXFAM now more candidly admit bio-fuels as a significant cause of
the growing global hunger. So whenever OXFAM attributes climate change as
causing global hunger, we can't be faulted to consider it an euphemism
for solutions peddled by climate activists that has gone awry but which
OXFAM continue to describe as “robust economic basis for swift and decisive
action”. We climate sceptics have always considered such solutions not
only a waste of money but solutions worse than the problem it tries to solve.
OXFAM's turnaround position in bio-fuels validates our position!
We have another reason to rejoice too. This is for the first time; OXFAM has
unambiguously and categorically condemned bio-fuels as being a causative factor
for global hunger. Till now, OXFAM walked the tight rope as reflected in
the document - “Biofuels:
Ony if we avoid burning food says Oxfam”.
On 23rd January 2009 in a Stop Climate Chaos
coalition meeting in Leeds, attended by Hilary Benn, Secretary of State for
Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Robert Goodwill, Shadow Roads Minister for
Transport Richard Brett, Liberal Democrat and Co-Leader of Leeds City Council,
Oxfam’s Head of UK Campaigns, Martin Kirk reportedly made this remarkable
admission:
“None of us foresaw the effects of first generation biofuels, but
without them we wouldn’t be getting to second generation and that’s the right
direction to go in.”
Biofuels obviously cannot be grown in Europe,
including the UK. So it has to be outsourced to developing countries. They in
turn look at it as a cash crop, diverting their arable land for bio-fuel
production so that European cars can be fed on “Green” fuels. This area
reduction in turn lowers the agricultural output in these countries which lends
itself to create supply led food inflationary pressures which reduces
affordability of food, leading to hunger. A blog post from Tanzania comments
the kind of other havoc these kinds of programmes played in developing
countries:
“Massive land-grabbing scramble in developing countries as Western
companies (some even with foreign aid support) rapidly establish enormous
carbon monoculture fields in tropical countries, destroying eco-systems and
biodiversity. A key question that is being asked is whether it is ethical for
rich countries in the North to make ‘renewable’ carbon in places where it has
serious negative iacts on poor people and tropical forests that will be cut
down to create space for ‘carbon fields’ in monoculture plantations.”
And yet, as far back as two years ago,
OXFAM’s campaign head in the UK was talking of a second generation biofuel
revolution which he was convinced was the right way to go! It is amazing
that OXFAM that boast of a worldwide operation including in Tanzania feigns
ignorance of biofuels detrimental impact.
Obviously since then some significant change has taken place in OXFAM’s policy
outlook that they have now finally decided to campaign against biofuels.
Better late than never, and so welcome as it, it still raises the question
whether OXFAM still support the other two pillars bio-fuel leans on viz. system
of carbon credits and trading (part of robust economic basis for swift and
decisive action)? The report significantly does not offer us a clue.
Maybe OXFAM perhaps has revised its opinion on these two props also but too
embarrassed to admit it.
REST OF THE REPORT -
NOTHING BUT DOUBLE SPEAK
There were 1.4 billion people in extreme
poverty in 2005. The World Bank estimates that the spike in global food prices
in 2008, followed by the global economic recession in 2009 and 2010 has pushed
between 100-150 million people into poverty. This in simple terms
illustrates a high correlation between the rate of development with
poverty and hunger - higher the growth, the lesser the poverty and hunger and
vice versa.
Food/energy inflation can negate the gains of
economic growth. Even OXFAM admits this:
“The dependency of the food system on oil for transport and fertilizers
is a key factor in both, as oil prices are expected to rise in the long term
and to become increasingly volatile.”
Nonetheless, though the narrative uses terms
like oil price shocks, the OXFAM report has nothing to say about the crude
supply disruption effects caused by Western countries warmongering impulses in
the Middle East. Iraq could be considered history, but surely Libya is current
that deserves some sort of mention as a significant contributor to global
hunger. And still despite this omission, the report claims that
“Oxfam’s Grow
Campaign has a simple message: another future is possible, and we can build it
together.”
What kind of future is this when an Iraq or Libyan war
and the accompanying oil price shocks are considered inconsequential in
the fight to banish global hunger?
This aside, if we thought that OXFAM’s solutions are intended to mitigate
problems of the food system arising from the dependence on increasingly
expensive fossil fuel, then think again. This is what OXFAM advocates:
“National governments must intervene to speed up and direct the
transition. They must invest in public goods such as R&D in clean energy.
They must create incentives through subsidies and tax breaks to guide private
capital to where it is needed. They must tax undesirables – such as greenhouse
gas emissions – to direct economic activity towards desirable alternatives”
This narrative simply means OXFAM’s solutions
offer no respite for the farming systems of developing countries as it calls on
their governments to tax their people even higher for fossil fuels. The OXFAM
report even claims that worldwide subsidies for renewable energy are $57bn
compared with $312bn for fossil fuels. How these figures have been derived
maybe a matter of controversy, but even we accept them at face value, what
OXFAM suggests is to remove the subsidies of fossil fuels and re-deploy them on
renewable energy sources.
This sounds a reasonable argument, but it ignores the reality that the efficacy
of renewables currently makes them incapable of replacing fossil fuels for
meeting mass consumption of energy.
We need to only look to Tamil Nadu to understand this. This is a state where
renewables constitute almost one-third the installed power capacity. In
fact in Tamil Nadu, all fossil dependent green-field power projects have been
shelved during the last decade. Instead new capacity expansion has taken place
by focusing solely on renewable energy.
The result was it reduced Tamil Nadu
from a power surplus to a power deficit state, forcing it to buy power from
other states in the country. With the deficit running above 3,500 MW, the state
has no option but to introduce long power cuts. As a result, industrial and
agricultural production in the state has taken a huge hit. Economists put the
cost estimates of this deficiency knocking off at least 2% of the state’s GDP!
All because the renewable energy sector was unable to generate more than 10-15%
of their installed capacity! A waste of public investment as the government
belatedly is realizing. And it is this option, renewables, that OXFAM peddles
as a sustainable solution in the fight against hunger!
HYSTERIA OF CLIMATE
CHANGE REPACKAGED AS GLOBAL HUNGER
The issue of climate change has started to
put off people and for NGOs dependent on public contribution, this could place
them in a very tricky situation. OXFAM seems to have found a simple solution to
get around this - re-package climate change as global hunger.
But the report claims that agriculture accounts for upto 30% of the world’s
greenhouse gas emissions. So to make agriculture climate compliant the Oxfam
report puts two criteria - practices should rapidly adapt to a changing climate
and it needs to slash its carbon footprint.
Let’s ignore this nonsense of agriculture’s carbon footprint and focus on the
dilemma on how OXFAM would find a balance between these two contradictory
objectives? Would OXFAM place the food requirements of the community first or
will their climate agenda get priority?
During the runup to Copenhagen Climate meet in 2009, Oxfam held a South Asian
workshop on Climate Change for their staff and partners. A few who attended
later told me that they were shocked when participants were told to encourage
conversion of arable land for afforestation to curb methane and other greenhouse
gas emissions as “climate adaptation” programmes. So if this true, then
OXFAM’s agenda of slashing carbon footprint swamps those of increasing food
security of the community and we need to take the following statement of
objectives with a pinch of salt.
"Unlocking the potential of smallholder agriculture – the backbone
of the food system – represents our single biggest opportunity to increase food
production, boost food security, and reduces vulnerability.”
The criteria of agriculture to quickly adapt
to climate is equally interesting as the report elaborates this must enable us
to “dramatically
scale up our ability to collectively manage risks and build resilience to
shocks and volatility.” This raises the question whether NGOs like
OXFAM have an adequate understanding of the weather, leave alone, climate, to
weave this into meaningful operational strategies and plans. If we go to Sri
Lanka, to enquire, this may provoke a burst of derisive laughter among the
locals. A few months ago “sustainable agricultural” projects of leading
NGOs like OXFAM; prepared for drought. Instead came the La Niña induced
unprecedented flooding. These NGOs ended up red faced as overnight the
practices they introduced turned Sri Lanka into a net food importer.
HAS OXFAM CAUGHT THE
EHRLICH BUG?
Paul Ehrlich’s book Population Bomb turned
him an instant celebrity. An environmentalist, Ehrlich in the seventies warned
the world of mass starvation in the 70s. But here we are in 2011 having
survived his scare. Until very recently, till hare brained climate schemes like
bio-fuels came into play, global food prices and availability remained fairly
stable.
Thomas Malthus, the 18th century political economist, propounded a grim
theory in which whenever population outstripped food production, starvation
would cull the numbers until the equation was restored. So Ehrlich's
theory was no means original. His contribution was to dramatically and
graphically rehash the Malthusian theory! Here is an extract from his book:
“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small
increases in food supplies we make....The death rate will increase until at
least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next
ten years... “hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of
any crash programmes embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a
substantial increase in the world death rate.”
Despite such prophesy of doom, the world
death rate fell in the 1970s and remained falling till present day! Could Oxfam
have caught the Ehrlich bug? It looks very possible as the report had been
written by Gawain Kripke who worked with the radical green outfit, Friends of
the Earth before joining Oxfam America. That could explain the rather sharp
language used in the report like the global food supply system is "pretty much
bust," urging governments and policy planners to take immediate
remedial steps. The elements prophesy of doom are all there too -“Future wars may
take place not over territory or other such issues but over food.”
So what’s the likely fate of the Oxfam’s report? After the initial publicity
hullabaloo dies down, once the media realizes that it is a Paul Ehrlich clone
with a climate change tinge; they may extend Oxfam the courtesy they now confer
Paul Ehrlich - contempt for a sensationalist! The revival of
agriculture is integral in any strategy to eliminate poverty and hunger in this
world. But to drum up support for any cause of the basis of specious reports those
exaggerates and distort facts and sensationalizing the issues not only is
unethical but counter-productive for NGOs.
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