Global Food Crisis

While I was in Malawi, my youngest sister Molly was right across the lake in Tanzania for a summer school program. She sent an email saying that she completely understood my draw to Africa, because "there is so much poverty, and so much beauty." I found this to be particularly the case in both Malawi and Ethiopia, more so than other places I've traveled to recently. There is something so basic and terrible about malnutrition, and starvation, and drought, in a world of so much plenty. It literally robs people of their dignity and ability to just live, and undermines all other areas of development because all that people affected can focus on is how to feed their children.

The issue of food insecurity (the technical term) was a constant discussion point in both Ethiopia and Malawi, where it is a major cause of the widespread poverty. I have never traveled to a country with this scale of food and water shortages, and so learned a lot about the issues on this trip. And with the rising concern about a "global food crisis," and getting several questions from friends and family, I decided to post a seperate blog entry about the issue.

Villagers harvest maize in Malawi
Articles about the global food crisis are appearing in newspapers and magazines around the world - I saw several front page stories online during my time in Ethiopia and Malawi. There have always been cycles of food shortages and abundance, but what’s different about this crisis is that it’s a global one, not just localized. Usually a harvest fails in a particular country or region due to shortage of rainfall, spreading of crop disease, war, etc. This crisis isn’t just happening in one location. It is occurring in many countries simultaneously, which is unusual.

What's also different about this crisis is that it's affecting people not usually hit by famines - not just the poorest. A recent article in the Economist captures what this will mean for different economic classes: "For the middle classes, it means cutting out medical care. For those on $2 a day, it means cutting out meat and taking the children out of school. For those on $1 a day, it means cutting out meat and vegetables and eating only cereals. And for those on 50 cents a day, it means total disaster. The poorest are selling their animals, tools, the tin roof over their heads--making recovery, when it comes, much harder."

And it's not just a matter of going hungry. Food crises are causing political instability in areas of the world where the political situation is hardly stable to begin with. Recently, food riots have erupted in countries all along the equator. In Haiti, protesters chanting "we're hungry" forced the prime minister to resign; 24 people were killed in riots in Cameroon; Egypt's president ordered the army to start baking bread; the Philippines made hoarding rice punishable by life imprisonment.


Global food prices have risen by 83% in the past 3 years. When global issues such as food insecurity occurs, it deals the most severe blow to the poorest countries in the world - mainly in Africa, where 95% of all agriculture success is completely dependent on rainfall levels - and to the poorest people in those countries - the rural population, particularly the chronically ill, women and children. Hence the affect on countries like Ethiopia and Malawi.

Taking Malawi and Ethiopia as examples, there are a lot of similarities between the two countries that explain why they are so affected. More than 85% of people in both Malawi and Ethiopia live off of the land, so their survival is very dependent on drought cycles and the harvest. Traditional agriculture systems for subsistence no longer provides adequately for household needs in most years, and there is little capacity or opportunity to develop other, more vialbe means of income. Agricultural production of one cash crop – tobacco in Malawi and coffee in Ethiopia - drives the economy in both countries, which is therefore also dependent on the harvest, as well as on global market prices.

Global market prices are falling, and harvests have been poor. Both countries have disproportionately large populations for their size, and agricultural development has been hampered by rapid population growth. Additionally, recurring droughts, which have hit this area of the world hard in recent years, deforestation and land degradation are affecting agricultural production. Malawi and Ethiopia have been unable to produce enough food in recent years to feed their populations, and the countries are too poor to import much food.

So that helps explain why a 'local' food crisis is occuring in two specific countries. But why the global one? Why are 36 countries in crisis in terms of food security, all of which will need external assistance this year? Why did the World Food Programme recently announce that, due to rising fuel and food costs, it's 2008 budget won't even cover current deliveries?

It really all boils down to supply and demand. World food consumption has actually been greater than supply for the past 5 years, gradually eroding stockpile levels to where it's just now affecting us. The demand has been increasing, primarily due to two key factors: 1) Rising per capita consumption in rich and emerging economies. In particular, emerging economies with large populations, in particular China and India, are becoming richer and are thus consuming higher quantities of food (burgeoning middle classes means rising purchases of meat and dairy products, which are highly inefficient to produce in terms of grain and water use); and 2) Use of crops to create biofuels in an attempt to move away from a dependency on oil (the U.S. alone spends $7 billion a year creating ethanol (made from corn and grains).

The supply, on the other hand is decreasing. 1) It's costing more to produce food due to rising energy costs. Fuel is used in every part of the agricultural system, both directly (cultivation, processing, refrigeration, shipping, distribution) and indirectly (manufacture of fertilizers, pesticides – the cost of urea, a fertilizer, has almost tripled since 2003); 2) Increasing water and land scarcity. The global demand for water has tripled in the past 50 years, and we're running out. 70% of all water used by humans goes into food production. As for land - only 12% of the world's land is still available for agriculture; 3) Extreme weather. In the short-term, poor rainfall levels in recent years has resulted in poor crops. In the long-term, climate change will increase the number of people at risk of hunger and will lead to an increase of between 40 million and 170 million in the number of undernourished people; 4) Trade policy. Agriculatural subsidies in the US and EU have made agriculture unprofitable for various other countries.

For those of you interested in reading more in detail about these issues, here are two useful links: Click here to read a short list summarizing the key issues driving the food crisis. Click here to read a more in-depth paper on the issues. Or, really, just google "global food crisis." The New York Times, the Economist, and bunch of others have recently run good articles - most drawing on the research and statistics from the above papers.