Indonesian food riots spread. Government declares emergency. Food riots turn deadly in Haiti: four people killed, twenty people wounded. Bangladesh workers riot over soaring food prices.
News story headlines like these pop up like "poison mushrooms." The world's populace faces a food crisis that eats at the very fiber of world security, economic growth and social progress.
While British Prime Minister Gordon Brown states that food riots now threaten democratically elected governments, the European commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid, Louis Michel, told MEPs that the growing cost of basic food is a worldwide humanitarian disaster in the making.
If governments continue to prolong their lack of investment in rural communities, which presently account for approximately 75 percent of world hunger, this cancer will spread, resulting in a future dominated by poverty, hunger, and social unrest.
At present, many countries in South Asia appear to be moving backwards - away from the future. Wheat production in India has dropped off in the last ten-years, leaving the country with the largest number of undernourished people in the world - namely 212 million. And as yet, China has not addressed the fact that 150 million of their citizens are starving.
This growing global food emergency is described by the World Food Program as the "silent tsunami."
Will this wave of despair engulf the world's continents, rendering devastation on an unprecedented scale and on all levels of society? With world communities facing the worst food crisis in forty-five years, it is estimated that twenty-five thousand people die daily from hunger.
The scenario is mind chilling; the result catastrophic.
THE ISSUES
Today's biotechnology of genetically modified crops has put the management of seeds and patents in the control of a few large international companies such as Monsanto, Dow, and Syngenta. Because of this technology we see an abrupt decline in food crop varieties due to favorite seeds that are mass-marketed. Industrial crops now represent only 150 varieties of seeds. Since the beginning of the twentieth century our variety of seeds has plummeted a full 97 percent. With the loss of these seeds, the inherited wisdom acquired over generations of local farming methods is quickly becoming a non-entity.
Changing farming practices, like industrial agriculture, are undermining our food security and affect more than just the hungry. In the search for more land to farm, these methods also damage the environment by destroying thousands of acres of forest wilderness that in turn kills an insurmountable number of wildlife.
We must manage the world's biodiversity (organisms present in a given ecological community or system) in order to provide sufficient food for a world population that may reach 9 billion by mid-century. "Agriculture can promote biological diversity if it shows due respect for nature..." said German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel, President of the ninth meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the Convention on Biological diversity, which took place in Bonn, Germany from May 19-30, 2008.
As stated by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, we grow one and a half times the amount of food we need to feed everyone on earth. Yet in lieu of growing food to feed our communities, industrial agriculture produces many crops to sell on lucrative world markets. These multi-corporations squeeze the life out of local farmers by forcing them from their land and leaving them cash-poor and unable to purchase what is grown in the fields around them.
Yet partial responsibility for our present world food crisis also lies in the calamitous changes of our earth's climate. Climate change in South Asia threatens to upset the stable monsoon pattern which farming has relied on for many years.
Admittedly, our food crisis has roots elsewhere as well. We witness the blatant corruption of governments, the hoarding of food, the expansion of the middle class in developing nations, the escalation of fuel prices, and the fact that the mismanagement of finances and weak trade negotiations merely reflect how political "grand standing" is allowed to run rampant.
THE SOLUTIONS
On December of 2008, the Asean Charter ratified a new charter that may be extremely effective in dealing with rising food prices and supply shortages in South East Asia. The EU-style community makes the bloc a legal entity and may create a single market within the next seven years. The new charter includes a common set of rules for investment, trade, environment and a variety of other fields. The members of this 10 country charter includes Brunei Darussalam, the Kingdom of Cambodia, the Republic of Indonesia, the Lao People's Democratic Republic, Malaysia, the Union of Myanmar, the Republic of the Philippines, the Republic of Singapore, the Kingdom of Thailand and the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam.
The change in weather patterns on a global level will leave us no choice but to adapt our agriculture production by selecting alternative crops, improving irrigation, reviving planting schedules, producing higher crop yields per acre, and modifying chemical inputs. Although difficult to address by developing countries, the situation is being administered by undertaking National Adaptation Programs of Actions as directed by the UN Framework Convention on Climate change.
Project Concern International is providing food through the World Food Programme's school feeding programs; it supports planting of school and community gardens, improving agricultural production, provisioning small livestock, and improving livelihoods for vulnerable families in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Lastly, the effect that genetically engineered food has on our health is unknown. Will its consumption continue blindly into the future at our children's expense? Will placing our hope in an "unknown" have devastating consequences for our planet?
We must gain control of our own destiny and not leave it in the hands of multi-corporations. By introducing sustainable and adaptable farming methods we will provide a future for the world's population.
Averting the Global Food Crisis lies not in feeding the world's population, but in allowing the population to feed itself.
References:
FP Passport Blog by editors of Foreign Policy Posted Monday 04/07/08 http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/node/8588 Biofuels Digest /indonesian-food-riots-spread-force-government-to-de clare-emergency-as-rising-soybean-prices-fuel -unrest http://www.biofuelsdigest.com/blog2/2008/01/16 BBC News Posted Saturday April 5, 2008 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7331921.stm Greenpeace Briefing/The future of farming: Industrial Agriculture/ Growth of GM foods http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/media/reports/the-futur e-of-farming The developing world/ GM foods http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/gm/the-developing-world The Independent/UK April 23, 2008 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/foo d-crisis-needs-aid-on-scale-of-tsunami-to-ave rt-famine-814066.html The Independent/UK Sunday May 4, 2008 http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-livin g/multinationals-make-billions-in-profit-out- of-growing-global-food-crisis-820855.html OneWorld Net/Sunday May 27, 2008 http://us.oneworld.net/guides/food Kurt Olson interview of Deborah Garcia/Producer, Writer Director-The Future of Food http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-80989654828 66581381 Project Concern International/Article/2008 http://www.projectconcern.org/site/PageServer?pagena me=World_Food_Crisis OneWorld Net/Public Protests May 6, 2008 http://southasia.oneworld.net/article/view/160391/1/ Genetic Engineering http://www.primalseeds.org/corporation.htm Desertification/Biodiversity Needed To Feed The World/William Van Cotthem/May 25, 2008 http://desertification.wordpress.com/2008/05/25/biod iversity-needed-to-feed-the-world-cbd/