Perilous
Times
'Perfect storm' looms for world's food supplies
Richard Ingham
May 31, 2011 - 7:29PM
Oxfam called on Tuesday for an overhaul of the world's food
system, warning that in a couple of decades, millions more people
would be gripped by hunger due to population growth and
climate-hit harvests.
A "broken food system" means that the price of some staples will
more than double by 2030, battering the world's poorest people,
who spend up to 80 percent of their income on food, the
British-based aid group predicted.
"The food system is buckling under intense pressure from climate
change, ecological degradation, population growth, rising energy
prices, rising demand for meat and dairy products and competition
for land from biofuels, industry, and urbanization," Oxfam said in
a report.
Advertisement: Story continues below
It added: "The international community is sleepwalking into an
unprecedented and avoidable human development reversal."
Noting that some 900 million people experience hunger today, Oxfam
said the tally of misery could rise still further when a "perfect
storm" struck a few decades from now.
By 2050, the world's population was expected to rise by a third,
from 6.9 billion today to 9.1 billion. Demand for food would rise
even higher, by 70 percent, as more prosperous economies demanded
more calories.
But by this time, climate change will have started to bite, with
drought, flood and storms affecting crop yields that, after the
"green revolution" of the 1960s, had already begun to flatline in
the early 1990s.
The price of staple foods such as corn, also known as maize, which
has already hit record peaks, will more than double in the next 20
years, it predicted.
"In this new age of crisis, as climate impacts become increasingly
severe and fertile land and fresh water supplies become
increasingly scarce, feeding the world will get harder still,"
Oxfam chief Jeremy Hobbs said.
The report, Growing a Better Future, trails a campaign for reform
that Oxfam is launching in 45 countries, supported by former
Brazilian president Lula Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, South African
Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu and actress Scarlett Johansson.
Solutions envisaged by Oxfam focus on cutting out waste,
especially of water, and to encourage the growing of food in a
sustainable way.
The "Western" lifestyle -- characterised by over consumption and
emphasis on beef and dairy which kilo for kilo (pound for pound)
use up far more natural resources than cereals -- is given a
hammering.
"In more than half of industrialized countries, 50 per cent or
more of the population is overweight, and the amount of food
wasted by consumers is enormous -- quite possibly as much 25 per
cent," said Oxfam.
The report also calls for prising open closed markets and ending
the domination of commodities and seeds trade by a handful of
large corporations.
Small farms -- traditionally dismissed as a hindrance to food
productivity -- could in fact drive the renaissance in yield with
the help of investment, infrastructure and market access, it
argued.
Just as important, said the report, is to set up new global
governance to tackle food crises, including the creation of a
multilateral food bank.
"During the 2008 food price crisis, cooperation was nowhere to be
seen," lamented the report, saying the disarray ignited a "grab"
for agricultural land in Africa by parched countries in the Gulf
and elsewhere.
"Governments were unable to agree on the causes of the price
rises, let alone how to respond. Food reserves had been allowed to
collapse to historic lows," it said.
"Existing international institutions and forums were rendered
impotent as more than 30 countries imposed export bans in a
negative-sum game of beggar-thy-neighbour policy making."