I have already blogged extensively on the current food price crisis affecting mostly poor countries. Now, via Le Monde, we learn, unsurprisingly, that riots have exploded in parts of Africa in response to the cost of food.

L’Afrique piégée par la flambée des prix des aliments
LE MONDE | 04.04.08

©

A combination of bad crops, absence of price controls and switch to biofuel crops are resulting in threats to political stability (for those countries that ARE politically stable) and increase in social tensions. Of course, the director of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has raised the alarm in October 2007 and predicted hunger riots as the cost of one meal has risen 40% and many in peripheral countries eat only one meal a day. Hunger demonstrations have already taken place in Cameroon, Egypt, Ivory Coast and Senegal as governments try to impose price controls against advice from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund although the situation is so serious that these institutions have proved more flexible. Egypt has even banned rice exports. Otherwise, governments all over Africa are trying to get creative to solve the problems but their margins of maneuver are extremely limited.

Interestingly, Le Monde quotes an IMF Africa Advisor stating that this crisis is precisely the results of policies pushed by the IMF and the World Bank. They pushed governments to grow for exports at the expense of subsistence agriculture because cash crops would supposedly carry higher value on the global market. In the absence of support to local subsistence agriculture, peripheral countries become extremely vulnerable to food shortages and famine. In the current context, African governments are now discussing the issue of self-sustainability in terms of food.

Too little too late, the World Bank recently published a report supporting a rebirth of subsistence agriculture.

But that is the larger issue, more specifically, in the past years, African farmers have been encouraged to switch from food to fuel to reduce the US’s dependency on foreign oil. This was supposed to increase the value of biofuel crops and would solve the poverty problem in the global South. Obviously, it did not turn out that way, as reported in the Guardian,

“Lester Brown, director of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington, said yesterday that land turned to biofuels in the US alone in the last two years would have fed nearly 250 million people with average grain needs. (…) Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, said this week that prices of all staple food had risen 80% in three years, and that 33 countries faced unrest because of the price rises. Zoellick urged rich countries to give the UN’s World Food programme $500m for emergency aid. The bank plans to increase lending for agricultural production in Africa from $420m to $850m a year in 2009.”

And this problem is not going away anytime soon,

“Last month the UK’s chief scientist and food expert, Professor John Beddington, said the prospect of food shortages over the next 20 years was so acute that politicians, scientists and farmers must tackle it immediately. “Climate change is a real issue and is rightly being dealt with by major global investment. However, I am concerned there is another major issue along a similar time-scale, an elephant in the room - that of food and energy security.”“

Yeah, no kidding. One person who takes this issue serious is UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, as mentioned in the Guardian. The UNSG has ordered a review of the biofuel impact on food prices and crisis. However, he did so using the usual, and oh-so frustrating UN bland middle-of-the-road, “let’s not offend anybody” kind of way:

“While I am very much conscious and aware of these problems, at the same time you need to constantly look at having creative sources of energy, including biofuels. Therefore, at this time, just criticising biofuel may not be a good solution. I would urge we need to address these issues in a comprehensive manner.”

He’s in a pickle on this because, even though he has been front and center on the question of global climate change, he has also been a proponent of biofuels as energy alternatives.

“The UN’s own special rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, called biofuels “a crime against humanity”, and called for a five-year moratorium. Ban rejected that proposal. “At this time I wouldn’t make any definitive judgment or definitive plans, in particular vis-à-vis these biofuels,” he said.”

Jean Ziegler has never been known to be diplomatic. However, the shift from food to fuel threatens the achievement of the MDG regarding cutting global hunger in half by 2015. And if that weren’t bad enough, wealthy countries have cut their aid to poor countries:

“At the 2005 Gleneagles summit, G8 countries committed to pledge an additional $50bn in aid by 2010. Three years on, this target now looks to be missed by as much as $30bn, said Oxfam, enough to save 5 million lives. (…) The EU’s collective spending target of 0.7% of national income by 2015 now also looks badly off track, with aid from the world’s richest countries falling from 0.31% in 2006 to only 0.28% in 2007, as the effect of some one-off debt relief drops out of the data.”

Which means that aid figures were inflated by including debt relief which should not have been included in there. As usual, Scandinavian countries are the one sticking to their commitment and 0.7% of national income target (with Norway at 0.95% and Sweden at 0.93%) whereas the US ranked last with 0.16%.

All in all bleak prospects. Better global governance, please.

Cross-posted at The Global Sociology Blog