What’s happening along the Mediterranean shores of Africa, where the world’s first agricultural revolution happened some 10,000 years ago, is one sign that the empires built by cheap oil and food are in for a shakedown.
My bet is that the current worldwide food price hike – the second in less than five years – will match the rise in oil prices in terms of its wrenching geopolitical impact. The two, of course, are intimately connected. Food can’t be fertilized and shipped without imports of cheap fossil fuels, and people in areas near the oil-rich Arab world cannot eat without imports of cheap food.
The rise in food and oil prices in 2007-08 caused mass outbreaks of rioting in some 40 countries, a reminder of how much desperation increased food prices cause for some 3 billion people. Oil price hikes, on the other hand, mainly create anger for the affluent.
The full effect of those soaring prices was cut short by its sidekick, the world recession of 2007-08, which captured attention while depressing prices.
As a result, few noticed that no major government did anything to deal with the structural fundamentals behind this rise in food prices: deep-seated shifts like population growth, urbanization, climate chaos, destruction of fishing grounds, meat-eating and other resource-intensive Americanizations of world food-ways.
This is quite apart from the significant shift of farmland from food to car fuel production and the rise of financial speculation in food commodities. There are so many factors at work, it’s safe to refer to price hikes as “overdetermined,” to use a weird term from leftist liturgy.
Despite urgings from bodies like the World Bank, no major government has spent serious money on research or programs to increase agricultural production. That’s been left entirely to the private sector and the dubious inventions of chemical-seed giants like Monsanto.
Ignoring a crisis does not make it go away. Rising food prices are inevitable, and this second round is almost certain to be followed by several more. In Canada, according to a February report by Capital Economics consultant David Madani, groceries will go up a sticker-shocking 5 per cent this year.
In countries where the low-income majority spend half their income on imports of basic staples of rice, wheat and corn – this describes Arabic regions of Africa to a T – minor shifts in food prices can wreak havoc.
In North America, where plentiful and convenient foods cost as little as 10 per cent of family budgets, the impact is less jarring, except for those on low and fixed incomes. Nevertheless, it’s estimated that 40 million Americans are now food-insecure, dependent on charity, food stamps and other aid for a full stomach.
In Canada, where both charities and government pay less heed to food access than south of the border, I’m not aware that any officials have even attempted to calculate impacts – an omission that screams out how unprepared Canadian government safety nets and social organizations are on this issue.
Other than in the Anglo-American bubble, where food access is deemed an issue unworthy of public policy and the poor are largely left to their own devices, leading nations get it. The G20 group of most wealthy nations has put food security at the top of its to-do list for this year.
Other than war and mass drought, food is as close as it gets to the real bottom line. The bottom line is that the foundation stones of relatively cheap food – the international norm since the 1970s, when the government of Richard Nixon (would you buy a used food system from him?) subsidized U.S. flooding of export markets with basic grains, beans and meat – are cracked.
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Read three steps to a new food system, and about the rising cost of food prices.
