STWR - Share The World's Resources

The food crisis and farm crisis are rooted in an irrational, anti-human agricultural system that puts profit ahead of human needs.

Spiraling food prices, rooted in the 'free market' re-structuring of global agriculture since the 1980s, has led to a worldwide process of famine formation on an unprecedented scale. 

Food Futures Behind Rising Prices

With stock markets and the property sector in the United States weakening, speculative investors are turning to fuels and the food sector as a "safe haven", driving up prices in the process, say some food security activists. This is the logical sequence from the transformation of food from a basic human need to an economic ''commodity'', they point out. This has made it a lot easier for investors and trading houses to regard agricultural food as a legitimate target for speculation, hoarding and market manipulation, especially though the futures market.

Giant agribusinesses are enjoying soaring earnings and profits out of the world food crisis which is driving millions of people towards starvation, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. And speculation is helping to drive the prices of basic foodstuffs out of the reach of the hungry.

The food crisis is now affecting many countries across the world. Millions of people in dozens of countries are unable to afford the food they need, and malnutrition is on the rise. From Egypt to Indonesia, Haiti to Thailand, and across many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, increasingly vociferous public protests over food prices or shortages have exploded; some governments even fear for their survival (see Marc Lacey, "Across globe, hunger brings rising anger", International Herald Tribune, 18 April 2008).

Food riots have broken out across the globe destabilizing  large parts of the developing world. China is experiencing double-digit inflation. Indonesia, Vietnam and India have imposed controls over rice exports. Wheat, corn and soy beans are at record highs and threatening to go higher still. Commodities are up across the board. The World Food Program is warning of widespread famine if the West doesn't provide emergency humanitarian relief. The situation is dire. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez summed it up like this, "It is a massacre of the world's poor. The problem is not the production of food. It is the economic, social and political model of the world. The capitalist model is in crisis."

If Josette Sheeran, head of the United Nations World Food Programme, is to be believed the current food crisis is “a silent tsunami which knows no borders sweeping the world.” That’s just wishful thinking. If the tsunami were really silent, then it’d be much easier for cretins to propose trade liberalisation as a remedy, or for Gordon Brown to support genetically modified crops as a way of responding to the disaster.