BIO-FUELING A NEW GLOBAL CRISIS

I’ve written several times over the years on the insanity of a system that forces underdeveloped countries to grow cash crops – for instance coffee and cocoa beans – for export to the west while millions starve.

George Monbiot in Tuesday’s Guardian writes a timely piece on the matter, focusing on how our “appetite for biofuels is causing starvation in the poor world.”

Swaziland is a prime example of the problem. Here, 40% of its population is facing hunger, while the country’s staple crop – cassava – is being grown with the intention of producing ethanol for export to the west. Elsewhere, rainforests, the lungs of the earth, are being cleared for the production of biofuel crops.

At a time when the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization is reporting that global food stocks are the lowest in a quarter of a century, the biofuel problem just makes you want to wretch.

The current problem is not helped by the rising price of oil (as I write it is nearing $100 a barrel), growing populations, extreme weather and ecological problems. Last week the UN Environment Programme announced that the planet’s water, land, air, plants, animals and fish stocks were all in "inexorable decline". Fifty seven countries, including 29 in Africa, have been hit by floods and crops have been wiped out by drought and heatwaves in Asia, Europe, China, Sudan, Mozambique and Uruguay.

All of which means the laws of supply and demand become more pronounced. John Vidal wrote in Saturday's Guardian:

“Record world prices for most staple foods have led to 18% food price inflation in China, 13% in Indonesia and Pakistan, and 10% or more in Latin America, Russia and India, according to the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO). Wheat has doubled in price, maize [the US produces 70% of the world Maize crop, a staple diet in many countries. Last year 20% of the maize yield was given over to the production of ethanol] is nearly 50% higher than a year ago and rice is 20% more expensive, says the UN.

Lester Brown, the president of the Worldwatch Institute said: "The competition for grain between the world's 800 million motorists, who want to maintain their mobility, and its 2 billion poorest people, who are simply trying to survive, is emerging as an epic issue."

Says Josette Sheeran, director of the UN’s World Food Programme, "There are 854 million hungry people in the world and 4 million more join their ranks every year. We are facing the tightest food supplies in recent history. For the world's most vulnerable, food is simply being priced out of their reach."

Meanwhile the EU has set itself targets that directly impact on the world’s starving millions: 5.75 per cent of transport fuel must come from biofuels by 2010, and 10 per cent by 2020. This is all to do with reducing the European carbon footprint. But this switch to biofuels hardly helps matters as Monbiot observes:

“In principle, burning biofuels merely releases the carbon the crops accumulated when growing. Even when you take into account the energy costs of harvesting, refining and transporting the fuel, they produce less net carbon than petroleum products…..If you count only the immediate carbon costs of planting and processing biofuels, they appear to reduce greenhouse gases. When you look at the total impacts, you find they cause more warming than petroleum.

“A recent study by the Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen shows that the official estimates have ignored the contribution of nitrogen fertilisers. They generate a greenhouse gas - nitrous oxide - that is 296 times as powerful as CO2. These emissions alone ensure that ethanol from maize causes between 0.9 and 1.5 times as much warming as petrol, while rapeseed oil (the source of more than 80% of the world's biodiesel) generates 1-1.7 times the impact of diesel. This is before you account for the changes in land use.”

Monbiot finishes with a warning:

“If the governments promoting biofuels do not reverse their policies, the humanitarian impact will be greater than that of the Iraq war. Millions will be displaced, hundreds of millions more could go hungry. This crime against humanity is a complex one, but that neither lessens nor excuses it. If people starve because of biofuels, Ruth Kelly [Secretary of State for Transport] and her peers will have killed them. Like all such crimes, it is perpetrated by cowards, attacking the weak to avoid confronting the strong.”

While I welcome Monbiot’s criticism of this issue, It is not so much the “strong”, the oil and biofuel, the transport and food production industries that need confronting. it is more a case that the damned system that allows them to operate as they do, that allows them to put profits before human and environmental interests, needs to be abolished

UN ASKS FOR $500 MILLION TO SAVE THE WORLD'S STARVING - or just one thousandth of the cost of the war in Iraq

"There is food on shelves but people are priced out of the market. There is vulnerability in urban areas we have not seen before. There are food riots in countries where we have not seen them before." (Josette Sheeran, head of the World Food Programme, The Guardian, 26th February)

Class Warfare take up the story of the global food crisis where it left off yesterday. The UN has announced it wants $500 a year extra to deal with the crisis. And it is a crisis! $500 million may sound a lot…well, it is…But it only provides food aid to about 75 million people in 78 countries, less than one tenth of those in dire need of it. Moreover, the figure pales into significance when compared to the cost of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, currently standing, as I write, at almost $498 billion. In other words the UN, hoping to save life, is asking for 1000th of what Washington has spent destroying life in Iraq.

Officials at the UN’s World Food Programme argue that increases in the global price of basic foods are caused by a ‘perfect storm’ of factors: a rise in demand for animal feed from increasingly prosperous populations in India and China who have found a penchant for new meat stuffs, the use of more land and agricultural produce for biofuels, and climate change. Little wonder that for many of the world’s impoverished, up to 80% of their income goes on food

The UN could have cited other factors, such as a system that produced for profit not need, a system that creates the artificial scarcity of commodities in order to maintain profits.

Needless to say, there have been food riots in Mozambique, Morocco, Yemen, Mexico, Guinea, Mauritania, Senegal and Uzbekistan. Pakistan has reintroduced rationing for the first time in two decades.

Other countries has moved to head off food-fuelled protest. Russia has responded to the crisis by freezing the price of milk, bread, eggs and cooking oil for six months. Thailand is also preparing a freeze on food staples. After protests around Indonesia, Jakarta has increased public food subsidies.

For its part, India has banned the export of rice except the high-quality basmati variety. Interesting that the better quality rice is destined for the shelves of wealthier countries – far too bloody good for your average Indian prole, especially where there are profits to be had. What, give them the good stuff? Nah, they’d only eat it!

Prospects for the future look bleak, with climatic change anticipated to have a heavy impact in coming decades, with the growing demand for biofuels expected to take more land away from food production and with the rising demand fore meat products. The latter factor is all the more insane when it is considered that it takes 10 kilos of feed to produce one kilo of meat.

Throughout Africa NGOs and top scientists are calling for a moratorium on new biofuels projects as millions of acres of prime agricultural land in sub-Saharan Africa are switched from food to fuel. The Food and Agriculture Organisation have reported that 100 million tons of cereals are being diverted to the production of biofuels each year, a figure excessively unacceptable on a continent that has a long history of producing cash crops to service foreign debt. In the US, 60 million tonnes of maize is produced for the biofuel industry. The figure might mean nothing but it is a figure that is more than double the entire UK cereal crop.

The WFP is holding an emergency meeting this coming Friday in the hope it can further address the problem. Needless to say there will be no levelling of criticism at capitalism or its insane production motives, nor a call for an end to a system that prioritises profit over human need. Once again, the mechanisms of capitalism will once again be asked to solve a problem they bloody well help create. I wonder if they'll consider, though, the fact that 78% of the world's starving live in countries that actually produce a food surplus?

UN predicts food aid rationing

The Financial Times has reported that the UN’s World Food Programme, charged with relieving hunger in underdeveloped countries, is drawing up plans to ration food aid in response to spiralling prices.

"The World Food Programme is holding crisis talks to decide what aid to halt if new donations do not arrive in the short term.

"Josette Sheeran, WFP executive director, told the Financial Times that the agency would look at ‘cutting the food rations or even the number or people reached' if donors did not provide more money. ‘Our ability to reach people is going down just as the needs go up,’ she said.

"WFP officials hope the cuts can be avoided, but warned that the agency’s budget requirements were rising by several million dollars a week because of climbing food prices."

Back in November, Josette Sheeran said (Guardian, 3rd November 2007):

"There are 854 million hungry people in the world and 4 million more join their ranks every year. We are facing the tightest food supplies in recent history. For the world's most vulnerable, food is simply being priced out of their reach."

One major factor, impacting food prices and mentioned elsewhere on this blog, is that pertaining to the growing of crops to supply the biofuels industry.

As Food First reports today on its home page.

“FACT: Ethanol is helping drive food prices out of control without lowering the price of gas – Corn planted for ethanol competes for farmland with corn for food production and with other food crops. This drives up the price of all food crops, especially those that contain corn products—which is most of our processed food. Meat is more expensive because our beef cattle eat corn, not grass. Food prices have increased by 25% over last year! Gas prices still went up by 80%...”

The insanity is that the UN is introducing rationed food aid programmes because it exists as part of a system in which the rationing of commodities is the order of the day. Indeed, rationing has been the order of the day since capitalists realised they could make huge profits by limiting supply.

Food shortages are very much rooted in a system that manipulates supply and demand to keep prices high. Stories are legion about farmers being paid to take land out of production, of governments stockpiling food, to keep prices low. I remember not so many years ago writing a lengthy letter to the local press screaming my anger at the EC’s decision (back then) to destroy 3 million tons of fruit and at the cost of £52 million, because, quite simply, too much had been produced and, it if it was allowed to enter the market, prices would have crashed. And now arable is being used for the biofuel matket!

And its nothing new. This has gone on for decades. John Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize winning The Grapes of Wrath (1939), set against t backdrop of the Great Depression, highlighted the issue in California, where tens of thousands of hungry, migrating farmers and their families, encountered mountains of rotting fruit, guarded by law enforcement officers instructed to shoot anyone who dared pick so much as a decomposing apple.

Organisations like Food First (Institute for Food and Development Technology –) are clear that the world today produces enough grain alone to provide every human being with 3,500 calories a day. “That's enough to make most people fat!” they assert. And this estimate does not take account of many other universally eaten foods—vegetables, beans, nuts, root crops, fruits, grass-fed meats, and fish. Indeed, if all foods are considered together, sufficient is available to provide at least 4.3 pounds of food per person a day. That includes two and half pounds of grain, beans and nuts, about a pound of fruits and vegetables, and nearly another pound of meat, milk and eggs. Put that on a platter in front of most people and ask term to eat it and the thought of it makes them quite nauseous. This much is asserted in a 2006 document entitled 12 Myths About Hunger (downloadable in pdf format).

The document further observes how “the problem is that many people are too poor to buy readily available food. Even most ‘hungry countries’ have enough food for all their people right now. Many are net exporters of food and other agricultural products.”

In other words, if you’re hungry in this world it is inevitably because you lack the purchasing power to buy food. The golden law of capitalism as ever comes into play – “can’t pay, can’t have”. Poor people simply do not constitute a market; no profit can be had for them. It is far simpler, and far more lucrative, to create an artificial shortage which maintains prices at a profitable level. And with biofuel crops entering the equation of late, the problem is only exacerbated.