In this first decade of the 21st century, the pursuit of an amoral neo-liberal economic logic, a trading system that protects the interests of the strong, and corporate greed have now conspired to deposit humanity at the confluence of three mighty challenges: rising fuel costs, climate change, and intensifying global hunger. Needless to say, their impact remains most devastating among the world’s poorest whose plight has no time to make sense of the high sounding scholarly and technical terminology currently employed in the debate. While in richer societies economic hardships may propel people towards changing eating habits, the rural poor in the global South have no luxuries that can be cut off to redirect household funds towards food. To these people, a doubling of food prices literally means starvation. There are even no job opportunities, let alone working extra jobs to prop up household incomes. This is why the hunger debate is both interesting and annoying.
Interesting and annoying debate on 'Crisis'
Mainly interesting is the energy spent on ‘discovering’ just what may have caused this ‘crisis.’ That we should talk hunger when the agribusiness community and seed companies are recording astronomical profits only compares to the paradox of five oil companies (Exxon Mobil Corp., BP America Inc., Shell Oil Co., Chevron Corp. ConocoPhillip) making between them $123 billion in 2007 profits right in the midst of an oil and economic crisis. It is a pity that in a world so endowed, the basic tenets of fairness and (re)distributive justice have proven so elusive to wo/mankind. This is why on the other hand, the debate is also annoying because at a closer look this unfolding food crisis isn’t really a crisis after all. That a disaster that has been so long in the making should seem to surprise the world borders on the ridiculous. I may be wrong, but if we envisage a ‘crisis’ as an emergency, and therefore that which we could not have foreseen, or depth and breadth of whose impact we couldn’t have possibly estimated then the term ‘crisis’ in reference to present global hunger is a misnomer. Expert opinion on the ‘actual’ causes range from the impact of bio-fuels, (over)consumption in emerging economies like India and China, the rising cost of fuel, hoarding of staples like rice by leading producers, as well as outdated farming techniques. Biotech companies also see in the argument for better technologies an opportunity to increase their already astronomical profits by pushing for GMOs as an inevitable panacea. While each may have a grain of truth, they also speak more to the socio-economic and political spaces occupied by their originators.
Man-made hunger
But for those to whom hunger and deprivation has become a daily lived experience, the forces operating at the global and local levels can be narrowed down to a simple duality; the inability to produce for the household table and the inability to realize the generous promises of export production. At the local level, it is impossible, even criminal to look at the food crisis without mention of the continuing legacy of the Bretton Woods Institutions for instance in Africa. The largely unrewarding interventions of the IMF and World Bank in African economies, the attendant economic authoritarianism that spread a particularly pernicious brand of globalization christened neo-liberalism, and the resultant social sabotage of the prospects of real transformation in these societies has received wide coverage by scholar-practitioners of social justice. For so long, the IMF and World Bank policies have criminalized government support programs to farmers in the global South at a time when farmers in rich northern nations continue to produce with huge government subsidies as the WTO looks the other way. Withdrawal of extension services, privatization or dissolution of – for instance – national cereals and produce boards denied farmers a stable market just as it de-established strategic national food reserves, a cornerstone of food sovereignty. Thanks to policy guidelines from the IMF, World Bank and related guardians of ‘free trade,’ farmers in the global South have had to choose between either watching their harvests rot and go to waste, or trade their harvests at a loss through the vicious networks of exploitative middlemen. Subsidy-related price distortions at the global market place and import liberalization virus have ensured an influx of cheap imports, further displacing local producers in the domestic market. The impact has been devastating because of conditions that denies these governments policy space to effect target interventions to protect strategic national food reserves.
Double dependency and the logic of exporting more to earn less
When you see Mexicans – the homeland of corn – protesting the high prices of corn imports from the US, the irony is not funny. While in the pre-structural adjustment era these countries were dependent on primary commodity exports, the systematic destruction of domestic economy has turned erstwhile food producers into net food importers because the orientation towards exports has come at the expense of domestic food production, and a dual dependency where countries are dependent both on food imports, as well as underperforming often unreliable export markets. Prior to the 1980s, at least the dependency was on primary commodity exports as many countries were self-sufficient in food production. When in 2008 your coffee earns half as much as it earned in the late 1970s while imports cost twice as much as they did then, trade fails to make sense as an engine for social transformation. Despite these scenarios, the systematic reorientation of agriculture towards the exportable (cash) crops has continued unabated with donors more willing to prop up poor nations’ budget deficits as long as they maintain policies that open their vulnerable economies to the predatory exigencies of western capital. It is in this context that the ‘Aid for Trade’ model that came out of the Hong Kong WTO Round falls short, proceeding from the notion that what ails Africa’s trade competitiveness is the lack of qualified trade experts (hence capacity building), or higher import tariffs that impede ‘free’ trade. Consequently, the Integrated Framework pours resources into ‘strengthening’ poor countries’ capacity to trade in a global trade environment that is fundamentally flawed.
IMF - Its ok, just take more loans
Through its Trade Integrated Mechanism (TIM) for instance, the IMF is more willing to give technical and financial support (read more loans) for countries to counter their balance of payment deficits from unfair trade than in developing nations’ struggle for a fair trading regime. Because of its proven supplementary role to IMF and World Bank’s destructive agenda in the global South, the WTO remains a critical site of struggle, and it is in this context that 8year contestations of the Doha ‘Development’ Round since 2001 must be seen as a continuing search for a democratic, fair and just WTO more positively responsive to the needs and aspirations of the world’s poorest citizens. this spirit of resistance may have been birthed in 2001 in Doha, but it would find its ultimate fulfillment in Cancun, Mexico in 2003 when - due to irreconcilable differences on the issue of agricultural subsidies - ministers from the developing nations walked out of the talks as a final symbolic act of frustration with an international system hell-bent on perpetuating historical economic apartheid. As experts discuss the ‘crisis,’ we must remember the good and the bad news. The good is that we don’t need nuclear science for a diagnosis. The bad news is in the fact that some of those involved in the debate are part of the problem, seek to benefit from the problem, or seek to suppress the pursuit of lasting solution. Even as ‘Operation Rescue Doha’ collapsed again in Geneva at the end of July, may we always remember the hungry in all fora, and steadfastly argue for trade relationships based on democratically-formulated, just and fair rules that (re)affirm the sovereign rights of governments to pursue policies consistent with the frontiers of domestic socio-economic and political realities, prioritizing fight against rising global poverty to put tangible social transformation within reach of the world most deprived. For that was the original promise of globalization then.
