What Will We Promise the World's Hungry This Time?

April 16, 2009
By Princess Haya Bint Al Hussein, freelance
Ottawa Citizen, Ontario

For the first time in decades, food – or the lack of it – has become the subject of high level anxiety and debate. The skyrocketing price of bread, rice and corn have made it onto the agendas of the G8, the World Bank and the IMF, normally reserved for weightier matters than the price of a bag of rice.

Politicians worldwide are increasingly alarmed by the political and economic upheaval food shortages might bring. There are new elements in the global food equation today, like the loss of cropland to biofuels production. But haven't we been here before?

When I was a small girl my father, King Hussein of Jordan, related a story about the last global food crisis and a famous promise made to the world's hungry by Henry Kissinger, then U.S. secretary of state. Kissinger came to Amman after attending the World Food Conference in Rome in 1974, called hastily as global food prices skyrocketed and widespread hunger threatened to engulf the developing world.

Kissinger related how he boldly had pledged that within a decade no child would go to bed hungry anywhere in the world. You have to give him credit for being ambitious and inspired, but sadly, more than three decades later there are more hungry children than there are Americans. Surely that number grows now with each passing week as once relatively well fed families in Cameroon, Indonesia and Egypt struggle to cope with the rising cost of a decent meal.

Back in the 1970s, global market conditions eventually improved, thanks in part to the dramatic impact of the Green Revolution in south Asia. But the development banks, aid agencies and donors soon forgot the lesson of the crisis, cutting the percentage of aid they devoted to agriculture in half despite repeated warnings by the Food and Agriculture Organization. Developing country governments did no better and failed to invest enough in agriculture. They all kept looking the other way when the number of hungry started to grow again in the mid 1990s, despite major reductions in poverty in a relatively robust world economy.

The symptoms of an acute food crisis have been around for a while and visible to anyone willing to see them. First there were riots in Mexico City over the price of corn and then suddenly the price of prime farmland in Iowa was rising faster than real estate in Belgravia or the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The European Union, which for years accumulated surplus lakes of oil and mountains of grains, began asking its farmers to put land back into production and milk was in short supply. Meanwhile, the United States quietly dropped all subsidies for its grains producers and experienced a near explosion in food exports. Finally, consumers across the world have now begun to complain loudly as they pay more each day to buy the family groceries and the riots that began in Mexico City have spread to other capitals. That finally got our attention.

While the media often attributes the current crisis to biofuels production, economists at IFPRI estimate that it accounts for no more than a third of the rise in cereals prices. Long-term drought in Australia has also been a factor, but the biggest cause has been rising incomes and demand for better diets in China and India. International prices for cereals have more than doubled since 2000. The price of wheat traded internationally has never been higher in history and some months back even prompted a consumers’ strike by Italians not amused by the rise in the price of their beloved pasta that has brought.

Rising food costs are very worrisome for many, but they are downright dangerous for the 850 million chronically hungry people who do not earn enough to afford this newspaper. Even when food was relatively cheap, these people suffered malnutrition and disease that left them cut out of the global rise in incomes. Their stunted children had little hope for the future then and even less now.

How has the donor community responded? The donor response to hunger outside well publicized emergencies like Darfur has been tepid at best. While on the surface it looks like Official Development Assistance is at historically high levels topping $100 billion, much of this is debt relief and has little impact on the price of a meal in Africa's rural villages. Aid transfers to sub-Saharan Africa – where one person in three is chronically hungry – have actually declined recently. Worse yet, food aid has dropped to its lowest level since Kissinger’s famous speech in Rome, plummeting to 6.7 million metric tons in 2006 -- less than half the level in 2000 and no one really sounded the alarm when it did.

Now the World Bank and bilateral donors are rushing to compensate for the lack of investment in agriculture over a period of decades. That might not be so easy. Just to feed the same number of needy people this year, the World Food Program has appealed for an extra $500 million. But this crisis should come as no surprise to donors who were warned for years by WFP that rising food and transport prices were cutting into their deliveries on the ground. President George W. Bush’s announcement of a $200 million release from the U,S, emergency reserve will surely help, but stocks worldwide are at frighteningly low levels. A curb in biofuels production might help too but economists note this will have little impact on wheat and rice output or address the fundamental issue of growing Asian demand.

As one market forecaster put it: “Food will soon become the next oil.” Even if global economic output dips this year as forecast, demand for food will still strain supplies. As that happens, it will be the poor and sick in remote villages in Bangladesh, Peru and Zambia who will pay the price – not you and me.

So what is to be done about all this? Well, one bright spot on the horizon is former Secretary-General Kofi Annan's $1 billion initiative with the Gates Foundation to create a Green Revolution for Africa. It was, after all, the first Green Revolution based on Nobel Prize Winner Norman Borlaug's research that helped India so much during the food shortages of the mid 1970s that prompted Kissinger's well intentioned promise to the world's hungry in Rome.

Clearly, food and nutrition need to move up the list of our development funding priorities and we must remember that the world's poorest people live in farming areas and reach out to them with new seeds, small scale irrigation, and educational services that can help them turn their lives around. The simple message to donors -- public and private -- is food must come first.

When I visited Malawi in 2006, I met incredibly poor families struggling with hunger and AIDS at the same time. I thought to myself:

How can they have any hope at all? It is these people I worry so much about in today's food crisis. We cannot and should not let them and their children down again. When it comes to food, the donor community was clearly asleep at the wheel, or at the very least dosing. Let's hope there are no more false promises and we do our very best to deliver what Kissinger so proudly promised to the world's children more than three decades ago -- a life free of hunger.

Princess Haya has been Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations World Food Programand is wife of the ruler of Dubai.

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