Although most of the world realised rather earlier, the West has suddenly woken up to the global food crisis. Never mind the extra 20p on a packet of cornflakes.
The price of wheat has more than doubled in the past year, meaning that the world’s poor are simply unable to afford to eat. Food riots have erupted from India to Mexico, leaving dozens dead and hundreds injured.
Reassuringly, the guardians of global free trade have the answer. “Eventually, no doubt, farmers will respond to higher prices by growing more and a new equilibrium will be established,” writes the ever optimistic Economist: liberalise trade, end government subsides, and increased production will drive down prices.
Yet while growing more will help, the real problem is not a lack of grub. It is that the rich can afford to buy food out of the mouths of the poor.
Last year global grain production actually grew 5% to 2.1 billion tons. Astonishingly, less than half will end up on people’s plates. The rest is diverted from empty stomachs towards calamitous biofuels and wasteful meat production.
Next year, the US will turn more than 100 million tonnes of corn into ethanol to be burnt in the engines of its vast fleet of cars. Even more grain – 760 million tonnes last year – is squandered on feeding animals for meat.
Literally trillions of calories are blown by turning grain into flesh because animals burn off most of what we feed them. For every kilo of beef that ends up in hamburgers, eight kilos of grain are needed as feed.
The only reason for this absurd use of food is that the rich can pay to make it happen. A farmer, who may be struggling to survive himself, will sell to whoever gives the highest price.
It doesn’t matter that the buyer will burn grain in her car and waste it to make sausages, rather than someone who actually needs that food to live.
Even if Economist-style free trade does give farmers an incentive to grow more, insatiable demand for biofuels and meat may simply swallow up any gains, especially given record oil prices and the affluent new carnivores of China and India.
Breathtaking inequality plus a free market means that the poor can be priced out of life itself by the wasteful whims of the wealthy.
Either the rich should be stopped from hiking up the price, or the poor should be given the means to compete. We accept that the welfare state should step in at a national level when some are given the finger by the invisible hand.
Why should it not be rolled out globally by a world government? As markets around the world are trashed by hungry crowds, the free traders have never looked so bereft of answers.
