World Food Crisis: Is it a shock to development process?
Analyze this: A week long protest, riot and looting in Haiti due to spiraling food prices led to the ouster of the Prime Minister and announcement of $10 million feeding program by the World Bank during an emergency meeting in Washington in April. The 9000 strong UN peace keeping force is still in dilemma to face the ‘hungry mob’ in Haiti. Approximately 10,000 workers clashed with police near the capital in Bangladesh over the rising food price. At least dozens of people, including 20 police officials, were injured in the violence in Dhaka. In Egypt, the revolt over food is mounting. The food sufficient countries are facing food crisis. But, for world leaders this is a secondary crisis. It is at least not the oil crisis!
For around 820 million poor in the developing country who never gets a meal in a day this is as well not so ‘silent Tsunami’. This has never been considered as a crisis or shock or a top of the agenda by the world leaders as long as other politics are executed. Now, this has been called as Asian and African rice price crisis ! But, more than half of the world population is facing the heat of rising food prices. Overall global food prices has increased by 83 percent and still increasing! The price of rice has risen by as much as 74 percent during the past year. Several rice-producing countries have put curbs on exports in recent weeks. Remember, the oil shocks are not unusual in the world of politics. Sometimes they are orchestrated for vested interests. Don’t be confused this food of affairs with the 1997 South East Asian Financial crisis as Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia and Philippines are undergoing food price rising!
We heard not long back ago about the Water War! That alert came from World Bank officials as well. So, after 10 years of understanding the Water War syndrome, now we have another ‘Food War’ cautioned by the international development mandarins. The apprehension is that the food shortage or crisis will lead to civil war within or among the poorest countries. However, the World Bank will be playing a major role as its President is non other than Robert Zollieck, former top US negotiator for WTO. Now, he will be interested in expediting his unfinished task within the World Bank to make world free from hunger. The affected countries must be cautious while considering the World Bank’s recommendations on food crisis. It may be linked to the free agriculture trade in later stage or introducing genetic modified seeds or grains. The world has been witnessing worst form of food diplomacy during the cold war by the superpower.
The World population is 6.67 billion and still increasing one per second. Almost half of this number of people depends on rice. But, the world population has 85.5 million hectares of productive arable land. It is estimated that one hectare of productive land is lost every 7.67 seconds. Sometimes, the Malthusian concept came surprisingly in a recurring time interval to the poor countries. Has the development objectives put forward by world agencies failed somewhere? Or, the projected market driven growth has some inherent problems? 5.
Since 1960s, the development institutions have been supporting the countries on agriculture, irrigation, water resource management and so on to eradicate poverty in the regions. All this directly linked to the production of food for the poor people. During last decade, the World Bank invested $13.2 billion in agricultural and water management out of which $5.6 billion was specifically for agricultural water management went to South and East Asia, and China, India, Indonesia, and Pakistan. Over the last three decades, ADB has been cooperating with the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) to improve the rice-related research projects by supporting $17.3 million in various projects. But, have they reduced the poverty?
Bangladesh is about to face a severe crisis of food shortage to feed its large poor people. It is boiling over ‘hidden hunger’ about 30 million of the country’s 150 million people could go hungry very soon. The cascading effect will be on the boarding India- one of the largest rice producing/exporting country. But, India has stopped exporting rice on the face of crisis. A large migration from the Bangladesh is on the sleeve which will trigger intense competition in boarding Assam, West Bengal and Orissa. The IFIs especially ADB has so far invested $ 1.6 billion in 51 agriculture and natural resource projects till 2006 in Bangladesh. However, the major loan has gone to energy sector, finance, transport and communication, and industry and trade. Even, with other development partners the ADB has been guiding the development plan of Bangladesh. But the country is facing severe food crisis. The ADB in general has reduced its portfolio lending on agriculture and natural resource management since 2004. In 2007, while the total lending of ADB has set the history of $ 10.2 billion, the agriculture sector received merely $146 million as loan and $ 22.3 million as grants! Although the ADB has announced to increase its lending upto $ 2 billion a year on agriculture during the 41st Annual Governing body Meeting in Madrid, it’s too little and too late. 7.
The shortsighted visions, truncate projects and programs designing have actually created the present situation. The development assistances beyond countries couple with national design have been focusing on more agriculture production through developing irrigation management. Even, they have failed to arrest or reduce the number of hungry stomach. The impacts of climate change have already reduced the production of grains. Again, to mitigate the emissions, the drive for agro-fuel or bio-fuel has transformed the traditional crop land into cash crop. At the end, the production of staple grain has been decreasing but the cash crop is increasing with the profitable employment/wages. To feed the hungry, the frontier science-biotechnology- will be placed hurriedly and the owner of that technology will call the deal. The crisis is not as simple as it looks. It’s more serious than immediate orchestrated world crisis. The responsibility of countries and development institutions is to feed the hungry without playing politics.