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July 25, 2008

Peacemakers hear about global food crisis

Speaker says all people have right to affordable food

by Evan Silverstein
Presbyterian News Service

ORANGE, CA — As the grip of the international food crisis tightens, nearly 300 Presbyterian peacemakers meeting here this month heard the inconvenient truth about what’s keeping hundreds of millions of people hungry.

Anuradha Mittal

Over the last few decades the United States, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have used their leverage to impose devastating international trade policies on developing nations,  according to Anuradha Mittal, a renowned expert on trade, development, human rights and agriculture.

By requiring these countries to open up their agriculture markets to giant multinational companies and by persuading them to specialize in exportable cash crops, Washington, the IMF and the World Bank have created a downward spiral of poverty and injustice in the Third World, said Mittal, a keynote speaker at the 2008 Intergenerational Peacemaking Conference of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).

The native of India told those attending the four-day event, which concluded July 18, that “we can have no peace as long as there is hunger, and as long as there’s hunger there can be no justice.”

Mittal, the founder and executive director of the Oakland Institute, a policy think tank on social, economic and environmental issues, said the removal of tariff barriers — made possible by international trade agreements — has allowed the United States and a handful of other rich nations to capture Third World markets by dumping heavily subsidized commodities in developing countries.

This has destroyed the agricultural base and local food production of many developing nations. As a result, millions of Third World farmers have been put out of business and driven from their land, making their countries even more dependent on food imports.

In the 1970s developing countries were net food exporters with a food trade surplus of $1 billion. Since becoming net food importers that surplus was turned into an $11 billion deficit, Mittal said.

Countries that were once self-sustaining food producers have suddenly become food inefficient, she said.

Indonesia, a country that received the gold medal in 1985 from the Food and Agriculture Organization for achieving self-sufficiency in food, had become the largest recipient of food aid by the 1990s, she said.

“It’s not that Indonesian farmers have forgotten how to grow their own food,” Mittal said, “it’s because of the policies that have come from the World Bank and IMF, and the trade agreements that have destroyed the ability of the nation to feed its own people.”

In Cameroon lowering tariff protection to 25 percent increased poultry imports by about six-fold, while import surges wiped out 70 percent of Senegal’s poultry industry, Mittal said.

Reduction of rice tariffs from 100 to 20 percent in Ghana as a result of the structural adjustment policies enforced by the World Bank, increased rice imports from 250,000 tons in 1998 to 415,150 tons in 2003.

Mittal said the “liberalization” of agriculture has resulted in the dismantling of vital state-sponsored institutions that once assured fixed prices for farmers and consumers, leading to skyrocketing food prices and more starving people.

Public distribution systems such as life-sustaining ration card programs are disappearing in many developing countries, too.

Last year it was estimated that 854 million people in the developing world were hungry, Mittal said, while more than 36 million Americans were living in food-insecure households.  

Mittal’s homeland of India, according to the World Food Program, is home to nearly half the world’s hungry population with 350 million people considered food-insecure. The government acknowledges that in the last eight years 150,000 farmers in India have taken their own lives, according to Mittal.

The global food crisis is not just rooted in internal laws and treaties, she said. Rising fuel and fertilizer costs, increased use of bio-fuels and climate change have all played a role. The solutions to these problems are complex, too, but not out of the realm of possibility, she said.

But depending on the World Bank and IMF for solutions “is like giving a key to the bank robber and asking him to guard the bank,” Mittal said.

She asked those present, “Do we want another world than the one envisioned by the World Bank, the IMF, the World Trade Organization, Wal-Mart, Disney? Or do we want strong nations with the capacity and the ability to feed, clothe and shelter their people?”

Mittal said strong social safety nets and distribution systems must be put into place for the poor. She told the group that it’s time to demand unconditional aid to support government efforts in poor countries that have been paying loans for projects they didn’t ask for.

She said in the past when money has been distributed to Third World countries in the name of aid, it has been a political device aimed at controlling and dictating to them.

Mittal said it is time to give aid unconditionally.

“This is a shameful world,” Mittal said. “The [world’s wealthy] countries need to provide aid right away. This is not a time for negotiations. It is not a time to change regimes and bring democracy to other countries. It is a time to provide aid, and we need to move away from the free-market ideology. We need to provide policies based for Third World countries.”

Developed nations should help impacted countries develop their agricultural sectors to feed more of their own people and decrease their dependence on food imports, Mittal said.

The production and consumption of local crops raised by small, sustainable farms — instead of growing cash crops for Western markets — must be promoted, she said. And a country’s effort to manage stocks and pricing so as to limit the volatility of food prices must also be supported.

Mittal said to embrace these crucial policies, however, developed nations must stop worshiping the golden calf of the so-called free market and embrace, instead, the principle of food sovereignty.