[THS] Counterpunch: Food Riots are Coming to the U.S.

[Peter Webster]

http://www.counterpunch.org/kampmark05082008.html

May 8, 2008
The Morality of the Stomach
Food Riots are Coming to the U.S.

By BINOY KAMPMARK

    "I don’t want to alarm anybody, but maybe it’s time for Americans to
start stockpiling food.  No this is not a drill."

    --Brett Arends

There is a time for food, and a time for ethical appraisals.  This was the
case even before Bertolt Brecht gave life to that expression in Die
Driegroschen Oper.  The time for a reasoned, coherent understanding for
the growing food crisis is not just overdue, but seemingly past.  Robert
Zoellick of the World Bank, an organization often dedicated to flouting,
rather than achieving its claimed goal of poverty reduction, stated the
problem in Davos in January this year.  ‘Hunger and malnutrition are the
forgotten Millennium Development Goal.’

Global food prices have gone through the roof, terrifying the 3 billion or so
people who live off less than $2 a day.   This should terrify everybody else.
In November, the UN Food and Agricultural Organization reported that food
prices had suffered a 18 percent inflation in China, 13 percent in Indonesia
and Pakistan, and 10 percent or more in Latin America, Russia and India.
The devil in the detail is even more distressing: a doubling in the price of
wheat, a twenty percent increase in the price of rice, an increase by half in
maize prices.

Finger pointing is not always instructive.   In this case, it may be.  The US
and various European countries are moving food crops into the bio-fuel
business, itself an environmentally unsound business.  This, in addition to
encouraging developing countries to not merely ‘liberalize’ their agricultural
sectors, but specialize in exporting specific cash crops (cotton, cocoa), has
done wonders to precipitate the shortages.  Consumption in developing
economies, added to the vicissitudes of climate change, water availability,
and rising fertilizer costs, are others.

Political stability is being undermined.  Food shortages are proving endemic.
Food riots are becoming common.  Riots have been sparked in Cameroon,
Egypt, Burkina Faso, Uzbekistan and Yemen.  There have been riots over
spiraling grain prices in Mauritania and Senegal. In Mexico City, mass
protests were sparked by a price hike in tortillas.  In Haiti, biscuits are being
made from a mud compound.  The Somali capital Mogadishu bore witness
to the deaths of five people.

Governments, indifferent and incautious to the demands of a hungry
public, have already fallen victim to the food crisis.  Prime Minister Jacques
Edouard Alexis was dismissed by a senate vote in Haiti after skirmishes
between UN forces and protesters.  The UN commander Major General
Carlos Alberto Dos Santos Cruz urged calm amidst the carnage. ‘It is
important for the people to have a peaceful life in Haiti,’ he claimed in April
2008.   The message then: be peaceful on an empty stomach.

The Bush administration, so often in arrears on the relief front, has
earmarked some 770 million dollars or so in funds dealing with the problem.
There is one glaring hitch: the money would only start flowing in 2009.
‘There is definitely a lag time when it comes to assistance,’ states the senior
manager of the Foreign Aid Reform Project at the Brookings Institute, Noam
Unger.

More troubling is the critique offered of the crisis by officials within the
administration.   US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, at the Peace Corps
conference held at the end of April, targeted various culprits.   The
audience barely stirred at some of the explanations: distribution, oil prices,
and the ‘alternate fuels effort’.  They duly woke up when Rice moved on to
targeting the export strategies of various countries – India and China
foremost amongst them.  ‘We obviously have to look at places where
production seems to be declining and declining to the point that people are
actually putting export caps on the amount of food.’

The problem, for Rice, is rising food consumption.   Improved diets within
China and India are bothering free market fundamentalists who insist that
export caps stifle trade.  According to this rationale, Indians are far better
off buying the rice from the global market than eating their own in times of
crisis.   How silly of them to ensure a domestic supply first before shipping
off the rest for the global market.  Rice is crying foul at such protectionist
deviancy, will ‘have a look at it’ and take the matter to the World Trade
Organization.

Members of the American public are not so sure.  A narrative of catastrophe
is gradually building – stockpile or perish.  The Wall Street Journal (April 25)
was one of the first to issue the clarion call: ‘Start Hoarding Food
Americans!’ The paper had various suggestions.  Stock up on some
products – dried pasta, rice, cereals, canned products.  Buy them all in bulk
to save.  Sit the children down give them a good talking to – no, not about
the birds and the bees, but about ‘how our generation and the two behind
it, screwed their world into a death spiral through greed and predatory
capitalism.’

Solutions suggested by such economists as Jeffrey Sachs, somewhat patchy
yet desperately needed, are forthcoming: allow easier access for sub-
Saharan African farmers to fertilizers; reduce the amount of crops going
into bio-fuel development; shore-up climate change policies.

Sachs, in his work Common Wealth, also advocates the abolition of states in
the face of a crowded planet.  But it was state regimes besotted by
neoliberal economics that brought us here.  They can take us back and
remedy the damage. Abolishing them would simply absolve their regimes.

In the meantime, the US and some countries in the West may have to
brace themselves for a starving army guided by the morality of the
stomach.  The food riots are coming.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College,
University of Cambridge.  He can be reached at: bkampmark at gmail.com