Food crisis sidelined

Worldwide economic fallout diverts attention from persisting desperate plight.

IN THE widening financial turmoil, the food crisis that hogged the headlines earlier this year may be pushed to the back-burner.

Despite the initial reaction of world leaders to tackle the food crisis, the worldwide downward spiral of stock exchanges has diverted their attention. There is concern that resources allocated to address food shortages may be undercut by bailout packages for troubled corporations and the financial markets.

Rising food and transport costs kept Malaysia’s annual inflation high at 8.2% in September despite cuts in retail gasoline prices, according to government data released on Oct 24 this year.

In its latest policy brief, the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN-DESA) has warned that the crisis could be sidelined although it continues to pose a global humanitarian and development challenge even as food prices begin to fall.

It is generally concluded that the global food crisis is a culmination of factors: poor harvests due to drought, flooded rice fields, a decrease in agricultural land, the diversion of grains for biofuel production and escalating oil prices.

Although the price of petrol, which once pushed up the price of fertiliser and in turn the cost of food production and distribution, has dipped from its record high of US$200 (RM721) per barrel to US$50 (RM180) currently, the food crisis remains real, particularly for the poor.

In Malaysia, a group of concerned citizens has banded together to keep the spotlight on the crisis which it says affects the rural and marginalised communities most. The latter category involves vulnerable groups such as migrant workers, the disabled, elderly, single-parent families and indigenous people.

Forming the Joint Action Forum on Food Crisis (JAFFC), the group, spearheaded by social movement Aliran Kesedaran Negara (Aliran), hopes to inform parliamentarians of the effect of food crisis on their constituents, and suggests people-oriented solutions to the problem.

Recently, it held a one-day forum which gathered 120 participants, half of them grassroot communities and leaders. Stories of hunger, malnutrition and reduced purchasing power linked to rocketing food prices were shared.

A single mother with two children from Selayang, Selangor, told the forum that she can only afford the inferior quality rice and had been foregoing fish and chicken.

Youssouf Oomar: ‘The country’s high dependence on food imports has translated into higher food costs for a large proportion of the population.’

Another participant, a migrant worker from Bangladesh who is embroiled in a legal tussle over unpaid salary with his former employer and thus forbade from being employed by the law, said he skipped meals to lessen the burden on his fellow countrymen.

Opening the forum, UN acting resident coordinator for Malaysia Youssouf Oomar said Malaysia is not insulated from high global prices although it had benefited significantly from the surge in global commodity prices, in particular palm oil and rubber, since 2005.

“The country’s high dependence on food imports, for example, has translated into higher food costs for a large proportion of the population, particularly the urban poor and those in rural areas who are net purchasers of food.

“In the past, consumer price increases were offset by Government subsidies and price controls. The joint pressures of a food and energy price increase are already evident in costlier subsidies and import bills.”

Root cause

According to many social analysts, the food crisis is a product of unbridled globalisation policies that went awry.

In The Global Food Crisis: Hype and Reality, economist Rosario Bella Guzman says globalisation first came in the scheme of the Green Revolution in the 1970s where Third World countries were told to use high-yield varieties to increase productivity – which turned out to be “high-input varieties” since they increased the farmers’ usage of pesticides and fertilisers peddled by agro-chemical transnational corporations (TNCs).

The publication by the Pesticide Action Network Asia and the Pacific (PAN-AP) and People’s Coalition on Food Sovereignty (PCFS), further pointed out that productivity no doubt increased but it was at the expense of sustainability, with degraded soil fertility and a polluted environment due to heavy dependence on agro-chemicals that was the hallmark of the so-called revolution.

While profit of agro-chemical TNCs soared, farmers in developing countries were saddled with debts. To settle the debts, these countries were forced to open up the traditional sector to cheaper foreign agro-produce and capitals which favoured high-value or export crops that prioritised profits rather than local food needs.

Furthermore, while food shortages are happening in poor countries, giant agri-businesses and grain traders have increased their profits.

An important factor in the under-development of the agriculture sector in developing countries is linked to land ownership where landlessness remains prevalent and has worsened, with vast tracts of land still in the hands of landlords and corporations.

“According to the UN Hunger Task Force, 20% of the world’s hungry are direct agricultural producers who do not have their own land,” says Guzman, the executive editor of IBON Foundation Inc, an independent development institution based in the Philippines.

Over the last 40 years, 105 of 149 Third World countries have become net food importers, the number of rural poor (earning US$1 or RM3.60 a day) has remained at 2.6 billion and small farmers now comprise 80% of the world’s 845 million hungry, reports Guzman.

No protection

AS A son of a rice farmer in Kedah, the rice bowl of Malaysia, Aziz Man will be the first to tell you that there’s something not right with the country’s rice production.

A retired serviceman, the 59-year-old Kedahan said although rice was cultivated twice a year in the famed Kuala Muda plains, the largely agrarian society remains the fourth poorest in the country.

“Rice in the field is cheap but rice in the shop is expensive,” he said, pointing out the irony that while farmers do not get a good price for their harvest, their produce fetches a high price once gets to the shops.

The president of United Rural Citizens Association of Kedah said that over the years, the emphasis on food production has waned partly because of the authorities’ issuance of approved permits (APs) for the importing of rice.

“Rice production has been neglected,” he said. Aziz added that to supplement their income, padi farmers go to sea to fish. He reckoned the agriculture department could help boost food production and raise the living standard of the poor farmers if incentives are provided for the development of other economic activities like bee farming and freshwater fish cultivation that utilised submerged rice fields.

Another group of food producers, inshore fishermen, lament the lack of protection of fertile fishing grounds amid increasing focus on deep-sea fishing and aquaculture development.

Peninsular Inshore Fishermen Action Network (Jaring) president Jamaluddin Muhammad said traditional fisheries that had been sustainable all these years are collapsing around the country as the destruction of mangrove forests and uncontrolled trawling operations carried on unabated, threatening not only marine health and the livelihood of fishermen, but also a vital food security component – protein from sea produce.