Читать книгу The Atlas of Food - Erik Millstone - Страница 10

For example, developing countries ask why it is necessary and acceptable for governments of industrialized countries to subsidize their farmers, while those same governments, and institutions they influence such as the World Bank, insist that the governments of developing countries should not subsidize their farmers. From the point of view of poor countries, current policies mean that the livelihoods of developing world farmers are undermined by cheap imports from industrialized countries, while those industrialized countries operate barriers to the importation of many agricultural products from developing countries. Those policies too often help to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Food policy issues concerning subsidies and trade rules are not just narrow technical considerations; they raise fundamental questions about how society is organized and how resources are shared or allocated. Important though techniques of food production, distribution and exchange are, the state of the current food system cannot be reduced to technical analyses alone. Sound, complex thinking about food requires multi-disciplinary, multi-perspective analysis. The persistence of global hunger is thus a political failure not just a technical challenge. Despite the fact that for much of the last 200 years food prices have, on average, declined, there have also been periods of considerable price volatility. They can be problematic, especially when accompanied by volatilities in supplies too, as has been the case since 2008. If significant food surpluses arise, they can result in sharp price reductions, which may adversely affect farm incomes and decisions about future investments, which in turn can lead to price rises in subsequent seasons and so to discontent amongst consumers, especially in the urban areas. One of the main reasons why governments of industrialized countries accepted responsibility for managing agricultural markets during the 20th century was to try to manage buffer stocks to stabilize prices and supplies. After the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1994, and the liberalization and globalization of agricultural markets, official interventions diminished, and most food commodity prices continued to fall. The goal of ever-lower prices has faltered. As we have argued earlier, this isn’t because of less production. In fact more grains, for instance, have been produced. So what’s going on? One factor is that as people get richer, they eat more meat and animal products. Half the world’s cereals are fed to animals, and animals use the nutrients in the grain less efficiently than humans would. Governments with economies reliant on road transport have desperately responded to rising oil prices by demanding more land to grow crops for biofuels. So animals and automobiles now compete with human mouths. Then, there is the slow inexorable pressure of climate change. And water stress. And growth of urban populations. And the role of speculators. This is indeed a complex food world. Hunger and poverty A core fact for today is that more food is currently produced on this planet than would be needed to feed everyone adequately, if it was shared equitably. Technologically speaking, the problems of food production has been solved, but political, economic and social forces result in severely skewed patterns of production, distribution and consumption. To put it starkly, the world lacks food justice. Hunger is not simply a technological problem, and technological changes can create problems as well as solutions. Particular caution is needed when transferring technology from one society to another, especially from wealthy countries to poor countries. Crop varieties and production methods that require relatively high-priced industrial inputs (fertilizers,

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