The Perfect Storm: Heading towards a World Wide Food Crisis.

School feeding programme, Kenya (Courtesy WFP, Thierry Geenen)

Village in Angola (Courtesy WFP, Tom Haskell)

Fetching water in Eritrea (Courtesy WFP, Evelyn Hockstein)

The world is heading towards a global food crisis. A number of factors contribute to what could be described as 'A Perfect Storm':

The price of fuel increased dramatically in the past years, thus the price of food production and transport increased dramatically.

For the first time in many years, the world's food production went into a deficit last year, pushing the price of the commodities, based on a supply and demand dynamic, even up higher.

Fast growing economies like China pulls people away from rural areas, causing a loss of farm land. The country lost an average of 1.23 million hectares of farmland annually in the past years. China is now looking for foreign farms because the nation can't feed its 1.3 billion people.

The increased food prices hit the most vulnerable countries the hardest: where people used to survive on the 'edge': Their income is no longer sufficient to feed themselves. International wheat prices in January 2008 were 83 percent higher than a year earlier. Protests turned riots in Bangladesh, Mozambique and Burkina Faso last week, will be the first in a long row, showing people simply can not cope with the price increases.

Aid agencies, traditionally able to feed the most vulnerable, are scrambling too: as the fuel prices increased, so did the cost to transport food aid. Add to that the increased price of the food commodities, for the same aid-dollar, less food is being delivered. This will have donors ask questions about the effectiveness of their aid-dollar invested in food aid, and might cause a trend where donors move away from food aid.

The outlook is not good: Because of the increased fuel prices, and the recent worldwide rally about global warming, the price of biofuel has gone up, having many farmers move away from food production, to a more lucrative biofuel production. The U.S. is now using more corn for the production of ethanol than the entire food crop in Canada.
This takes away a lot of resources (land, assets, production and distribution capacity) from the food production, not only in the West, but even in food deficit countries in Africa and Asia. Less food being produced once again pushes the prices even higher.

The global warming has shifted weather patterns, causing more natural disasters: tropical cyclones causing vast flooding hit Central America, Africa and Asia harder than ever before. Winters are harsher and longer in Central Asia. Dry spells bring longer periods of droughts cause crops to dry up, and cattle to die.

More demand for food, less production, higher prices. A vicious circle, felt the hardest in developing countries. How can this cycle be broken?

Author's note:
I have updated the data and some facts of this article in: The Global Food Crisis: a Perfect Storm.
I also published different articles on the food crisis on The Road to the Horizon.

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