Sunday, January 4, 2009

Review of Global Food Crisis 2008

Perhaps we all know that 2008 is an era where Global food Crisis happens and therefore has created much of hunger and poverty in many areas around the globe. Yes, Food prices have been rising for a while. In some countries this has resulted in food riots and in the case of Haiti where food prices increased by 50-100%, the Prime Minister was forced out of office. Elsewhere people have been killed, and many more injured. While media reports have been concentrating on the immediate causes, the deeper issues and causes have not been discussed as much.

It is the new face of hunger. A perfect storm of food scarcity, global warming, rocketing oil prices and the world population explosion is plunging humanity into the biggest crisis of the 21st century by pushing up food prices and spreading hunger and poverty from rural areas into cities. Millions more of the world's most vulnerable people are facing starvation as food shortages loom and crop prices spiral ever upwards. And for the first time in history, the impact is spreading from the developing to the developed world.
Global Food Crisis: Has Spread during 2008 era

One of the obvious argument about the occurance of global food crisis is overpopulation. In the other hand, A lot of land has gone into producing products that could be considered unnecessary in their production (like tobacco, sugar, beef), and there is new fact that Some 80% of the world production is consumed by the wealthiest 20% on the world suggesting. An inequality in resource use due to social, economic and political reasons, and perhaps less because of Malthusian concerns about population sizes outstripping resource availability in most cases.

Beside of those arguments, there are some facts that become innediate factors of global food crisis, that is: Droughts in major wheat producing countries, Low, grain reserves, a doubling of per capita of meat consumption in developing countries, and the diversion of 5 % of the world cereals to agrofuels

In the other hand, many of richer nations has accused become the maker of food crisis. The dominance of the richer nations and companies in the internarional arena has had a tremendous impact on agriculture. which for many poor countries forms one of the main sources of income. A combination of unfair trade agreement, concentrated ownership of major food production, dominance (through control and influence in institutions such as the World Bank, IMF and the World Trade Organisation) has meant that poor countries have seen their ability to determine their own food security policies severely undermined.

The increase of poverty and inequality which fueled corruption making the proble even worse. Food dumping (aid) by wealth nations into poor countries, falling commodity prices, vast agricultural subsides in north America and Europe (outdoing the foreign aid they sent, many time over)have all combined to have various effects such as forcing farmers out of business and into city slums.
a new hope to prevent global food crisis in 2009

My beloved readers, This food crisis has worsening the poor condition especially in third world country, creating ineuality among nations. Hopefully it is become a reflection for us especially to do more attention of condition our environment. Perhaps it is not bring a great impact for us who live well, but it is become more danger and really influenced people who live in the povertu lines..

(Review from: globalissues.com, sundayherald.com, abc.net)

7 comments:

Grace said...

Hi Niar, this is another wonderful piece. How are you doing nowadays?

Tikno said...

As always, you write an interesting article!

Anonymous said...

Niar, I can assure you and am willing to lead you to books and information on the fact that there is plenty of food available to feed every single person and creature on this earth. The problem is that it does not reach those who need it most and if it does, they cannot afford to buy it. What really happens is on the way it all evaporates to greed and inhuman exploitation.

What we need to do is to address this problem. It is young people like you who can now take the responsibility to do so.

leo7_lion said...

Agree but sometimes government jsut has to do something about this =.=

Relax Max said...

Your blog is interesting. Good luck to you.

Jim Belshaw said...

Niar, I thought that you caught the issues well. For what it's worth, I think that some of the key things that we need to consider are:
1. Free up world trade in agricultural products. As part of this, reduce subsidies paid by wealthy countries, allow for freer imports.
2. Ensure that UN agencies buy local as much as possible. They are beginning to do this anyway.
3. Where possible, and its not always possible, instead of giving people food aid give them cash for work so that they can buy food.
4. Increase international cooperation in agricultural development.
5. Greater funding for public interest research to reduce the increasing dominance of agribusinesses.

Jim Belshaw said...

Hi Niar. A follow up that has absolutely nothing to do with this post! Where is Depok City?

I have added a long postscript to my message post, talking about UNEJ and Jember - http://belshaw.blogspot.com/2009/01/message-for-our-overseas-and-australian.html

How far out am I? To find that youe uni was UNEJ, mine UNE established an unexpected initial link!