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Food crisis: a new normal?
July 26, 2012 / Jonathan M. White
GlobalPost
This article was posted on the Global Post. It can be read in full here.
GlobalPost: Droughts and crop destruction this summer are focusing attention on what is being called an urgent global food crisis. But you put out a report in April, months before the summer planting began, pointing out that, “over a billion people suffer from chronic hunger,” and that, “food production must double in the next twenty years to meet demand and stabilize food crisis.”
So what’s new about the current food shortage and how is it different from what you wrote about?
Jonathan White: What we discussed among the forty members of the experts group were the questions of commodity prices, of the energy and food market fitting new equilibrium levels that we’re expecting to be around for some time.
The drivers of this are very much the drought and climatic changes which, with the current crisis, seem to have now hit us in the United States, with an exceptionally severe drought this July. That is affecting the corn and soybean markets. Because the US is one of the largest exporters of those two commodities, it’s affecting the global price.
I would say that the current crisis isn’t necessarily new, but rather a continued trend: climate is impacting not just small holders in Africa but now impacting us at home.
GlobalPost: What about the effect of population? The global population continues to grow and now exceeds seven billion.
The more immediate cause is the drought in the US.
Jonathan White: More broadly, if we’re looking at the global trend, we are definitely seeing a combination of both supply side shocks—droughts and climatic changes like we’re seeing in the United States—and demand side shocks—the rising population in the emerging markets, and their diet shifting away from grains to livestock and meat. That’s putting further pressure on the production of food and land.
There are also policy issues, which get into the question of biofuels and export demands which have, in many ways, played a role in this global food crisis as well.
Image: USAID's Flickr account
