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10/04/2005:

"The Myth - Scarcity. The Reality- There is Enough Food"

The world today produces enough grain alone to provide every human being on the planet with 3,500 calories a day.' That's enough to make most people fat! And this estimate does not even count many other commonly eaten foods-vegetables, beans, nuts, root crops, fruits, grass-fed meats, and fish. In fact, if all foods are considered together, enough is available to provide at least 4.3 pounds of food per person a day. That includes two and half pounds of grain, beans and nuts, about a pound of fruits and vegetables, and nearly another pound of meat, milk and eggs.

Abundance, not scarcity, best describes the supply of food in the world today. Increases in food production during the past 35 years have outstripped the world's unprecedented population growth by about 16 percent. Indeed, mountains of unsold grain on world markets have pushed prices strongly downward over the past three and a half decades. Grain prices rose briefly during the early 1990s, as bad weather coincided with policies geared toward reducing overproduction, but still remained well below the highs observed in the early sixties and mid-seventies.

All well and good for the global picture, you might be thinking, but doesn't such a broad stroke tell us little? Aren't most of the world's hungry living in countries with food shortages - countries in Latin America, in Asia, and especially in Africa?

Hunger in the face of ample food is all the more shocking in the Third World. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, gains in food production since 1950 have kept ahead of population growth in every region except Africa. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) found in a 1997 study that 78% of all malnourished children under five in the developing world live in countries with food surpluses.

Thus, even most "hungry countries have enough food for all their people right now. This finding turns out to be true using official statistics even though experts warn us that newly modernizing societies invariably underestimate farm production-just as a century ago at least a third of the U.S. wheat crop went uncounted. Moreover, many nations can't realize their full food production potential because of the gross inefficiencies caused by inequitable ownership of resources.

Finally, many of the countries in which hunger is rampant export much more in agricultural goods than they import. Northern countries are the main food importers, their purchases representing 71.2 percent of the total value of food items imported in the world in 1992. Imports by the 30 lowest-income countries, on the other hand, accounted for only 5.2 percent of all international commerce in food and farm commodities.
foodfirst institute

PRIVATE INVESTMENT MAKES AFRICA POOR
Anyone remember the pronouncements by Blair and Brown, Bono and Sir Bob, earlier this year about saving Africa? The white knights riding to the rescue were specifically named as the forces of private enterprise, as part of a package of measures that included fine-sounding phrases about aid, trade and 'better governance'. It is only weeks later, yet this September those illusions seem so shallow -- with little aid, no real debt 'relief', and many NGOs roundly condemning the G8/Live8 deals as enforcing further economic restructuring on poor countries.
African countries have tried in the 1990s to attract foreign investment, by de-regulating and privatising their economies. Now a UN report has been published that shows how private investment and multinational corporations can be a curse, rather than a blessing, for Africa.
The report, 'Economic Development in Africa, Rethinking the Role of Foreign Direct Investment', by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), September 2005, is highly critical of poverty reduction solutions that rely on attracting foreign direct investment (FDI). Such investment is usually the result of corporate involvement in a particular area, and the report says that 'expectations have been raised that by creating jobs, transferring new technologies and building linkages with the rest of the economy, FDI will directly address the continent´s poverty challenge'.
On the contrary, FDI can sometimes mean that a country is getting poorer -- a privatisation of a state owned company, for example, would show a net 'increase' in investment, but not necessarily result in an improved service or more jobs. 'M&As [mergers and acquisitions] have accounted for a very high percentage of inflows in particular years, often as the outcome of privatization programmes.' And where FDI has occured, it has often been isolated in 'enclaves' and oriented towards export industries. This could mean a company investing heavily in a single mine or cash crop plantation, but with little benefit to the rest of the country outside this small area of high investment. In addition, profits from this small enclave will often mostly flow overseas, back to the corporation's home market, rather than circulating within the country or Africa itself. UNCTAD states that a balanced approach 'will recognize that the inflow of capital from FDI may be a benefit, but that the subsequent outflow of profits earned on the investment may be so high as to make it a very substantial cost... Where the firm does not create new assets, but merely takes over existing locally owned ones, the net benefits may be particularly hard to discern.' (pp 25-26)