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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | World Food Crisis: Causes, Consequences and Solutions -C Saratchand

World Food Crisis: Causes, Consequences and Solutions -C Saratchand

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published Published on May 25, 2022   modified Modified on May 25, 2022

-Newsclick.in

The war is exacerbating the food crisis, but to end it, the United States must first realise no military solution to the conflict in Ukraine will bring about the defeat of Russia it seeks.

There is a world food crisis spanning the realms of production and distribution. According to the Global Report on Food Crises 2022, acute food insecurity afflicted approximately 193 million people in 2021. They were based in 53 countries/territories. This number was 40 million higher than those plagued by acute food insecurity in 2020. All this before the outbreak of the current armed hostilities in February 2022 in Ukraine, which has undoubtedly aggravated the world food crisis.

Before turning to the causes of this crisis, it may not be inapposite to review the working of the contemporary world food system. It has been argued that the elites of the developed countries, based principally in the temperate lands of the Global North, seek to exercise control over many primary commodities (crops and minerals). This is the case since most such primary commodities are not domestically available in the Global North.

These primary commodities are predominantly (but not exclusively) based in tropical and sub-tropical regions, home mostly to developing countries. This control involves a squeeze on the incomes of the working people, who release a greater volume of primary commodities to the developed world. Consequently, the working people in these countries are subject to chronic hunger, malnutrition and famine. However, this squeeze is not symmetrical across all segments of working people within or across developing countries.

As far as crops are concerned, this export to the developed countries often involves a shift of cultivable land use from food to non-food crops and the export of food crops at the expense of domestic food security. Developing countries where this shift has gone far enough end up dependent on food imports. This not only makes them vulnerable to volatility in the world market but also beholden to corporate agribusiness (and the elites of the developed countries more generally, especially through international finance, which controls much, though not all, of world trade in food and primary commodities.

During the centuries-long colonial period, this control of developed-country elites--the colonisers--over primary commodities resulted in the deaths of hundreds of millions of people in colonies and semi-colonies due to famines and epidemics exacerbated by such famines. The British colonial government squeezed the purchasing power of working people in India by prioritising the drain of wealth through the export of primary commodities. It largely ignored public investment in agriculture that could have been land-augmenting, and these played a principal role in such deaths. However, the promise of political decolonisation, inadequately realised during the dirigiste period, was soon belied by the neo-liberal project, which reinstated domestic food insecurity in many developing countries. It attenuated even the limited public support for agriculture put in place during the dirigiste period.

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Newsclick.in, 25 May, 2022, https://www.newsclick.in/World-Food-Crisis-Causes-Consequences-Solutions


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