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Is there really a world food crisis?
Yes, 100 million people hungry, 800 million more living in extreme poverty. Especially women, children and the sick and elderly are dying, 25000 a day. That is the whole population of London and Paris in a year. All of the Dutch famished and dead in less than two years.
At the Food Aid Organisation in Rome forty World leaders arrive at the invitation of the Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-Moon. Speech after speech they speak about the causes of this crisis. Insufficient investment in agriculture, already for years. High oil prices. Unfair trade allowing rich countries to dump subsidized high-oil-intensive agricultural products in developing countries.
Western tariff walls, monopolistic practice from agrarian multinationals, financial speculation, more meat-eating middle classes in China and India. And the farming for biofuel instead of food. They agree about everything except that: president Lula from Brazil claims that not a millimeter of rainforest is lost, nor a single bite of food less available because of bio-fuel production. According to him it provides work, makes profit and benefits the environment. He compares it with ‘good cholesterol’ instead of the ‘bad cholesterol’ of the protectionism of the west.
Emotions and figures fly across the table, and each of the speakers could be employed by Oxfam. Why then don’t we find the 15 billion dollars needed to send each child and person to bed with a full stomach – and the second 15 billion needed to invest in sustainable local agriculture? “Yes indeed”, I foam in my small NGO corner of the enormous conference hall (where no more then 80 people were allowed in with great difficulty), “Yes, indeed leaders, you are right, so why don’t you do something about this?” In the last six months America has passed a farm bill of nearly ten times the 30 billion needed – to subsidise their own megafarmers. Forty times this amount is spent on arms yearly. Europe arranges EPA's (European Partnership agreements) with African countries to open their boarders for our trade, or they’ll get less aid. Europe has spent 75 billion less in aid this year than promised. And is going to spend less on the millennium goals in the coming years, more on transport: for European contractors? And the worst fact: since December 2007 the European and American Reserve Banks have magically found 1000 billion dollars to ‘stabilise the financial world’. And then we can’t find one-thirtieth of that for the food crisis?
‘Boys’, I think angrily as I sit there, ‘Stop talking and solve it!’, because they are nearly all gentlemen speaking here whilst food production in the world is mainly in the hands of women. Mostly bare hands: only 5% of the measly 3.4 billion invested in agriculture in developing countries reaches women. When they can’t repay their micro-credit loans or can’t bear to hear the cries of their starving children any longer, they commit suicide. Often by taking pesticides. In the last five years more than 200.000 of these suicides were recorded in India. Because of the cheap cotton dumping.
I speak very politely about the mobilization in many countries to Mr. Ban when we get a quarter of an hour of his time. We hand over 340.000 support emails that Avaaz and GCAP (Global Call for Action against Poverty) received in the last weeks: symbolically placed in a grain bag. We speak of the 43 million people who stood up against poverty last October, and Ban Ki-Moon immediately puts on the white band I give him. He says explicitly that he agrees with me strengthening the role of women is part of the solution of the world food crisis.
So shall we finally really start supporting women? With money, not just words?
