The Big Fix by Hal Harvey & Justin Gillis

Author:Hal Harvey & Justin Gillis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2022-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

Feeding the World

Poor people all over the world were in an uproar. In Mexico City, marchers banged metal pots and pans in front of government buildings for days on end, theatrically turning the pots upside down to show they were empty. In Egypt, rioters burned cars and knocked out the windows of government buildings. In Haiti, the riots grew so fierce that the country’s limited hospital beds filled with injured people, and public anger forced senators to fire the prime minister and form a new government.

Riots or public protests erupted in at least thirty countries, and tensions escalated in dozens more. The cause of all this turmoil, starting in late 2007 and cresting in 2008, was a rapid global escalation in the price of the basic food commodities, including rice, wheat, and corn, on which poor people depend. Failed harvests in several major producing countries, caused or exacerbated by the intensifying heat waves that are characteristic of the climate crisis, was a major underlying reason for the price run-up. The United States is a large grain exporter, so an American policy of turning nearly a third of the country’s corn crop into ethanol for use in vehicles did not help. If we run a contest for grain between America’s SUV drivers and poor people living on the margin, guess who wins.

If governments had reacted wisely, the crisis might have been manageable, but they reacted foolishly. Panicked by the prospect of running out of food, some middle-income countries started closing their borders to grain exports, even as many poorer countries were desperately trying to get their hands on supplies. The result was a predictable chain reaction in which more and more countries effectively hoarded food within their borders, escalating a global price spiral. The spikes were felt only modestly by people in rich countries, where basic commodity prices represent only a small part of the cost of processed foods. But in countries where people spend the bulk of their income on a bit of grain to get their families through the next day, the result was chaos. Over those years, global hunger made its largest jump in decades.

The global financial crisis that followed later in 2008 and 2009 helped to drive prices back down, and several years of robust harvests refilled depleted global stocks. Yet the whole affair was replayed a few years later, in 2011, after a new round of failed harvests. Grain prices spiked even higher than they had in 2008. But this time, governments were better prepared, and financial experts worked behind the scenes to head off the panicky border closures of a few years earlier. The second crisis ebbed with less public anger than the first, though it was still hard on the world’s poor. In the years since, harvests have been good most years, and global commodity markets have been operating smoothly. Perilously low stockpiles have been rebuilt to a degree, and commodity prices are once again low enough that farmers in exporting countries are complaining about them.

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