OPINION> OP Rana
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OPINION> OP Rana
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Wasteland of profit and greed
By Op Rana (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-06-13 07:41
In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo The women in T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock may not know what they are talking about. But world leaders who met in Rome last week to resolve the global food crisis knew what they were driving at. The mess that agriculture is today is the result of the developed world's policy, the policy that puts profit above everything else. And it has come back to haunt it. The rich countries tried every trick up their sleeve to have their way at the Food and Agriculture Organization summit. Even before the Rome meeting, they were blaming countries like China and India for the crisis. It's true that more people in these countries can afford to buy more and better quality food today. But don't they produce most of the food they consume? "Yes", the West would say. But then, it would argue, they are consuming more, and have cut their exports to feed their own people. So is a cut in their exports actually responsible for the global food crisis? That's what the West would want us to believe. That brings us to the question: What has happened to food production in the developed countries? A large percentage of it now goes into making biofuels. To be honest, it's not only developed countries that are diverting grains and other food products into the making of ethanol. Many developing nations are doing so too. But the hunger for fuel is still very high in the developed world, though it never tires of paying lip service to the fight against climate change. That brings us to another question: Shouldn't the demand for fossil fuel decline when the world is producing more biofuels? On the contrary, the price of crude oil has shot through the roof, hovering above $130 a barrel, because of the "unprecedented high demand". All this becomes even more confusing if we take the Saudi Arabian government's comment into consideration. "The increase in (oil) prices isn't justified in terms of market fundamentals," it said a couple of days ago. In fact, it has called for a meeting "soon" with oil-producing and consuming nations to discuss how to deal with record prices. So what's the mechanism at work behind all this? Profit, undoubtedly. But don't expect the West to question the motive of the big oil companies. Instead, what it's bothered about is its consumers, the ones who can afford to pay an extra dollar or two to buy just a chunk of meat, when millions in the developing world survive on less than a dollar a day. But ask the rich countries to shelve their biofuel policies and all hell will break loose. How dare the poor and the wretched of the earth question the "time-tested development model" of the West ? Even the governments and farm lobbies in the rich countries know their biofuel policies have contributed the most to the food crisis, but accept they will never. Subsidies worth $11-12 billion for biofuels were used, say FAO officials, to divert 100 million tons of cereals from human consumption in 2006. Why? Because it would help fight climate change. Despite that the carbon footprint of the developed world shows no sign of decline. The WTO opened up the world market. It gave big players from the developed nations the license to dump their cheaper foodgrains, thanks to government subsidies, on the developing world. And then we have the World Bank, which in the past two decades helped put tens of thousands of farmers in the developing countries out of business. The environment is suffering because of carbon emissions. To cut such emissions, we need more eco-friendly fuel, which mostly comes from foodgrains. But if foodgrains are used to make biofuel, there is a food crisis. Have we entered a vicious circle? By all accounts, yes. And unless the big companies stop pretending and eschew their greed, we'll soon be staring into a wasteland where every month will be like April, the cruellest. E-mail: oprana@hotmail.com (China Daily 06/13/2008 page8) |
