Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
lightning lash that disrupted our sense of complacency and ahievement in regard
to global hunger. Prior to this event, a general sense had emerged that, at a glob-
al scale, hunger was to be associated with environmental disaster, civil and ethnic
conflicts, or the actions of despotic rulers. Our capacity to produce sufficient food as
a global community and the commitment of 'responsible' governments to meet the
goals documented in the Millennium Development Goals and the Universal Declar-
ation of Human Rights surely indicated that we were on the road to solving glob-
al hunger. In specific situations of need, aid and development interventions led by
individual nations provided an answer. Otherwise, new institutions like the World
Trade Organization (WTO) helped expand free trade, providing the central mehan-
ism for 'solving' world hunger. he outbreak of massive WTO protests in Seatle and
Cancun during the collapse of the most recent round of world trade talks was ini-
tially interpreted as evidence of failure of the ability of the world's nations to agree
on world trade policies, particularly around food. After 2008, the political courage
expressed as resistance to further trade liberalization became aligned with a wider
sense of the failure of market solutions to pressing issues like hunger.
It is worth noting that the upsurge in food prices and the fluctuating numbers
of hronically hungry, vacillating somewhere between 800,000,000 and 1,200,000,000
people, did not constitute a 'crisis'. Volatility and the tendency to spike in response
to certain market hanges are, ater all, normal and acceptable features of prices in
commodity markets. The reference to crisis only entered the dialogue when people
began to protest and threaten political stability. Already, in late 2007, the rumblings
of discontent over rising food prices surfaced as public protest in Uzbekistan and
Mauritania. A continued sharp rise in food commodity prices the following year
evoked similar protests in over 30 countries, ranging from Indonesia and Pakistan to
numerous African states and to Latin America and the Caribbean.
he most prominent of these events atracted greater international atention as
a result of the associated threats to the stability of governments and the sometimes
brutal actions that were employed to suppress the protests. Numerous international
experts, including those at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the Un-
ited Nations, and the World Bank, as well as independent sholars suh as Jefrey
Sahs, argued for a rapid response to the food crisis precisely because of its potential
to destabilize governments in the worst affected countries. Some governments re-
sponded to suh perceived threats with force. Protesters were arrested and jailed (for
example, in Morocco, Burkina Faso and Mauritania) and even killed (in Cameroon
