Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
proponents including Paul Ehrlih of Stanford University and Lester Brown of the
World Resources Institute.
Several food systems experts and organizations also emphasized the role of sup-
ply side effects on food availability and prices. In some cases, this argument coin-
cided with concerns about global climate hange as extreme weather events in Aus-
tralia, Russia and elsewhere reduced the harvest of staple grains. Others, including
Julian Cribb (2010), saw evidence that the lak of investment in agricultural science
had resulted in diminishing productivity gains and increased environmental degrad-
ation. The World Bank and the IMF, meanwhile, promised greater investment em-
phasis on agricultural infrastructure in developing countries as a means to encour-
age increased production through access to markets. Lead economists did, however,
aknowledge that it would be naive to expect an instantaneous response to, and be-
neit from, suh policies.
Later explanations of the food crisis accounted for the diverse factors distorting
food commodity prices as a perfect storm; in other words, the crisis was not so muh
the result of a single disrupting influence but rather, a result of the compounding
effects of coincidental factors. Early references to a perfect storm came from those
faced with disgruntled populations suh as President Elías Antonio Saca of El Sal-
vador. The metaphor was soon taken up by representatives of international organiz-
ations (including the UN World Food Programme) in order to emphasize the gravity
of the situation and the improbability of a simple and fast resolution. The perfect
storm metaphor implied, however, that the global food system functions well un-
der normal conditions and that the real failure during the crisis was the unfortunate
and ill-timed simultaneous pressures on food commodity supplies and prices. Thus,
rather than aknowledging a fundamental law in the global food system, the crisis
was seen as a situation that could be alleviated without revising existing approahes
to food security.
More recently, both the media, and global food system experts have begun to re-
assess the food crisis and its causes as an event with identifiable boundaries. These
analyses generally argue that one or more of the suspected causes of the crises may
have been overemphasized at the time. Some of these reassessments, for example
by the International Food Policy Researh Institute (IFPRI), refer to comparisons to
the earlier food crisis in 1972-74, resulting from a rapid increase in oil prices and
pressure on commodity stoks due to increased purhasing from the Soviet Union
and Eastern Europe. he general conclusion of suh analyses is that the contribut-
