Hand to Mouth

Who is benefiting from the high prices?
Many farmers are, and that's good news. But for us, half of the hunger we address in Africa, for example, [is experienced by] farmers who can't produce enough for their own families. So there's been a sense of giddiness in the world that the poor farmer's day has come … but there are indications that poor farmers have not been able to access this boom, mainly because of the high cost of doing farming. If you're not producing enough for your own family, you're not actually going to make any money from high food prices. You're going to get hurt when you go to market [to buy seed or fertilizer, for instance]. In many places these poor farmers are actually planting less now than they were a year ago. So in Kenya fertilizer has gone from 1,700 Kenyan shillings for a bag in December to 4,000 now. They can't afford the diesel to till; they can't afford the fertilizer or the seeds. We haven't done a systematic, global look at this, but early anecdotal evidence [suggests] a new concern.

How concerned are world leaders about the political ramifications of high food prices?
There is a growing awareness that we have a global challenge of fairly significant proportions … That leads to [another] concern: the actual availability of enough food. We've already had a couple of situations where it's been hard to secure food for our programs.

Is the distinction you're making here between food that can be bought at higher cost and your ability to secure food at any price?
WFP procures food in over 80 countries around the world. Half of our contributions are in cash; half are in-kind agricultural contributions. But even those are bought on open markets now. Even the U.S. contribution, which is given to us as wheat in a dollar amount, then has to be purchased on U.S. open markets. It has to be purchased here. But we're in a post-surplus world. It's not your grandmother's food aid, where we'd get a call saying, "We have a warehouse full of wheat. Do you have hungry people?" That era is done. WFP has been out of the surplus business for at least five years. In November the U.S. durum wheat supply for 2007-8 was already sold out. It was overbooked, done. If I get $300 million to buy wheat for Darfur [I have to ask], "Is there wheat to buy?" In the fall we were trying to buy wheat in Asia to produce biscuits for victims of the floods in North Korea. And for the first time in memory in our building, we couldn't initially find the wheat anywhere in Asia. It took a week or 10 days to identify enough wheat to produce the biscuits.

Looking forward, there's every prospect that oil prices will remain above $70 a barrel. Alternative fuels are being subsidized. Do you have a projection on where food prices will be a year from now?
I have seen no projections anywhere that over the next two or three years we'll see declining prices. In February we were told that prices had reached a platform, and then they went up another 20 percent for us. There are so many factors that determine this. Now a bad harvest could tip this in a very bad way.

To what extent are environmentalists and people like you getting together to think about a more holistic approach to environment and hunger issues?
We're in a world that is so interconnected that we can no longer look for solutions within silos of concern. Hunger and the environment and climate change and opportunity for growth are all interlinked, and you change one lever here and it impacts [another] over there.

Here in America people often don't get a sense of hunger unless they see pictures of starving kids. Is this an issue you face—that people do not really get the message until they see babies with distended bellies on their television screens?
Absolutely. The new face of hunger is angry riots around the world. And the new face of hunger is a quiet market change that undermines peoples' ability to buy basic needs. It's in this slum here and this village there. It's been very hard to put a face on this. Typically what we're seeing is that people who make two dollars or less a day are cutting out health care or education. Even at very abject poverty levels of two dollars a day, there's a little room before food starts being sacrificed. At one dollar a day we're seeing people giving up protein and vegetables. For people at less than 50 cents a day, if they were getting three helpings of a staple before, that may be down to two portions or one portion. If a child does not have adequate nutritional input at under two years old, that is something that has a lifetime impact.

© 2008