An executive of the South African corporation, Sasol, has stated in a TV interview that his company can set up facilities to convert coal to liquid fuel by the Fischer-Tropisch process for any state or region in the USA that has coal deposits that they would like to exploit. Governor Brian Schweitzer, did you hear that?
It’s the Stupid Politics
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Policymakers in both countries are addressing these land issues. Beijing has issued new directives to bolster farmers' tenure rights, and India plans to give its poorest 18 million households tennis-court-size garden plots to buffer them from spiking grain prices.
It's not only subsidized food that feeds the hunger crisis. The average incomes in poor agricultural regions are undercut by America's cotton subsidies, by Europe's phony opening of its sugar market (only to cheap unrefined sugar) and by the U.S. and European practice of "tariff escalation" on coffee. The latter raises tariffs depending on how fully coffee growing nations process their beans. "The more value they add by grinding, packaging it, branding it and doing everything else they teach in business school, the higher the tariff," says Moore. Now these policies are raising the vulnerability of nations like Colombia and Egypt to famine.
So is the boom in biofuels. Western farm lobbyists have embraced corn ethanol (and other biofuels such as rape-seed biodiesel) as a new way to gobble up excess production and justify lavish farm subsidies. The result has been a vast shift of land into energy crops (15 percent of arable land in Germany and France, and some 20 percent of America's corn production). Prosterman warns that "we need to close the subsidy spigot, otherwise we won't be feeding 15 to 20 percent of our corn to cars, but two or three times that amount. I shudder to think what that would do to food availability worldwide."
Agronomists argue that the planet is not even close to being tapped out on spare food growing capacity to nourish an expanding population. And economists say higher prices could be the wake-up call that compels politicians to create the right incentives for farmers to meet that potential. They need to cut the red tape, knock down the trade barriers and create conditions in which investments in agriculture flow to the areas that need it most. In one promising development, the food-price crisis has led African and other poor countries to all but drop import tariffs among themselves, which should boost production. And in recent years the EU has begun slashing its highly destructive export subsidies from a high of €15 billion in the 1990s to less than €3 billion last year (though they still refuse to abolish many of their highest tariffs). To solve the food crisis, a much more profound attitude shift will be needed. As hundreds of thousands of tons of warehouse rice sit in bins in Japan, it's a change that can't come too soon.
With Rod Nordland in Rome, Akiko Kashiwagi in Tokyo and Chris Yabes in Negros
© 2008
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