Current Concerns

FOOD PRICES AROUND THE WORLD – both local and imported products – rose by nearly 40 percent in 2007, caused by a combination of factors that include the financial markets, environmental conditions, and policy decisions.

Booming Asian economies are leading to a heightened demand for all kinds of food, but in particular for meat and dairy products, which rely on an increased supply of grain for animal feed. Cereal stocks in 2007/08, especially those of wheat, are predicted to be at their lowest since the early 1980s.

Extreme weather conditions, including both droughts and floods, have affected both local food supplies and prices, and the global grain trade.

High oil prices mean higher transport costs, which clearly impacts on global trade, but also on local retail prices.

The increased demand for biofuels – in part a response to the need to combat climate change – is also a contributing factor, since it reduces the amount of grain available for food. Campaigners in Africa are highlighting a worrying trend towards the purchase of large areas of land by commercial companies intent on growing crops for fuel.

While higher food prices may have little impact on some sectors of society, for people who may need to spend as much as 70 percent of their income on food, they bring real hardship, and even starvation. Protests against the high cost of staple foods took place around the globe in 2007, and in some countries government action was taken to freeze prices.

Early in 2008, the World Food Programme warned that the sharp increase in the price of cereals was affecting its capacity to provide food aid for some of the world's most vulnerable people.

Feeding the World

MORE THAN ENOUGH FOOD is produced to feed everyone in the world, and yet more than 850 million people do not get enough food to lead active and healthy lives. ,, They are consuming too little protein and energy to sustain a healthy weight, and suffer from deficiencies in the composition of their diet that leave them vulnerable to disease. In 2005, the UN FAO estimated that the world's total production of cereals was about 2.2 billion tonnes. Divided equally between the 6.5 billion people in the world, that would give each person approximately 340 kilograms of cereal a year – sufficient to provide at least 2,000 calories of energy a day for everyone.

Most undernourished people live in countries where food is in chronically short supply because of war, natural disasters, poor food distribution, low productivity, or a number of these factors combined. What they all have in common is that they are poor. In wealthy countries, by contrast, the amount of food available is sufficient for people to be able to consume significantly more than the 2,500 calories recommended by nutritionists, even though the food they eat may result in the other extreme of poor nutrition – obesity.

Country averages hide wide disparities. In the fast-growing economies of Brazil, China, and India, the more prosperous citizens are switching to western-style diets, high in animal fats and sugars, while their poorest compatriots spend an ever-higher proportion of their household income on food, and still suffer from undernutrition.

The World Food Programme and other agencies aim to supply the most vulnerable people with basic foodstuffs, responding both to long-term needs and to emergency situations as they arise.

Unequal Distribution

CHRONIC UNDER-NUTRITION is not a consequence of overall scarcity, but of unequal access to land, technology, education and employment opportunities, coupled with a whole range of socio-economic and environmental factors. The world's population is unevenly distributed, as is the quantity of food produced, and there is a mismatch between the largest populations and the most productive agricultural land and farming methods.

Although the overall production of cereals has grown roughly in line with population increase, the regions where the largest strides have been made in terms of agricultural production are not those that have experienced the greatest increases in population. Productivity has improved substantially in South America and Asia in the last half century, but in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the need is greatest, the increase was not as marked, and in some parts productivity has declined. Climate change is likely to affect agriculture in many and complex ways, but current predictions show reduced outputs in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Food is redistributed around the globe both as trade and aid – and a mixture of both – but the redistribution is neither sufficient to solve the problem of under-nutrition nor desirable as a long-term solution. Improvements are needed in agricultural practices and in social structures so that more food can be produced and consumed where it is most needed. While technological change can raise agricultural productivity, if the technologies are too expensive for poor farmers they will make the well-off richer and the poor even poorer. Technological change without social change can therefore aggravate inequalities.

Predictions for further population growth vary, but even if the rate of increase continues to slow, as it has done since 1970, the number of people in the world is still likely to exceed 9 billion by 2050, with more than 60 percent of people living in cities.

Environmental Challenges

AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTIVITY has increased over the past 50 years, but the adverse environmental impacts of those changes have often not been included in commercial prices and so have been mostly tolerated or ignored. It is now clear that the...