The Triple Storm - energetic, financial and food crisis

Food enough for everyone?

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) says we don't really have insufficient food in the planet although we're facing a serious crisis. This food crisis is related with several things: the population increase (countries like China or India now have a better quality of life and therefore, they consume another type of food); the growing use of the biofuel; the crude oil crisis... If there isn't a shortage of goods, certainly exists difficulty of acess to them!


By MARIANA GONCALVES PEREIRA
from Lisboa, PORTUGAL


Today, there are 862 million people suffering from hunger in the world! Is it because of the recourses shortage? The disagreement is old and it comes from the nineteenth century. While Thomas Malthus state that we didn't have enough recourses because the increase of the population was higher than the food increase, Karl Marx defended that there were enough recourses, they just were wrongly divided. Recently and in the context of the food crisis, the french magazine Politics said that a balanced distribution of all the cereals produced in the world would allow every person to consume 300 kg per year, when 200 kg are more than enough.

The actual food crisis works, unavoidably, as a heavy tax on the poor population. This triple storm (energetic, financial and food crisis) demands a deeply reflection about the global recourses.

For the human being the recourses represent his source of life and, therefore, he has the right of acess to them but also the responsibility of preserve them. This responsibility demands a horizontal vision about the recourses. This means that when it comes to preserving recourses, the worries can't be only on the ambiental departments, they need to be present in every motor of the world evolution. We're talking about an environmental ethics that only came up in the 70's.

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) says we don't really have insufficient food in the planet although we're facing a serious crisis. This food crisis is related with several things: the population increase (countries like China or India now have a better quality of life and therefore, they consume another type of food); the growing use of the biofuel; the crude oil crisis; and so on. If there isn't a shortage of goods, certainly exists difficulty of acess to them! This difficulty comes from the ones that are in the worst position to search this recourses.

So, who are the bad guys here? The speculators? The producers? The millions of people that everyday revolt themselves in the streets against hunger? That's subjective. But the numbers are a concret fact: between 2005 and 2008 the cereals prices raised 80% (says FAO); the violence related with food appeared at list in 14 countries and the United Nations says that in every fice second a child dies because of food privation.


(Published: 10.06.2008.)