Tag: food crisis

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Food crisis almost over, people starving as usual

Agriculture related press releases continue to start with a sentences like “The current crisis in world food prices…”. Take these three of yesterday’s posts on this blog: the above quote is from the article discussed in Great Expectations; we need induced mutations because: “The global nature of the food crisis is unprecedented”; and it is also a reason to go forth and grow halophytes: “There’s a real urgency to addressing the issue of rising food and fuel prices.”

Haven’t they noticed that the crisis is (almost) over? Supply is up and speculators are retracting. The first stories about complaining farmers are coming in. Perhaps I am missing the point of the long term trend of dearer oil (fertilizer) and climate change?

Either way, in a couple of months we’ll be back to business as usual. Cheap food, and,

every day, almost 16,000 children that die from hunger-related causes — one child every five seconds.

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Neocolonial land grab?

Sue Branford writes in The Guardian that:

China, South Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other nations have been buying and leasing huge quantities of foreign land for the production of food or biofuels.



A couple of days ago, Luigi mentioned in a footnote of a post on Malagasy coffee, that Daewoo is to lease 1.3 million ha in Madagascar. Apparently to produce maize. The Financial Times reported:

“It is totally undeveloped land which has been left untouched. And we will provide jobs for them by farming it, which is good for Madagascar,” said Mr Hong [of Dawoo]. The 1.3m hectares of leased land is almost half the African country’s current arable land of 2.5m hectares.

There might be some scope for agricultural expansion on the Malagasy high plateau, but 1.3 million ha of good arable land that is untouched? Except by the local population, of course.

Not quite, and not so fast, responded the government:

The contract (…) concerns only the facilitation of a land search. We are talking about a search for 100,000 hectares … It is only after this stage that the rest of the process will continue.

Grain has a report, and a Google notebook with clippings.

FAO’s Jacques Diouf talks about neo-colonialism. There is also this Guardian article on resentment in Laos. Expect more of that to come.