Ethanol, poor harvests last year, the price of oil, and increased demand for meat. Fertilizers and pesticides are made from oil, so increased oil prices hurt poor nations most. Other sources say that it is also caused by “The World Bank want(ing) developing countries to introduce market reforms, including the abolition of protective tariffs, a move that often causes massive damage to local agriculture”, climate change, and food speculators.
Basically, stories about rice being rationed at Cosco are a joke, after you read that people in Haiti are eating MUD PIES. This is not a joke, they use a type of clay, add fat to it, and then eat it.
Here is where I get mad.
The US Defense budget is about $500 Billion a year. 2008 is estimated at over $600 Billion. These numbers are just planned budgets, not actual spending. We spend more than this.
The second highest defense budge in the world is China, at about $60 billion per year. Meanwhile “The United Nations estimates that the cost to end world hunger completely, along with diseases related to hunger and poverty, is about $195 billion a year.”
$195 billion a year would end world hunger completely?
So the US could cut its military spending by enough to wipe out world hunger, and still spend 6-7 times more than the number two military country in the world.
Actually, I am not a fan of just sending countries aid. Welfare only keeps people poor, and I don’t think the citizens of these countries just want hand outs - they want the tools and education to make it on their own. Contrary to popular belief not everyone in Africa welcomes the food we send them. To quote the article:
We can continue the endless cycle of need and dependency, or you can create jobs, develop indigenous capacity, and build a sustainable future.
Aid not only crowds out local entrepreneurship, it makes governments lazy and deprives countries of the incentive to build effective institutions. Public revenue derived from taxes makes governments directly responsible to their citizens. Free money builds white elephants and bloated bureaucracies, it being far easier to create new government jobs than implement policies to fight unemployment, especially when someone else is footing the bill.
Some Africans have even asked that the UN stop sending food to Africa.
Lets recap:
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Sending free food to poor nations only encourages corruption and laziness, and ensures the cycle of poverty and hunger continue.
- The US and other industrialized nations continue to send food to poor nations. These nations are still hungry though, people are still dying every day.
- The US alone could cut its military budget by 33% - think about this, just a 33% decrease - apply that money to distributing free food to poor nations, and end world hunger. Yet they do not, they send some food and aid, but continue to spend three times the money on its military than it would take to end world hunger. The US would still, after this decrease, be spending 6-7 times what China, the number two militarized nation in the world, spends on its military.
- “The World Bank wants developing countries to introduce market reforms, including the abolition of protective tariffs, a move that often causes massive damage to local agriculture.”
It would appear then, that if people in power really believed that free food would solve world hunger, that the US on its own could do so pretty easily. Yet we do not.
If the people in power know that sending $195 billion in free food per year would not really fix the problem, why do we continue to send smaller amounts of free food?
A case could be made that the industrialized world does not want too many of the poor countries to industrialize. Especially Africa. As noted above, the World Bank pushes reforms that cause huge problems for poor nations. This article in the NYTimes even shows how Malawi, a country in Africa started feeding its own people and even selling surplus food to other countries - they ignored the advice given to them by the World Bank, and US Economics ‘experts’. This article really proves that the US is purposely trying keep these nations poor, and starving. How? It states:
Over the past 20 years, the World Bank and some rich nations Malawi depends on for aid have periodically pressed this small, landlocked country to adhere to free market policies and cut back or eliminate fertilizer subsidies, even as the United States and Europe extensively subsidized their own farmers.
The US is planning on spending $288 billion on farm subsidies - yet we tell African nations not to subsidize their own farming. Malawi decides to go on its own and subsidize farming… and now they have so much food, they are exporting it.
Possibly this is not all planned. I would like to think so, actually. But the evidence is pretty strong. Sending free food is not helping, rich nations are counseling poor nations to use economic policies that they themselves do not use. The US could easily wipe out hunger if it truly felt that sending free food would help these countries.
In a time when oil is getting harder to find, maybe people in power understand that natural resources are limited, and the more countries become industrialized, the more we will have to share with the rest of the world. The US could not sustain its lifestyle if we did not import natural resources, and by keeping poor nations from industrializing, we can buy their natural resources and even claim that it helps their country - which it would, if many of the nations in Africa were not controlled by dictators, and overrun with corruption… which is coincidentally, promoted by the policy of sending them free food…
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Image via WikipediaAccording to Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, there are four reasons that food prices are rising, causing riots around the world. 
