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Everyday concerns of the population rarely reach the negotiating table, in part because the economic and social problems in conflict-ridden societies are extremely complex, involve many actors and can only be resolved in the long term.

So what happens when people are driven to kill one another for food? It’s a critical question to ask as the world faces a sudden and unexpected food price crisis that is threatening to plunge millions back into poverty.

The sharp spike in food prices this year has already generated violence. Food riots in parts of Africa and the Caribbean have created social and political instability. In rice-growing countries like India, Vietnam and Thailand, hoarding has begun with export bans already in place, creating inter-state friction.

Burma’s rice-growing capacity has been devastated by Cyclone Nargis, which will add to price pressures in the coming months.

This is largely a crisis born of inflation and other market factors rather than fundamental shortages. Prices for the benchmark Thai variety of rice, a food staple across much of Asia, have increased threefold in a year, reports the Asian Development Bank. Meat prices have risen by 60% in Bangladesh in the year ending in March, and by 45% in Cambodia and 30% in the Philippines.

With this sharp increase in the price of basic staples, people are already hoarding, stealing and fighting over scarce supplies. The World Food Programme calls it a “silent tsunami.”

The threat of conflict is real, both within societies where the numbers impoverished by higher grain prices is already high, and also between states as the trend towards commercial liberalisation and conglomeration is suddenly reversed and replaced by subsidies, price-fixing cartels and export curbs.

In Indonesia, retired general recently warned: “If students demonstrate it’s not a worry, but if hungry people take to the streets, now that’s dangerous.”

Hunger causes conflict when people feel they have nothing to lose and are willing to kill their neighbours over scarce resources. The peasant wars of the late 20th century in Central and South America and the wars that sprung from famine in Nigeria, Ethiopia and Sudan, are grim reminders of man’s most basic instinct, which is to fight to survive.

The trouble is that in terms of resolving conflict, we have come to rely less on material remedies and more on political artifice. Many of the internal conflicts that have been peacefully resolved in recent years only superficially addressed the material seeds of conflict. Peace agreements have been elite affairs where leaders of armed groups and governments reached an understanding on how to share power within a common state.

This approach is a sensible first step toward conflict resolution: by convincing the people inciting violence to lay down their arms, it becomes possible to start designing a wider range of policies addressing socio-economic issues.

However, typically, the socio-economic changes and the economic reconstruction and development the public was expecting trickled down slowly, if at all. Aceh remains one of the poorest parts of Indonesia, as does Mindanao in the southern Philippines - two areas of Southeast Asia where peace has been negotiated.

When hunger drives people into conflict, we might presume that peace-making will simply be a question of providing food. We would be mistaken. In fact, the experience of humanitarian aid agencies in the 1970s and ’80s in Africa was that food aid tends to fuel conflict, as the combatants seek to harness the supply of nutrition to the goals of war.

Experts tell us that farmers will eventually adjust the supply of food to cope with higher demand so that prices stabilise. More encouragingly, there are signs that decades of improving cooperation between states is stimulating a collective urge to resolve the crisis. The sharing of technology is key, says Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary-general. He believes that farmers in Africa could double food output in five to 10 years if rich countries partner them in a “Green Revolution” for a long-term solution to the continent’s food crisis.

But realistically, trade agreements and technological advances are slow-moving transformations.

In the meantime, officials in India warn that the food price crisis could plunge millions of people into poverty in a country that is already battling an internal Marxist insurgency that draws support from impoverished and landless peasants.

In Bangladesh, where the soaring cost price of staples has forced the marginally poor to give up meat and rice, there is a significantly increased risk of conflict in an already fractured polity.

The immediate challenge, therefore, is to prevent and resolve conflict arising from the food crisis. This places a significant burden on the international community to swiftly respond to outbreaks of violence.

But if people driven to war by hunger are less inclined to compromise, this makes the task of peace-making rather more challenging.

For one thing, conflict fuelled by hunger will be more widespread, exerting strain on international agencies involved in peace-keeping and humanitarian work. Food security is already fragile in many African countries and a protracted conflict tends to drift across borders, as we have seen in Sudan and Congo.

Peace-makers need to be more aware of, and recognise, the socio-economic roots of conflict. They should incorporate in peace agreements remedies for the population’s grievances and to enlist the international community’s support behind their implementation.

Such remedies should include pledges by leaders to address in a meaningful manner contentious issues such as land distribution, job creation, and racial and ethnic discrimination leading to socio-economic inequality.

The ethnic and religious wars of the last half of the 20th century have perhaps lulled us into a false sense of security.

We have grown accustomed to resolving conflict by forging political accommodation and compromise in situations where protagonists had much to lose materially if they kept on fighting.

But in a world where environmental and market pressures can treble the price of staple commodities in a matter of a few months, it is harder to find the grounds for compromise.

This calls for more effective negotiating skills, both domestically and internationally, bilaterally as well as multilaterally, to resolve these crises.

Markets must be kept open to assist with the flow of goods to crisis situations, and in affected countries solutions must be found that address both elite and popular grievances.

Tags: asian development bank, critical question, decades, everyday concerns, export curbs, Food, food crisis, food price, food prices, food riots, food staple, grain prices, hoarding, inter state, job, market factors, meat prices, nargis, price crisis, price pressures, retired general, signs, ups, variety of rice, world food programme

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Around the globe, people are protesting and governments are responding with often counterproductive controls on prices and exports - a new politics of scarcity in which ensuring food supplies is becoming a major challenge for the 21st century.
Plundered by severe weather in producing countries and by a boom in demand from fast-developing nations, the world%26#39;s wheat stocks are at 30-year lows. Grain prices have been on the rise for five years, ending decades of cheap food.
Drought, a declining dollar, a shift of investment money into commodities and use of farm land to grow fuel have all contributed to food woes. But population growth and the growing wealth of China and other emerging countries are likely to be more enduring factors.
World population is set to hit 9 billion by 2050, and most of the extra 2.5 billion people will live in the developing world. It is in these countries that the population is demanding dairy and meat, which require more land to produce.
%26quot;This is an additional setback for the world economy, at a time when we are already going through major turbulence. But the biggest drama is the impact of higher food prices on the poor,%26quot; Angel Gurria, head of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD, told Reuters.
In Gurria%26#39;s native Mexico, tens of thousands took to the streets last year over the cost of tortillas, a national staple whose price rocketed in tandem with the price of corn.
Global food prices, based on United Nations records, rose 35 per cent in the year to the end of January, markedly accelerating an upturn that began, gently at first, in 2002. Since then, prices have risen 65 percent.
In 2007 alone, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation%26#39;s world food index, dairy prices rose nearly 80 per cent and grain 42 per cent.
%26quot;The recent rise in global food commodity prices is more than just a short-term blip,%26quot; British think tank Chatham House said in January. %26quot;Society will have to decide the value to be placed on food and how … market forces can be reconciled with domestic policy objectives.%26quot;
Many countries are already facing these choices.
After long opposition, Mexico%26#39;s government is considering lifting a ban on genetically modified crops, to allow its farmers to compete with the United States, where high-yield, genetically modified corn is the norm.
The European Union and parts of Africa have similar bans that could also be reconsidered.
A number of governments, including Egypt, Argentina, Kazakhstan, and China, have imposed restrictions to limit grain exports and keep more of their food at home.
This knee-jerk response to food emergencies can result in farmers producing less food and threatens to undermine years of effort to open up international trade.
%26quot;If one country after the other adopts a `starve-your-neighbour%26#39; policy, then eventually you trade smaller shares of total world production of agricultural products, and that in turn makes the prices more volatile,%26quot; said Joachim von Braun, director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington.
In Argentina, a government tax on grain led to a strike by farmers that disrupted grain exports.
Vietnam and India, both major rice exporters, announced further curbs on overseas sales on Friday, sending rice higher on US futures markets. Other food commodities retreated from record highs in recent days but analysts attributed that less to fundamentals and more to profit-taking by investors.
In the next decade, the price of corn could rise 27 per cent, oilseeds such as soybeans by 23 per cent and rice 9 per cent, according to tentative forecasts in February by the OECD and the UN
Waves of discontent are already starting to be felt. Violent protests hit Cameroon and Burkina Faso in February. Protesters rallied in Indonesia recently and media reported deaths by starvation. In the Philippines, fast-food chains were urged to cut rice portions to counter a surge in prices.
Last year, the central bank of Australia - where minds were focused by a two-year drought - asked whether the surge in commodity prices could be one of the few really big ones in world history, like those of the mid-1930s or the 1970s.
Real commodity prices remained flat or even fell during the rapid industrialisation of the United States and Germany in the early 20th century. But the industrialisation of China, with 1.3 billion people, is on a totally different scale, it noted.
%26quot;China%26#39;s population is proportionately much larger than the countries that industrialized in earlier periods and is almost double that of the current G7 nations combined,%26quot; the Australian central bank said.
The emergence of China%26#39;s middle class is adding hugely to demand for not just basic commodities like corn, soybeans and wheat, but also for meat, milk and other high-protein foods.
The Chinese, whose rise began in earnest in 2001, ate just 20kg of meat per capita in 1985. They now eat 50kg a year.
Each pound of beef takes about seven pounds of grain to produce, which means land that could be used to grow food for humans is being diverted to growing animal feed.
As the West seeks to tackle the risk of global warming, a drive towards greener fuels is compounding the world%26#39;s food problems.
It is estimated that one in four bushels of corn from this year%26#39;s US corn crop will be diverted to make fuel ethanol.
%26quot;Turning food into fuel for cars is a major mistake on many fronts.%26quot; said Janet Larsen, director of research at the Earth Policy Institute, an environmental group based in Washington.
%26quot;One, we%26#39;re already seeing higher food prices in the American supermarket. Two, perhaps more serious from a global perspective, we%26#39;re seeing higher food prices in developing countries where it%26#39;s escalated as far as people rioting in the streets.%26quot;
Similarly, palm oil is at record prices because of demand to use it for biofuel, causing pain for low income families in Indonesia and Malaysia, where it is a staple.
But despite the rising criticism of biofuels, the US corn-fed ethanol industry enjoys wide political support because it boosts farmers, who suffered years of low prices, and that support is likely to continue.
John Bruton, the European Union%26#39;s Ambassador to the United States, predicts that the world faces 10 to 15 years of steep rises in food costs. And it is the poor in Africa and, increasingly, South East Asia, who will be most vulnerable.
The director of the UN World Food Programme, Josette Sheeran, is on a global tour in search of donations to fill a $US500 million ($NZ643.9 million) funding gap caused by the rising prices. America%26#39;s largest aid programme, Food for Peace, has seen its commodity prices jump 40 per cent and may have to curtail donations.
But aid and many policy options available to governments for helping the hungry distort markets and cause pain elsewhere in their economies, according to proponents of free markets.
%26quot;I was involved in a government that introduced food subsidies in Ireland and we had the devil%26#39;s own job to get rid of them,%26quot; said Bruton, who was Prime Minister of Ireland from 1994 to 1997.
Others trust that better fertilizers and higher-yielding crops - some of them genetically modified - will keep production in line with demand.
Bruce Babcock, an economist at Iowa State University, said the rising markets are a signal to farmers that they need to raise production.
%26quot;It%26#39;s actually the greatest time in the world to be a farmer around the world,%26quot; Babcock said. %26quot;We are going to see fairly substantial increases in production because farmers have never had such a large incentive to increase production.%26quot;
But others note that expensive seeds and fertilizers are out of reach of farmers in poor countries.
Around the beginning of the 19th Century, British political economist Thomas Malthus said population had the potential to grow much faster than food supply, a prediction that efficient farming consistently proved wrong. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, some are revisiting his predictions.

Tags: cars, decades, europe, Food, food price, food prices, grain prices, job, objective, s green, world food programme

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Agflation: the word does not exactly trip off the tongue, but its meaning is clear enough. Economists say we are moving into an era of permanently higher food prices.
For 30 years, the cost of the weekly family shop has been heading the other way. Due to intensive-farming techniques, cheap Third World production and more competitive distribution channels, food prices in real world dollars have dropped an astounding 75 per cent.
Households used to spend a third of their budgets on groceries. The latest Statistics New Zealand figures show it is now just 16%. The average weekly spend is $156 (with perhaps surprisingly nearly a quarter going on restaurant and takeaway meals).
Thank goodness food has been relatively cheap. With housing, power and, more recently, petrol all putting sudden strains on the family purse over the past few years, food has been one of the easiest areas for people to make economies. When money gets tight, you can always trade steaks for sausages, muesli for Weet-Bix, pastries for bread and jam.
But now we face agflation — agricultural inflation — with food prices taking off, too.
Worldwide over the past year — except, bizarrely, in drought-striken Australia — food prices have leapt ahead of ordinary inflation.
Rabobank agribusiness analyst Hayley Moynihan ticks off the list. In New Zealand, inflation overall ran at 3.2%, but food inflation was 5.4%. In Europe, it was 3.2% and 6%. The United States fared better at 4.3% and 4.7%. But developing nations really felt the squeeze. Food-price inflation in Brazil was 10% and in China — where pig disease sent pork prices silly — it reached 18%.
As Kiwis, we certainly know all about last year%26#39;s sudden sharp hike in milk prices. Our farmers talk of %26quot;white oil%26quot;. The rest of us are complaining about paying $15 for the family block of cheddar last week, $16 this week. The official figures from Statistics New Zealand are that milk rose 16% in 2007, cheese 37%.
However, what has escaped the attention of many is that grain prices have been soaring, too. Lincoln University agribusiness professor Keith Woodford says that in the past few months, every kind of planted crop, from wheat to rice to soy beans, has shot up by 30% to 50%. So expect bread, pasta, baked beans and other staples to be following dairy up the charts.
Woodford says the hit from butter and milk is most obvious because they are both perishables and raw ingredients. We see all the price rise almost immediately. With other products, the impact will be more insidious.
Icecream and biscuit price changes will lag because milk-powder suppliers are locked into long-term contracts and warehouses take time to empty.
The doubling in the price of wheat must hurt bread. Yet Woodford says there is only 20c worth of flour in a loaf, so the effect will be muted.
But on the other hand, he says that poultry and livestock are fattened on grain. Well, in New Zealand, the cows mostly eat grass. But grain-fed cattle overseas will push up global prices, and our local market rates will be dragged along with them.
Chicken and eggs certainly depend on grain. Poultry prices have already leapt 28% over the past year.
%26quot;Wheat prices are still going up almost every week internationally, so there are still a lot of flow-on effects to come through,%26quot; Woodford says.
The speed at which the global food economy is shifting gears has caught even industry experts off-guard.
In countries such as India, Vietnam, Argentina, Venezuela, Egypt and Russia, governments are being forced to bring in forms of price control.
Last month, 10,000 people took to the streets in the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, to protest soy bean price rises. Mexicans have been marching over the cost of their tortillas, Senegalese over rice, Indians over onions, Italians over pasta. Overnight, it has become a big political issue.
In the carpark of central Christchurch%26#39;s Pak %26#39;N Save, there is no sign of citizens ready to riot. Mildly perturbed seems the extent of it so far.
Piling the yellow bags into their boots, most customers reply that they have not needed to change their shopping habits. But closer questioning reveals some adjustments are already being made.
Debbie Swan, of Halswell, a young mother with three girls, says nappies have just dropped off her shopping list so now her supermarket budget of $200 a week goes a bit further, anyhow.
She is keen on a healthy diet so the children drink premium unhomogenised milk. Three cartons of Farmhouse poke out of a bag. Yet Swan confesses that she has just started buying supermarket-own-brand for cooking. The tweaks have started.
%26quot;My food bills have definitely gone up in the past year. There%26#39;s been a real bump,%26quot; Swan says.
Wynn Corby, a Waltham solo dad with a 13-year-old and 10-year-old, says petrol prices may have made him rethink long country trips, but he still dines on the same menu. The price hikes are yet to bite.
Pondering it though, Corby says some things have been moving out of reach for a while now. For instance, roast leg of lamb is special occasion stuff these days: %26quot;I mean paying $30 for one of those things that holds a sheep up!%26quot;
As the new era of agflation takes hold, many people may find items starting to fall off their shopping list, never to return.
Cutting back will be a blow to the middle-class ego. It is hard enough as it is walking past supermarket counters laden with smoked salmon, fancy chocolates and gold-medal wines.

You studiously look the other way while wondering who are all these people who can afford to buy such things?
But for the poorest in the community, the fast-rising price of basics is going to be more than a prick to their pride.
Across town, the City Mission food bank is opening its doors. Two Maori children haul their trolley to the serving hatch, no parents in sight. Even on tip-toes, the older one cannot quite make the counter.
They are handed white plastic bags bulging with donated boxes of Weet-Bix, toilet rolls, budget cans of beans — enough to see a family through three or four days. For those who want it, a barrow of rather wilted celery has just arrived from the Rolleston Prison gardens.
It is supposed to be a crisis service. But Christchurch has several food banks. Customers will do the rounds.
Christchurch City Missioner Michael Gorman says there is evidence the pressure is cranking up another notch.
%26quot;The demand is certainly not decreasing. For the first time I can remember at Christmas we had queues. People were waiting outside at 6am, scared we might run out I suppose.%26quot;
The food bank mainly used to serve the addicted and the afflicted — those really unable to cope with life.
Now, Gorman says, there is a whole new class of working poor. They have jobs. In fact they often have two or three. But the jobs are so unskilled, so badly paying, that after rent, heating and other immovables, there is too often no cash left to feed the family.
Lee-arna Niven stops to tell how bad it can be.
Niven says it has been a rough year for her anyway. Bills have got out of hand and she owes $120 a week to two different finance companies. However, she can remember a time when she was poor yet able to afford a roast.
More recently, the weekly budget stretched to a kilo of sausages, a kilo of saveloys, a kilo of mince. That did her and her two boys. Now meat is completely off the menu. And cheese has just followed: %26quot;It is not an option any more,%26quot; Niven says.
%26quot;Food has always been a big budgeting issue, but it%26#39;s different because the average benefit and average wage have not changed, yet the price of food has. The last year%26#39;s been the hardest ever.%26quot;.
Niven has taken to pouring the milk on her 14-year-old son%26#39;s cereal herself, to ensure it lasts. Fortunately, she says, bread and eggs have not increased in price too much yet.
When circumstances allow, Niven grows her own vegetables — a skill she picked up at a community garden. And she will pinch fruit off people%26#39;s trees rather than see it rot.
%26quot;It pees me off to see it all being wasted. So I%26#39;ll go round and raid a plum tree and freeze everything.%26quot;
There was a real low point for her over Christmas when she had $19 to last the week. Niven says she ended up not eating for four of the days.
The cost of food is what all her friends are talking about, she says.
And do not be surprised to see a sharp rise in shoplifting and petty crime. She knows teenagers from poor homes stealing because they have empty bellies. It is not a drug habit they are feeding. One acquaintance has just been up in court for nicking a couple of peaches and a nectarine worth 90c.
Gorman adds that he sees women putting up with toxic relationships simply because the man can put food on the table for her kids.
A gflation is going to place a new kind of strain on both budgets and society.
Winsome Parnell, a nutrition researcher at the University of Otago who has studied %26quot;food insecurity%26quot;, says the three obvious responses to rising food costs are to cut back in quality, cut back in quantity, or find cheaper substitute foods.
Not many of us will simply eat less. But we may decide to halve the size of our steaks or spread the butter more thinly. Others may completely rethink their menus, learning the benefits of %26quot;peasant cooking%26quot;.
Authentic Moroccan or Mexican recipes are healthy and tasty as well as cheap, featuring plenty of pulses, bean and in-season vegetables.
However, experience shows it is food quality which is most often sacrificed when dollars are tight. Perishables are the first to go because waste is expensive. Which means fruit and vegetables of course. Cheap fatty cuts and junk food creep on to the menu.
Perhaps everyone should be home baking and organic gardening, but that is not a realistic expectation, Parnell says.
So agflation means bad diets are only likely to get worse for most, with the obvious social consequences.
There is still the question of whether the current bout of agflation is just a blip or a harsh new fact of life. The same economists who did not see it coming might now be getting carried away about it marking some fundamental change.
After all, one of the points about food is that there is more scope for personal choice — ways to balance the budget — than with other kinds of household spending. And just as individual families can adjust, so global consumption and production patterns may also respond to what is cheap, what is expensive.
The grumbling has already started. We grow most of the stuff here — cheese and lamb is our birthright — so farmers should somehow be forced to sell it at traditional prices. And why do we have GST on food when Australia doesn%26#39;t?
But Lincoln%26#39;s Woodford says New Zealand stands out in the world for its lack of distorting agricultural subsidies and other forms of protectionism. A truly free market is what we are trying to urge on other nations, particularly the US and Europe.
That is the purpose of the still-stalled Doha trade talks. Ironically, it would make us wealthier and better able to afford the fine export-quality food we produce.
In recent years, this virtuous nakedness is why our farmers have been so squeezed by falling commodity prices. But now it is their turn to benefit, while consumers feel the pain.
If cheese blocks go to $20 and two litres of milk hits $5 in an election year — if they ever start shaking placards down at the carpark of Pak %26#39;N Save — then tunes might be changed. But in a life already complicated with many budget worries, agflation looks a new one to add to your list.

Tags: agricultural subsidies, cate, europe, fact of life, Food, food price, food prices, ford, grain prices, indians, job, zeal

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