Agribusiness Is the Problem, Not the Solution

By Jomo Kwame Sundaram

Cross-posted at Inter Press Service.

For two centuries, all too many discussions about hunger and resource scarcity has been haunted by the ghost of Parson Thomas Malthus. Malthus warned that rising populations would exhaust resources, especially those needed for food production. Exponential population growth would outstrip food output.

Humanity now faces a major challenge as global warming is expected to frustrate the production of enough food as the world population rises to 9.7 billion by 2050. Timothy Wise’s new book Eating Tomorrow: Agribusiness, Family Farmers, and the Battle for the Future of Food (New Press, New York, 2019) argues that most solutions currently put forward by government, philanthropic and private sector luminaries are misleading.

No Friendship in Trade

Unequal Exchange in the Global Coffee Economy

Sasha Breger Bush, Guest Blogger

The global coffee economy, a chain connecting different parts of the global division of coffee labor to one another, takes us downstream from the green coffees harvested in the field by farmers, through various traders and processors, to the cups of roasted coffee consumed by final consumers.

The diagram below illustrates how the global coffee economy operates and the severe inequalities that characterize it. International traders and roasters operate in a very uncompetitive market setting— they are monopolists. The six largest coffee trading companies control over 50% of the marketplace at the trading step along the coffee chain (Neumann Kaffee Gruppe from Germany and ED&F Man based in London are the largest international traders). The roasting stage of coffee production is even more concentrated, with only two companies (Nestle and Phillip Morris) controlling almost 50% of the market. Market power gives these modern-day robber barons influence over prices and other terms of trade, allowing them to place downward pressure on prices they pay to farmers, and upward pressure on the prices they charge to consumers.

Breger Bush 1

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Feeding the World: The Ultimate First-World Conceit

Timothy A. Wise

Since the food price spikes of 2007-8, global hands have been wringing over the question, how will we feed the world? Population keeps growing, food-producing resources like land and water become more scarce, climate change introduces a dramatic uncertainty.

The images are downright Malthusian. The urgent recommendation is to produce more food, quickly. It is the theme of this year’s World Food Prize.

The question is fundamentally flawed, as is the Malthusian panic. There is no “we” who feed the world. There are, mostly, hundreds of millions of small-scale farmers. And there is no abstract “world” out there needing to be fed. There are about one billion hungry people, nearly all in developing countries. The majority are some of those same small-scale farmers. The rest are poor because they are unemployed or underemployed.

Increasing the industrial production of agricultural commodities does almost nothing for these people. Oddly enough, it can even make them hungrier.

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Chicken Comes Home to Roost

Sunita Narain

What should I eat now? Is there nothing that is safe?” This is what I am asked every time the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) does a study on toxins in food. It is a fact that our food is becoming unhealthy—not because of deliberate adulteration but because we are choosing to produce it in unsafe ways. India is at the beginning of industrial food production focused on efficiency and profits, and not on consumer safety, so it still has a choice to get it right. Why should the country not exercise its right to food that secures livelihoods and nutrition?

This time CSE has looked at antibiotics in chicken. Its laboratory bought 70 samples of chicken from different markets across the National Capital Region. It analysed each animal for six antibiotics: oxytetracycline, chlortetracycline and doxycycline (class tetracyclines);enrofloxacin and ciprofloxacin (class fluoroquinolones) and neomycin, an aminoglycoside. All these antibiotics are critical for humans. These are the same medicines we are prescribed when we are taken ill. These are life-saving drugs.

Today we know antibiotic resistance is almost a health pandemic. It is said that humans are headed towards a post-antibiotic era, where these miracle medicines will not work. No new class of antibiotics has been discovered for the past 20-odd years, so what we have is what we should keep for critical treatment. It is well known that resistance is growing because of our overexposure to antibiotics. A drug is no longer effective for treatment when microbes become resistant to it.

But we do not realise that our overexposure to antibiotics is also growing because of the food we eat.

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Why is Calorie Intake Falling if Incomes are Rising in India?

Deepankar Basu and Amit Basole, Guest Bloggers

Deepankar Basu is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Amit Basole is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. This blog post summarizes the findings from their recent Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) working paper “Fueling Calorie Intake Decline: Household Level Evidence from Rural India.” The full paper is available here.

The Indian “Calorie Consumption Puzzle” has attracted a lot of attention recently. The puzzle is that average per capita calorie intake has been declining over the past few decades, even as real per capita expenditures and incomes have been rising. According to National Sample Survey (NSS) data, between 1983 and 2009-10, average inflation-adjusted monthly expenditure increased by 28% but calorie intake declined by 16% in rural India (Figure 1). Since, at any given point in time, calorie intake tends to increase with income, the Indian time trend is unexpected and puzzling.

Figure 1: Average real monthly per capita expenditure (MPCE) and calorie intake in rural India. Real MPCE is obtained by deflating nominal MPCE by the consumer price index for agricultural labourers (with 1986-87 as the base year). Source: Report 508 and 538 of the National Sample Survey Organization, India and authors’ calculation from unit-level data.

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