Undernutrition and Overnutrition: Who is Feeding Whom?

Jennifer Clapp

We live in a world today where one billion people– that is one in every seven people on the planet – are undernourished. At the same time, more than one billion people are overweight, including some 300 million people who are obese. Both undernutrition and overnutrition are forms of malnutrition, and both harm human health and impose enormous costs on society. Transnational food corporations are intimately involved both in feeding the overnutrition crisis through their investment in the global snack food industry and in their investment in new food products to treat the crisis of undernutrition.

The twin problems of overnutrition and undernutrition were highlighted by the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier de Schutter, in the presentation of his latest report to the UN Human Rights Council yesterday: “The Right to an Adequate Diet: the Agriculture-Food-Health Nexus.” At first blush these two trends – undernutrition and overnutrition – seem to be quite opposite from one another. Yet there are a number of connections between them and they exist side-by-side in many countries.

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New Data Confirms Food Crisis Model: Warns of coming price spikes

Timothy A. Wise

Today, researchers at the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI) released new modeling results they claim demonstrate the predictive validity of their food price model. Last September, they released a detailed report showing that US ethanol expansion explained the underlying secular rise in food prices, while financial speculation explained the two price spikes, in 2007-8 and 2010-11. (See my post on the study.) The Institute, which performs mathematical modeling to reveal social and political trends, has now extended its model to January 2012. With no modifications, the model still fits food price trends, predicting to a high degree of accuracy the bursting of the food price bubble last year.

In our recent report on the food crisis and a recent article in Economic and Political Weekly, Sophia Murphy and I argued that the international community has thus far failed to address the underlying causes of the food crisis. As the NECSI report highlights, those causes include biofuels expansion and price volatility stemming from excessive financial speculation and the lack of adequate food reserves.

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Hitting Them Where They Drive: Will rising gas prices prompt action on commodity speculation?

Timothy A. Wise

There’s nothing like a food riot to focus the attention of a developing country government. And perhaps there’s nothing like a gas-price spike to get the attention of US policymakers, particularly in an election year.

As oil prices jumped to $108/barrel and US gas prices inched toward the politically toxic $4.00/gallon, welcome attention is being focused on speculation in oil futures markets. Forbes reported last week that as much as one-quarter of the price of crude could be attributed to a surge in speculative capital, which now accounts for four of every five dollars on oil futures markets. Citing data from Goldman Sachs, they estimated this was costing US drivers $.56/gallon, a hefty 18% hike in the price at the pump.

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Recipe for Disaster

Jayati Ghosh

It is clear that the raging policy debate on allowing multinational companies a greater role in the Indian retail sector, particularly food retail, is not yet over. Already Commerce Minister Anand Sharma has declared that the decision to hold back on liberalising rules of foreign direct investment (FDI) in this sector following the political backlash is only to provide breathing space for the government. It is only too likely that the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government will seek to push through this “reform” at some point over the next two years of its term.

This makes it all the more important for Indian citizens to become aware of the extent of concentration and control of multinational companies in global food distribution, and the implications of this for both producers and consumers of food. These aspects are drawn out in some recent studies that deserve much more public attention.

A new report produced by Timothy Wise and Sophia Murphy (“Resolving the Food Crisis: Assessing Global Policy Reforms since 2007”, GDAE and IATP, January 2012) makes several interesting points about how the global food crisis is related not just to medium-term supply factors that reflect the effects of more open trade and the policy neglect of agriculture, but also to the biofuel subsidies that have diverted grain acreage and production. Recently, financial speculation too has played a role in pushing up prices of food. But Wise and Murphy also highlight a feature that is often ignored in policy discussion on the food crisis: market power in the food system.

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Bio-fuels, Speculation, Land Grabs = Food Crisis

Triple Crisis blogger Timothy A. Wise and guest blogger Sophia Murphy were recently interviewed by the Real News Network on why, despite important policy reforms, the countries that dominate international agricultural markets leave the world at risk of another food crisis. The interview is based on their new report, “Resolving the Food Crisis: Assessing Global Policy Reforms Since 2007″. Read the executive summary here. Also read a blog post by the authors, “Resolving the Food Crisis: Global leaders fail to make crucial reforms.”

January 19, 2012 | Posted in: Videos | Comments Closed

Resolving the Food Crisis: Global leaders fail to make crucial reforms

Timothy A. Wise and Sophia Murphy, guest blogger

The spikes in global food prices in 2007-8 served as a wake-up call to the global community on the inadequacies of our global food system.  Commodity prices doubled, the estimated number of hungry people topped one billion, and food riots spread through the developing world. A second price spike in 2010-11, which drove the global food import bill for 2011 to an estimated $1.3 trillion, showed that while global leaders may now be alert to the problems, our agricultural systems remain deeply flawed.

Various inter-governmental institutions responded with alacrity to the food price alarms. But the most powerful governments remain resistant to reform. In the final two months of last year alone, the G20, the WTO, and the Durban Climate Summit all turned big opportunities for action into small communiqués of little import.

In our new report, “Resolving the Food Crisis: Assessing Global Policy Reforms Since 2007,” we find that the recent crisis has been a catalyst for important policy reforms, but governments have yet to address its underlying causes. By avoiding deeper structural reforms, the countries that dominate international agricultural markets leave the world at risk of another devastating food crisis.

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What Happened to the WTO’s Original Food Security Agenda?

Jennifer Clapp

The WTO ministerial meeting in Geneva last week failed to take any decisions on the question of food security. Indeed, we knew this would be the outcome even before the meeting began. As the ICTSD reported, two proposals on food security – both calling for exemptions from export restrictions for the world’s least developed and net food importing developing countries and for humanitarian food purchases by the World Food Programme – did not gain sufficient support at the WTO General Council meeting in late November to make the Ministerial agenda.

The fact that WTO members could not even support discussion of these specific measures does not bode well for the adoption of a broader and more comprehensive food security agenda at the WTO.  The disagreements over rules on export restrictions have in fact served as a distraction from the broader food security issues that the WTO is already supposed to be working on.

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Spotlight G20: Who Calls the Shots on Food Security?

Frequent Triple Crisis contributor Sophia Murphy analyses the G20’s chilling effect on strong initiatives at the UN level to address food security issues, in a new commentary from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. It builds on Jennifer Clapp’s recent blog post and the recent interview with Clapp and Timothy A. Wise:

ROME, OCTOBER 2011 – Multilateralism is in crisis. It is perhaps most evident in the painful and truly frightening failure of governments to come to grips with the implications of climate change. But it was also evident on a much less well-publicized stage in mid-October in Rome, where governments were gathered at the U.N. Committee on Food Security (CFS) to discuss food price volatility…

Read the full commentary.