Can a New U.N. Committee Prevent More Mozambique Food Riots?

While Americans may have years before they need to worry about true famine and exorbitant food bills, people worldwide and international policymakers have new cause to stress. The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) called for an emergency meeting on Sept. 24 to discuss potentially catastrophic food price inflation. The call for a meeting comes just one week after food riots in Mozambique killed 10 people and led to about 150 arrests.

These discussions, while well-intentioned, could suggest more hot air to boost Western agribusiness than hot ideas to promote local economies and sustainable, small-scale farming.

Mozambique's citizens organized the protests last week through text messages after bread costs rose by 30 percent. Unless major international policy reform and investment comes soon, the protests may be the first of many such public outcries. Global crops and meat prices have risen to record-breaking highs, largely due to smaller yields after unusually rough weather and increasing demand. Wheat production has dropped five percent, according to The Guardian, and barley by 22 percent. Meanwhile, cocoa, sugar, and coffee prices remain high, with coffee hitting a 12-year peak. Beef, chicken, lamb, and pork costs have climbed to their highest in 20 years as production has dropped while developing world demand has risen.

About 15 international food experts have been recruited to form a steering committee for the U.N.’s Committee on World Food Security, which is expected to meet for the first time sometime this month. From Tewolde Berhan Gebre Egziabher, director general of Ethiopia’s Environmental Protection Authority, to Renato Maluf, president of Brazil’s National Council of Food and Nutrition Security, the committee appears an impressive brain trust. But will it be truly effective, or just more of the same-old, same-old rehash of failed policies?

One committee member, former head of the U.N. World Food Program, Catherine Bertini, didn’t exactly inspire radical change or vision when she told Voice of America that she hoped they’d come up with “all sorts of ideas about things that the governments should be paying attention to” to address hunger. The first “idea” she offered: agribusiness. She cited efforts of a new international organization, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), to link smallholder farmers with the private sector. “Agriculture is, after all, a business,” Bertini said.

Translation: It’s a muddy area of policy and profit. Agribusiness, by definition, operates on investment, self-interest, leaders, and top-down decision-making. To major agribusinesses, community empowerment, ownership, and sustainability are just some hippie-dippy ideals.

Bertini does hint that the committee’s version of agribusiness involves seeking out and funding small farmers, an idea increasingly touted by aid organizations, as these subsistence producers remain more insulated from international trade fluctuations and provide indigenous food at lower costs for nearby residents. But this version has little chance to overcome the much larger “feed-the-world” efforts that act as a boon for U.S. agribusiness and foreign policy. As I recently wrote, much Western-led international hunger relief efforts represent Western interests in profit, not those of the poor. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) openly states that its mission includes “furthering America’s foreign policy interests in expanding democracy and free markets." In practice, this policy often means pushing third-world producers to sign away ownership of their own seed, fertilizers, and traditional farming methods, and accept them from U.S. corporations like Monsanto.

To many folks in Mozambique and others starving worldwide, fixing food prices fast might be the priority. The question of how could take a backseat to “now.” Still, food crises will continue to erupt as long as strategies for reform begin with Western investors, who come with their own agendas and stipulations. Those in developing countries are not only hungry for bread, but for real reform.

Photo credit: Keith Bacongco via Flickr