My generation was born into a world of incredibly touchy subjects, subjects that only become more and more treacherous the further you tread. That’s not to say every inhabitant of the crucial 18-to-29-year-old demographic are a bunch of oversensitive “flip-floppers”, utterly incapable of ever really making up their minds; this is just the world we were born in to. Most people will brag about status symbols, like where they shop or what they listen to. Many, though, are rather hesitant to discuss truly important issues; strangely, our religious values and civil rights are, quite frankly, just not appropriate for dinner party discussion. Barack Obama is right: we do, collectively, need to be talking about race more often, like intelligent adults. It’s a manufactured construct that has plagued this whole country since its conception. But just because something is necessary does not make it easy. In fact, history has shown us that all of the most necessary actions – social and cultural revolutions; widely accepted technological advances – were very difficult, and took great amounts of time to truly set in.
We don’t like to discuss the ideas that make us uncomfortable. This is an innate reaction to the negative aspects of our very existence, and for the most part, a completely understandable one. When it’s springtime, and beautiful, colorful flowers are blooming all around you, you don’t want to be reminded as you sniff a tulip that women still only make 75 cents for every dollar that a man is paid to do the same job. As the first snow of the season falls and you rush outside with your friends to have a snowball fight, you don’t want your friends to shout, “Last one to the top of the hill is the corn farmer who is forced to burn excess crops to keep prices high so that growing corn will still make him or her enough money to live on!” When you’re wrapped in the arms of your lover, quietly watching a raging thunderstorm on a warm summer night, you don’t want that lover to whisper into your ear, “The American government just spent another $300 million dollars in Iraq today, and there’s still no evidence of a just motive behind the war.” That’s just not sexy. Most people wouldn’t want to be bombarded with these facts, and, again, that’s reasonable. But what I’m really afraid of is that many of them wouldn’t care at all if someone tried to explain them. I don’t understand that. In the long run, we, the members of the Human race, are all in this together. If American citizens and its government still want to claim such incredible dominance over the rest of the world’s policies, we need to start working as a team to promote worldwide sustainability, while also reinstating a sense of civility that, if we ever really had, we’ve almost completely depleted since 2001.
So what are the magic words that will make Americans want to live differently? What do they need to hear, or see, or smell? As has been the case in many instances over time, change often starts with one group of people, or sometimes even one single person. Those people know something, and believe something, and they want to tell you about it. And you’ll either listen and absorb and maybe even do research and form your own opinion, or you’ll just brush it off. Why would you ignore someone else’s “good information”? Well it’s probably on an uncomfortable subject.
Food is a peculiarly touchy issue. When people find something that they like, they become very attached very quickly. Sometimes there’s a rich cultural history behind that; more often, though, and especially in America, it’s just an issue of not understanding what we’re given as opposed to what’s available. It’s easy to overlook the 5-calorie cookies when the 50-calorie cookies cost a dollar less and have their own display at the very front of the aisle. There are a lot of foods out there are very good for you, but – and please excuse my conspiracy theorizing – a lot of people don’t want you to find them. To some, food isn’t a necessity, to be classified next to “water” and “shelter”; it’s a business. “You are what you eat” is one of the truest aphorisms in our national phrasebook, and I think if we all knew what was in a McDonald’s “hamburger”, we wouldn’t feel too great about ourselves anymore afterwards. (Although to be honest, I never felt that good after a McDonald’s burger when I was younger…) Business and necessity have coincided side-by-side for a long, long time, but the general consensus as expressed by economists and struggling eaters alike is that they have overlapped – and now we have a serious, worldwide problem.
A week ago, I was telling a friend of mine, “I think I’m going to write a piece about the food shortage.” And because I genuinely felt as if I didn’t know enough about it, I added, simply, “I’d really like to know more about it.” I was ignorant of the hard facts behind the food crisis that, apparently, is affecting our ability to purchase life-sustaining foodstuffs at sensible prices. In 2008, that kind of ignorance isn’t so hard to resolve; I’ve got an information superhighway at my fingertips for several hours out of every day, so I might as well use it to stay informed, right? So if I felt unlearned, imagine my surprise as my friend replied hesitantly, “…What food shortage?”
The little I knew about it I had gathered from both perusing headlines and listening to a brilliant professor/lover of global catastrophe doomsday-theories, so I explained what I could. I told him that the price of rice has risen drastically in the last year, nearly 150%, and – as explained by that professor – that if there was an extreme blackout situation across the country, the food we have in New York City would only last about three days. “But how?” he asked. I didn’t know.
Paul Krugman, of the NY Times, sheds some light on the “how” in a recent op-ed:
Governments and private grain dealers used to hold large inventories in normal times, just in case a bad harvest created a sudden shortage. Over the years, however, these precautionary inventories were allowed to shrink, mainly because everyone came to believe that countries suffering crop failures could always import the food they needed. This left the world food balance highly vulnerable to a crisis affecting many countries at once — in much the same way that the marketing of complex financial securities, which was supposed to diversify away risk, left world financial markets highly vulnerable to a systemwide shock.[1]
It sounds like we just…messed up? Truthfully, though, that’s just how I would expect a food shortage to come about nowadays; we’re not dealing with Irish Potato Famine-type circumstances that we could never see coming. In the 21st century, this kind of crisis is simply the result of poor planning. The price of oil and the fast-growing economies of nations like China and India, where some, as Krugman puts it, are becoming “rich enough to start eating like Westerners,” are two aspects that widely affect the price of food. As developing nations move away from Third World status, they stop growing their own food in favor of purchasing it. So not only does demand rise, the need to ship it does, too. Much of what we hear about oil prices and growing economies is that this sudden boom was unforeseen, but that doesn’t mean that our government couldn’t have accounted for them at some point, if only through hastily sketched-out “What If?” contingency plans. But it seems like there was no sketch with a possible solution to the question “What if all circumstances regarding oil start working against us, and we need to consider other fuel sources from other places?” exists, and we – Humans – are left holding the bag. TIME Magazine reported in late February that riots are breaking out in Mexico, Pakistan, and numerous African nations, among others, due to high food prices. Governments are trying to get involved, but even if they can hold down protesters, “bringing down food prices could take at least a decade, food analysts say.”[2]
The greatest causes of this situation are clear. What is unclear, in America at least, is why the government almost seems to support the problem by looking towards corn-based ethanol fuel as a substitute for fossil fuels. This is an unrealistic and unsustainable option. “Ethanol is 20 to 30 percent less efficient than gasoline, making it more expensive per highway mile. It takes 450 pounds of corn to produce the ethanol to fill one SUV tank. That's enough corn to feed one person for a year. Plus, it takes more than one gallon of fossil fuel -- oil and natural gas -- to produce one gallon of ethanol,” explains economist Walter E. Williams.[3] Nothing about that works in favor of Americans, yet the government offers generous subsidies to corn farmers to contribute their crop to ethanol development, rather than food production. And many farmers across the country are taking them. Why settle for being paid peanuts when you grow one of the most widely used edible plants on the planet? As with many policies adopted by the US government over the last eight years – give or take –, the timing of this is comically bad. Quite literally, food is being taken from people’s mouths so that we can drive to the mall. Imagine you and a friend or loved one are driving home from a leisurely day out, and that friend tells you, over the roar of the air conditioning, “While we were running errands around town in your Flex Fuel® pick-up truck, with a full tank of E85 – that’s 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline – a protest over food prices in Cameroon left twenty people dead.” That’s not so sexy, either, is it?
But still, the biggest question, in my mind at least, was actually my friend’s second inquiry: “Who could possibly benefit? I mean, even as oil prices shoot up, Exxon and Mobil make more money than ever. Who gets paid off overpriced rice? Farmers?” Apparently – and not so unsurprisingly – no, not the farmers. With biofuels such as ethanol, it’s slightly more transparent – although not necessarily pleasant: the US government gives money (that it doesn’t have) to farmers so they can grow corn (that won’t be eaten). The world of rice, though, is more complicated. In Asia, the rice farmers, the people who create the food that is to be sold, have no pull. They are in the weakest positions, especially if they don’t intend to sell; farmers who take the majority of their rice crops home to feed their families are only being hurt by the demand as gasoline and fertilizer prices rise. “Their fields are empty,” a Laotian farmer said of his neighbors’ rice paddies to the International Herald Tribune.[4] Those who sell their crop, as many do in Thailand, the world’s largest exporter of rice, are doing better, but just barely. Because they lack storage facilities, they are forced to sell immediately after the November harvest, “when supply is ample and prices are usually lowest.” Rice prices have been increasing gradually since 2000, and a rise after winter is not uncommon, but they spiked abnormally in February and have not fallen since. “The price of Thai white rice is 122 percent higher now than it was in November.”
So: who benefits? The 25% of Thai farmers who have access to irrigation, and can harvest up to four times a year are seeing some extra income, and any company that has the ability to hold on to the rice will be in control. That doesn’t seem like it includes too many people. Perhaps there will more beneficiaries in the future? Kwanchai Gomez, executive director of the Thai Rice Foundation, hopes so. She explained to The IHT that she thinks that the rice crisis will ultimately promote positive change: “She hopes the spike in price will lead rice farmers to modernize, become more financially savvy and increase their productivity.” I don’t mean to be a pessimist, but that’s asking a lot of these people, especially if they don’t soon receive governmental or UN aid for the current situation, or without some form of relief while they attempt to apply modern business practices to an activity that might seem more natural than business-like.
If the Thai economy sees a huge boom, and adopts more Western policies regarding the modernization and business of farming, will we see the advanced society that Kwanchai Gomez wants, or will we see another struggling nation require more resources than it ever did before as it comes into its own? I’m not saying that we need to hold Thailand back – or China or India – as they develop. Quite the opposite. They should be nurtured, and we, Humans in a global community, should all have a vested interest. Instead of keeping one nation down, countries’ wealth and resources need to reach a global balance, so that when a smaller or poorer nation becomes a developed one, urban societies don’t react with outrage when prices go up or a harvests have poor yields. Smaller nations just want what we already have; they’ve been living without the things that we would never be willing to live without for years now.
I do not have a host of solutions for the food crisis, nor is it the only crisis the world is currently facing. I think that, in the end, what we do individually will matter just as much as what governments decide to do. I do my best to stay informed, and to keep others informed – letting people know that the majority of bottled water is already-paid-for municipal water, or that you get more energy by eating lower on the food chain, or that McDonald’s hamburgers can contain the meat of over 1000 different cows produced in many different factory farms can be tedious, but someone has to do it. Sometimes having information is just the best you can do, but this is not one of those times. Us lowly plebs may not be able to control the world food market, or the Dow Jones, or the housing crisis, or the rocketing unemployment rates, or the dark dark thoughts that occupy Dick Cheney’s mind, but we can talk to each other, and learn as much as we can, and refuse to stay ignorant, and fight back against bullshit propaganda, and realize that it is okay to get uncomfortable, because everything that’s important probably isn’t much fun to talk about.
[1] Paul Krugman. "Grains Gone Wild". New York Times. 7 April 2008.
[2] Vivienne Walt. "The World's Growing Food-Price Crisis. TIME Magazine. 27 February 2008.
[3] Walter E Williams. "Big Corn and Ethanol Hoax". Townhall.com. 12 March 2008.
[4] Thomas Fuller. "High rice prices no windfall for many Asian farmers." The International Herlad Tribune. 7 April 2008.
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