07 May, 1800 UTC: A Silent Tsunami: World Food Crisis

Hundreds of people, angry over rising cost of food, block a key road connecting Jalalabad to Kabul, demand action from the government to bring down prices

Jennifer Parmelee People wait as WFP staff unload food aid for residents of Kibera slum, at Woodley stadium in Nairobi, Kenya, 15 Jan 2008

We were talking to Jennifer Parmelee, a Washington Spokesperson for the World Food Program about the global food crisis. The U.N. World Food Program says high food prices are creating the agency’s biggest challenge in its 45-year history.

WFP calls the crisis a silent tsunami that threatens to plunge more than 100 million people on every continent into hunger.

World Food Program CARE VOA Special Coverage, World Food Crisis

- Transcript Follows -

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Jennifer: The root causes of this silent tsunami, the global food crisis that's crossing all borders are multiple; chief among them is the rising demand. Many areas of the world that previously did not are now supporting middle classes of substance or middle class appetites. This has happened in India and China, to a large degree since about 1990. You're seeing increased demand for basically more protein than was in their diets before. Then we have of course skyrocketing fuel and energy costs, which impact food at every stage, from fertilizer to the fuel in tractors to the fuel used in production of processed food and to transport it. In addition we have climate change-induced weather catastrophes, for example, the drought in Australia, which for two years has contributed greatly to higher wheat prices around the world as their exports suffered. And now we are facing a whole new set of factors, including biofuels which has taken a good chunk out of the already tightest global grain markets in about 30 years, and you have another phenomenon, which is the fact that many countries are slapping on export restrictions which again causes more shortages and higher prices. So you can see we're facing a very challenging and dynamic situation. On agriculture, we're not an agriculture organization ourselves, we work in concert with our sister UN agency, the Food and Agriculture Organization, FAO. However it's clear that we need to stimulate agriculture production, especially in chronically food insecure areas like Africa. This is absolutely vital to getting out of the crisis. The bottom line is we have been consuming far more than we have been producing over the past 3 years and this trend must be reversed.

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Jennifer: There is no doubt that the diversion of food to energy use is an important factor in the rise of food prices around the world. However, we also see that in the long-term, biofuels can present opportunities for poor farmers. We look with great anticipation to research into non-food resources for biofuels such as switch grass. These kinds of grasses and non-food plants can often be grown in arid climates where food production is already difficult and open up new markets for poor farmers in the developing world. However, this is far off for most of the poor farmers and right now they too are being challenged by the food crisis.

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Jennifer: Great question. Agricultural development is the key to getting out of this crisis. Agricultural development assistance, in fact, has been on a decline for the past 20 to 25 years. That's since the days of the green revolution in Asia, which as you know turned around agricultural production in a big way. Since that time, poor farmers have had few resources to help them with everything from improved seeds to better irrigation systems to better, more affordable fertilizer and in places like Africa, completely lack the infrastructure to even get their crops to market, should they successfully produce them. We are encouraged by the fact that the World Bank announced that it was doubling agricultural development assistance this year in response to the food crisis and we hope other donors will do the same.

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Jennifer: It's true that we are seeing riots, food riots happen all over the world in response to the global food crisis. I like to quote Martin Luther King, who famously said, 'Riots are the language of the unheard.' There is no doubt this is happening now. However, this crisis is built on a foundation of hunger. Already before the food crisis hit, the world was supporting a growing number of chronically hungry people, estimated today at some 860-million, and now believed to be increasing by another 130-million, by our latest estimates. Most of these people have been suffering silently with their hunger for many a year. So this silent tsunami has actually been happening for a very long time. As for WFP's response, we obviously have to look to the immediate humanitarian needs, which are growing daily and of course are compounded by disasters like the horrific cyclone in Myanmar. However, as we address the clear emergency needs of tens of thousands of people plunged into new lows of poverty and hunger, we need to be attentive to addressing the root causes of that problem whenever possible. We look to work with our partners in establishing productive safety nets, using existing programs such as School Feeding, Food for Work, and Local Purchase. You may not know that WFP purchased a record amount of its food in developing countries last year. We have been consciously using our great purchasing power closer and closer to the areas where poor farmers need our help most in getting markets and creating incentives for them to produce more.

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Jennifer: Of course it's no longer such a silent tsunami, with people spilling into the streets in protest, but for the most part the tens and hundreds of millions people who are being impacted by rising prices, the kind of people who already spend 60, 70, 80-percent of their household incomes on food, do indeed suffer in silence. I'd also like to point out that every day an estimated 25-thousand people die of hunger and hunger-related causes. It's considered the biggest public health threat in the world, killing more people than AIDS, TB and Malaria combined. Every ten days, 250-thousand lives are eclipsed by hunger. That's equivalent to the toll from the Asian tsunami, happening every ten days.

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Jennifer: The current global food crisis has to be addressed from every angle: economic, social, political and of course agricultural. One political dimension of the current crisis that needs to be addressed at the highest levels is the disturbing wave of unilateral export restrictions that is causing still more hardship around the world. If for example an Asian country restricts its exports of rice, that will have an immediate and harmful impact on a country halfway across the world like Mauritania, which imports 70-percent of its food.

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Jennifer: The current situation is alarming and shocking and unfortunately it doesn't look like it will either go away or diminish in the coming years, especially when you see that energy prices are still attaining record levels every day. However, what's equally shocking is that it took riots breaking out all over the world for people and politicians to start addressing the age-old problem of hunger in a serious way.

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Jennifer: As noted, we have been consuming more than we've been producing as a planet for at least the past three years. However, distribution, especially when it comes to our planet's poorest citizens, has always been part of the problem. Just take a place like Darfur, where the logistics of getting food aid in are extremely costly and difficult. In the best of times, distribution is a major issue for them. On home gardens, certainly this is at least a partial solution for individual families and we've also had some good success with gardens at schools where we operate feeding programs. We find it's a win-win situation when we can help poor families or communities increase production of locally grown food.

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Erin: Has the international response to the WFP appeal been adequate?

Jennifer: As you know, we put out an emergency appeal for 500-million dollars back in February. Two months later that had been raised to 755-million dollars. This was only to keep steady on plans for our 2008 budget year and to avoid cuts in programs and the number of people we were helping. The response to the second appeal has been encouraging. We estimate we have commitments for some 80-percent of that amount. But the needs keep growing and that appeal does not include new needs. In addition, because this is not all cash in hand, we have already been forced to cut some programs, including a school-feeding program for some 450-thousand children in Cambodia. I'd just like to explain what school feeding means to poor children around the world. We feed some 20-million schoolchildren each year but we estimate there is huge unmet need, something like 59-million primary schoolchildren go to school hungry every day. Once you introduce something as simple and as cheap as a school meal or even a nutritious snack, everything changes for these children. It costs just 25-cents per child per day to increase not only school enrollment, but attendance and academic performance. This works especially well for girls who are traditionally neglected in many parts of the world in terms of education. Just 5 years of school can dramatically change a girl's life for the better. She will marry at an older age, she will have fewer children, and those children will be healthier and better fed. This has a proven track record of success and is one key to helping solve this hunger crisis in our world.

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Jennifer: The basic bottom line for human life to continue on a normal basis is 2200 kilo calories a day, anything below that means that the person's energy consumption will not be adequate to maintain weight and health. Beyond calories, it is essential that human beings receive adequate nutrition, something that is often overlook and is absolutely vital, especially for children under two years of age, and pregnant and lactating women. If a child fails to have adequate nutrition in the first two years of life, they will be stunted mentally and physically for the rest of their years. This is a terrible loss of human potential that unfortunately afflicts millions and millions of children in our world.

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Jennifer: The Red Cup is actually used in many of our school feeding programs where it typically contains nutritious porridge. Our executive director Josette Sheeran likes to bring a red cup from Rwanda in her visits to heads of state and other international figures. It is a symbol of need and today she tells people that the WFP merely because of the rising food prices is able to fill that cup 40-percent less. It costs just 25-cents a day to fill that cup for a child at school. This is a great and easy investment in the future of our planet.

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Jennifer: WFP has been warning of what it calls a perfect storm of global trends that were shaping up to create a crisis on a global scale for about the past year. However we were all caught by surprise by the severity and aggressiveness of the rise in commodity prices. But I'll repeat that this silent tsunami did not come out of the blue. Today you see people in Haiti eating mud cakes; you see people in Bangladesh reduced to eating rice with only salt. For people on less than a dollar a day and there are a billion of them, this crisis has been nothing short of a catastrophe. But again, I'll reiterate that a quiet catastrophe has been happening every day for the poorest of the poor for so many years. We are hopeful that now it has taken on a vocal and political dimension that the world will realize this must be solved. Resolving the worst of hunger in the world is the essential bottom line to everything we hold as significant in terms of human progress, from economic development to education to adequate health.

Jennifer: Of course we're looking at it today with the huge crisis following the cyclone in Myanmar. This is especially tragic because in fact we've been able to purchase most of the rise in our programs there inside Myanmar. Now of course the chief rice producing regions are the ones that have been hardest hit and it's unclear whether Myanmar too will become another food insecure country unable to meet its own needs.

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