When People Are Hungry, They Need Food---Will There Be Enough?

World hunger is now front and center.  It is all over the news and the situation is so serious that World Bank President Robert Zoellick appealed to governments around the world to provide the U.N. World Food Program with $500 million in emergency aid by May 1. President Bush immediately responded with $200 million from the United States.

The cover story in The Economist magazine this week addresses the consequences of food inflation on the world's poor calling it "The Silent Tsunami."  The problem is growing and threatens to destabilize countries. Soaring corn prices are already responsible for riots in Mexico City, rising flour prices threaten to destablize Pakistan, and people caught hoarding rice in the Phillipines face the possiblity of life imprisonment. Hunger even prompted Haiti's prime minister to resign. 

So what's the problem?  One paragraph in The Economist caught my attention.

"The prices mainly reflect changes in demand--not problems with supply, such as harvest failure.  The changes include the gentle upward pressure from China and India eating more grain and meat as they grow rich and the sudden, voracious appetites for western biofuels programmmes, which convert cereal into fuel."

Time magazine estimates that corn from one in five acres in the United States is now going to ethanol refineries.  That is causing American family grocery bills to climb. Combine increasing fuel prices (gasoline, home-heating oil and diesel) with higher food prices and we are feeling the pinch at home.

In my column which appeared in today's The Columbian, there is reference to another problem which could have the same impact as the Irish Potato Famine in 1845-50 which killed 750,000 people.  That is the potential of a global pandemic of Ug99, a new strain of wheat rust which has hit Kenya and Ethiopia. Ug99 drew the attention of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which awarded Cornell University a $26.8 million grant to develop a rust-resistent strain. 

While some oppose genetic modification, it has worked for years.  It allows research universities, such as Washington State and Cornell, to develop disease and insect resistent plants which in turn provide enough food for the world.

The point is there are tradeoffs when crops are converted from food for people to gas and diesel for cars, trucks and buses.  Those tradeoffs need to be carefully considered and thought out.  Research must to continue to insure that diseases, such as Ug99, do not spread across the world. 

When people are hungry and thirsty, everything else is irrelevant.  Hopefully, our legislators and elected officials will look at the big picture and not just focus on alternative fuels and invest in research, as have the Gates.

Don C. Brunell, President (DonB@awb.org)