Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 51, no. 3, June–July 2009, pp. 71–98
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With the world in the midst of the most serious economic downturn since the Great Depression and soft commodity prices depressed, it is easy to forget that barely a year ago sky-rocketing food prices were generating serious political and social strife in more than 30 countries around the world. The price of rice more than tripled in the 12 months to April 2008, while the food price index published by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) rose by an unprecedented 50%. In 2007, the number of people living in conditions of food insecurity increased by between 50 and 130 million as the global food import bill rose to its highest level on record. Pessimists predicted the end of cheap food presaging a new era of resource insecurity. The spectre of Malthus seemed once again to haunt the Earth. Were these dramatic increases in price merely a cyclical aberration or do they foreshadow a structural shift in supply and demand that will prove the pessimists right? These are not inconsequential questions. The price of food is a matter of profound importance for the economic well-being of billions of people and the political stability of the most affected states. This analysis explores the reasons for the 2008 food crisis by placing it in historical context and drawing out the implications for policymakers and business.
Historical anxieties about food
A useful starting point is the recognition that we have been here before. The food-security anxieties of 2008 were redolent of those of an earlier era when there was also much apprehension about the emergence of a gap between future global food production and consumption. During the 1970s, as populations began to soar in developing countries and incomes rose in the wealthy, it was argued that more grain would be needed both as a food staple and to feed the growing demand for animal protein associated with more affluent diets. If these demands could not be met, there were fears that violent conflict over diminishing food supplies would result. A major 1974 UN conference on food held in Rome captured the prevailing mood. Many predicted that steeply rising food prices and falling food stocks were harbingers of a looming crisis that, in the absence of urgent remedial action, would result in mass starvation.
Malthusian pessimism that a growing world population would eventually exceed the planet’s capacity to produce food, triggering massive famines, was not borne out because population growth from advances in health care was offset by increased agricultural production. True, famine remains a potent killer, causing 70–80m deaths in the twentieth century, as many as the two great wars of that century combined. However, the prospect of endemic famine has receded markedly since Malthus’s day (Table 1).
By the late 1990s, famine-induced deaths had been largely confined to poverty-stricken, war-torn pockets of the globe, leading one scholar to conclude that ‘major, prolonged famine anywhere is conceivable only in the context of endemic warfare or blockade’. Given this apparent success in defeating the...
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Alan Dupont is Michael Hintze Professor of International Security and Director of the Centre for International Security Studies at the University of Sydney. Mark Thirlwell is Program Director, International Economy, at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney.
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