Food Prices: Hunger Strikes

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Pain in Africa
The million or so people living in Kibera, the Kenyan slum, are what the WFP calls "the new face of hunger." They are victims of soaring prices, not just of food but also of more costly staples such as fuel, charcoal, cooking oil and kerosene. Residents can almost feel themselves becoming poorer by the day. The sensation is particularly cruel because Kibera's stores have adequate supplies, but the tomatoes lie rotting on the shelves alongside untouched bags of rice and cereal: they are now too expensive for locals to buy and cook. "We are not eating to be satisfied, we are eating to sustain ourselves," says Daniel Anyona, a counselor at a Kibera AIDS clinic.

There's little immediate relief in sight, because Africa's farmers face their own inflation problems and can't easily boost output. The FAO predicts that food prices will remain high for years to come, but that galloping price rises will begin to slow down. For poor farmers that is little cause for cheer. The surging price of oil has made using tractors costly, and the cost of fertilizer has doubled in Uganda over the past year, says Kenneth Kaboi, a 19-year-old farmer who was out in his family's maize field recently in Uganda's lush Kapchorwa district, churning the deep-red soil with a hoe. The earth looks fertile. But Kaboi isn't expecting a bumper harvest. "Farmers have not been able to buy materials like fertilizer," he says. "So they have done without."

Betting on the Farm
The outlook is not unrelentingly bleak, however. Leaders meeting in Rome pledged — at least in theory — to spend billions more dollars for agricultural programs. African governments and international organizations now face the task of getting new projects off the ground quickly. Obstacles abound. After decades of neglect, transportation networks for getting crops to market consist mainly of rutted dirt roads; irrigation systems are in a shambles; and there's little access to credit for poor farmers. Aid agencies are starting some programs virtually from scratch. "There are very few plans to take off the shelf," says Joachim von Braun, director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington.

But there is growing recognition that solutions are at hand, if old policies and mind-sets can be left behind. For years, environmental groups have lobbied U.S. and European lawmakers to shun agricultural projects that involve chemical fertilizers or genetically modified crops. Without those technologies "you cannot increase agricultural productivity," says Andrew Natsios, former chief of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and now a professor of international development at Georgetown University. A more flexible approach could dramatically improve the world's ability to feed itself. As proof, Natsios cites a USAID project that sent Afghan farmers a genetically modified wheat strain immediately after the Taliban's defeat in 2002, resulting in a massive harvest that year. "Farmers told me it was a miracle of Allah," he says.

Ultimately, solutions will come not from miracles, but from markets. Farmers worldwide are responding to higher prices by boosting output. The FAO predicts that European countries, as well as India and China, will increase harvests this year. As the world begins growing more food, inflation is expected to ease. But the bountiful days are gone. Over the next several years, "food prices are likely to be 30 or 40% higher than they were at the beginning of this century," says Steve Wiggins, rural-policy researcher at the Overseas Development Institute in London. For the world's impoverished masses, who already spend most of their earnings simply feeding themselves, that margin between survival and starvation has become uncomfortably narrow.