Experts predict that the crisis will peak by the middle of the twenty-first century; it is arriving even faster than climate change. Yet there is still time to forestall catastrophe. The first foreshocks were discernible soon after the turn of the millennium. In the years from 2001 to 2008 the world steadily consumed more grain than it produced, triggering rising prices, growing shortages, and even rationing and famine in poorer countries. The global stockpile of grain shrank from more than a hundred days’ supply of food to less than fifty days’. It was the difference between a comfortable surplus and alarming shortages in some countries; it was accompanied by soaring prices— and the resulting fury of ordinary citizens.
It was mainly this simple fact of each year consuming slightly more than we grew that panicked the long- quiescent grain markets, triggering a cycle of price increases that sent shockwaves through consumers in all countries, governments, and global institutions such as the United Nations, its FAO, and the World Bank. All of a sudden, food security, having been off the po liti cal menu for de cades, was heading the bill of fare— not even to be entirely eclipsed by the spectacular crash of the world’s financial markets that followed soon afterward.
That the world was suddenly short of food— after almost a half century of abundance, extravagant variety, year- round availability, and the cheapest real food prices enjoyed by many consumers in the whole of human history— seemed unimaginable. On television, celebrity chefs extolled the virtue of devouring animals and plants increasingly rare in the wild; magazines larded their pages with mouth- watering recipes to tempt their overfed readers’ jaded appetites; food corporations churned out novel concoctions of salt, sugar, fat, emulsifier, extender, and dye; fast- food outlets disgorged floods of dubious nutrition to fatten an already overweight 1.4 billion people. And, in the third world, nearly fifteen thousand children continued to die quietly and painfully each day from hunger- related disease.
“A brutal convergence of events has hit an unprepared global market, and grain prices are sky high. The world’s poor suffer most,” stated the Washington Post. “The food price shock now roiling world markets is destabilizing governments, igniting street riots and threatening to send a new wave of hunger rippling through the world’s poorest nations. It is outpacing even the Soviet grain emergency of 1972–75, when world food prices rose 78 percent.” Between 2005 and 2008, food prices rose on average by 80 percent, according to the FAO.
Sustainable Food Management as a Planetary Emergency
