The coming crisis

THE COUNTRY’S population grows by about two million every year. That’s like adding half the population of Singapore, or a third of Hong Kong’s, every 12 months. Feeding an enormous, fast-growing population is difficult enough; feeding it at a time of gathering crisis—the new Oxfam report speaks of “spiralling food prices, devastating weather events, global financial meltdowns”—taxes a nation’s resources to the utmost limit.

It is possible that the prospect of a severe shock, like the possibility of a shooting war, will jolt both government and people, both business community and civil society, into massive, concerted, effective action. But even though more people report themselves as going hungry, too many of us do not see the looming problem as a food security crisis.

Against this background, Oxfam’s “Growing a Better Future: Food Justice in a Resource-Constrained World” makes for chilly, upsetting reading. Inquirer columnist Cielito Habito has already touched upon some of the more startling estimates or statistics gathered by Oxfam, an international network of NGOs present in 99 countries: over 925 million people around the globe go hungry every day; as much as 25 percent of food in developed economies go to waste; the biofuels initiative means some 40 percent of the US corn crop goes to feed motor vehicles, not human stomachs; between 1983 and 2006, agriculture’s share of international aid plummeted from 20.4 percent to 3.7 percent; the world’s population is expected to breach 9 billion by 2050.

What is even more disturbing is that whereas before global food imbalances could be blamed largely on distribution, today and in the run-up to 2050 productivity has become just as much a problem. The challenge can be summed up simply in the following estimate: in the next 40 years, the world’s population will grow by about half, but food supply must increase by 70 percent.

The Philippines is especially vulnerable to a food shock. It is only about 81 percent food self-sufficient; despite improvements, about 13 million hectares of agricultural land are showing declines in “net primary productivity.” Most of the country’s most important fishing grounds are overfished. In 2008, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization included the Philippines in its list of countries with “severe localized food insecurity” (meaning external assistance was required). In 2010, the Nomura investment house named the country as one of 80 countries highly vulnerable to food price surges. As the controversy over rice imports in the last years of the Arroyo administration showed, sometimes the government itself, instead of keeping prices stable, end up starting food price surges in the first place.

Unfortunately, when food prices spike, poor families bear the brunt. Oxfam research shows that those families which spend three-fourths of their meager income on food end up sacrificing education, health and medicine.

What can be done? Philippine initiatives cannot be implemented in isolation from those of other countries, but the following seem necessary:

We can greatly increase investments in agriculture and in fisheries, taking particular care to invest in the future of farmer and fishers through capacity-building programs. We can reconsider the country’s commitment to the biofuels agenda, taking particular heed of those voices warning that more biofuels investment can only lead to food insecurity. Not least, we can recruit the country’s smartest minds, the best scholars and experts, in a Manhattan Project-type of effort to find a way to protect even more of our crops from the deadly but predictable typhoons. The idea is to minimize crop damage as much as possible.

Closer to home, in the cities where newspapers are read and online social media have taken root, we can try a variation of Oxfam’s name-and-shame campaign. The original campaign helped to dramatically lower the costs of HIV medicine; perhaps a local campaign led by Oxfam and its partners in the Philippines can help prevent food wastage, possibly by taking a closer and more skeptical look at all those eat-all-you-can, rice-all-you-can, drink-all-you-can promos. Excess encourages waste.