George W. Bush’s proclivity to tread the absurd is amazing. He sought to blame the Indian people for the global food crisis by saying, “[India’s] middle-class is bigger than our entire population... When you start getting wealth, you demand better food... and prices... go up.” So far, many thought that his insights concerning foodgrains were inspired by his trusted lieutenant, Condoleezza Rice. Rely, he did, on the intemperate comments made by Rice a day earlier: “Improvement in the diets of people, for instance, in China and India” was contributing to the global food crisis.
Not to be left behind, the European Union (EU) has emerged more loyal than the king. EU Commissioner for Agriculture Mariann Fischer Boel has asked the world not to overlook the “elephant standing right in front of them”. This, we are told, “is the huge increase in demand from emerging countries like China and India. These countries are eating more meat. It takes about four kg of cereals to produce one kg of pork, and about two kg of cereals to make one kg of poultry meat. So a dietary shift towards meat in countries with populations of over 1 billion people each has an enormous impact on commodity markets”.
Apart from being as ridiculous as the proverbial story of the blind describing an elephant, these comments are a brazen admission by the industrialised West that their levels of prosperity are mainly dependent upon the levels of impoverishment and malnutrition in the developing world. Having plundered for centuries through colonialism, they seek to continue to fatten themselves by a similar plunder through current phase of imperialist globalisation, whose hallmark is the sharp escalation of inequalities.
However, let us first consider certain facts. According to the US Department of Agriculture, the per capita consumption of grain in the US is 1,046 kg compared to 178 kg in India, i.e. five times more. The per capita consumption of poultry is 45.4 kg in the US, 16.2 kg in the EU, while it is 1.9 kg in India. So who is eating more?
The fact that under imperialist globalisation, the vast majority of the world’s population continues to remain undernourished is confirmed by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) which estimates that in 2001-03, there were 854 million undernourished people worldwide. Of these, 820 million are in the developing world and 25 million in the transition countries (former Soviet Union and Eastern European countries). The World Food Summit (WFS) held in Rome in 1996 had targeted to halve the number of undernourished by 2015. Since 1990-92, the baseline period for the WFS’s target, the undernourished population in the developing countries has declined only by 3 million. These are the years of the ‘globalisation offensive’. This contrasts starkly with the reduction of 37 million in the 1970s and 100 million in the 1980s. A decline of 26 million between 1992 and 1995-97 was followed by an increase of 23 million up to 2001-03.
This situation will only worsen given the sharp declines in the global food stocks. Wheat stocks in 2008 are forecast at 142 million tonnes down from 197 million in 2001 — the lowest since 1982. The rice stocks are expected to tumble to 107 million tonnes in 2007 from 136 million in 2001. Caving in to pressure from the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank, poor countries dismantled tariffs and other barriers to trade, enabling large agri-businesses and subsidised goods from rich countries to undermine local agricultural production. To some degree, food aid — in the form of dumped subsidised goods produced in rich countries — also played a role in diminishing farming in poor countries. Roughly 70 per cent of all developing countries are currently net importers of food.
It is ironic that such comments should come when 78 per cent of Indians live on less than Rs 20 a day. According to official data, 136,324 farmers have committed ‘distress suicide’ between 1997 and 2005. The per capita consumption of cereals has declined from 468 gms in 1990-91 to 412 gms in 2005-06. The consumption of pulses, the main source of protein, declined from 42 gms (72 gms in 1956-57) to 33 gms during this period.