In 1984, I gathered the most successful musicians of the time to form a “supergroup” called Band Aid to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia. The next year, an even larger grouping was formed for Live Aid, a major benefit concert and music-based fundraising initiative that continues to this day.
At last month’s International Forum on Food and Nutrition, held by the Barilla Foundation, the enduring — and increasingly urgent — need for efforts to strengthen food security could not be more obvious.
The fate of the Easter Islanders illustrates the world’s problem. Some time in the 12th century, a group of Polynesians found their way to a remote volcanic island where dense forests provided food, animals, and the tools and materials to build hundreds of complex and mysterious stone sculptures.
However, little by little, the people destroyed those forests, ultimately committing social, cultural and physical suicide.
Today, in relative terms, we collectively have only a small swath of forest left — and we are rapidly destroying it. We are running out of land to farm and deserts are spreading.
The food we produce is often wasted, while almost 1 billion people do not have enough to eat — a reality that leaves many with little choice except to migrate.
Most media coverage focuses on refugees fleeing armed conflict — think Syria — or migrants seeking better economic opportunities than they have at home — think Nigeria or Pakistan.
However, the link between food scarcity and migration is stronger than it might seem to those who are not among the hungry.
For example, the Arab Spring uprisings of 2010 to 2011, which produced a massive wave of refugees, were triggered by a rise in wheat prices, which led to widespread bread riots that morphed into broader political revolutions.
In fact, many armed conflicts, and the mass displacement they cause, can be traced back to food insecurity.
While the poor south starves, the rich north gorges. More than 2 billion of us are overweight, puffed up by low-energy sugars and mass-produced processed foods rich in fat.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN, just one-quarter of the food we throw out or squander each year would be enough to feed 870 million hungry people.
Worldwide, one-third of all crops are wasted. Like the Easter Islanders of the past, we are setting ourselves up for self-annihilation.
Moreover, human-driven climate change threatens to intensify existing pressures affecting food supply and migration.
In a report published in December last year, the European Commission’s European Political Strategy Center predicted that ever more frequent droughts and floods will “dwarf all other drivers of migration,” with as many as 1 billion people displaced globally by 2050.
Even the lowest estimate of 25 million climate-change migrants “would dwarf the current levels of new refugees and internally displaced persons,” the report says.
To be sure, some steps are being taken to address food waste and scarcity.
For example, this year, the European Commission proposed cuts in farm subsidies, which contribute to overproduction.
However, this approach — framed in terms of “evolution,” rather than the “revolution” that is needed — is not even remotely adequate.
The EU’s common agricultural policy has long been highly problematic.
The policy authorized tax money to be spent on growing surplus food, which was then warehoused — at further cost — and ultimately destroyed — at still further cost.
The system has improved somewhat over the years, but not nearly enough.
The farm bill in the US — the US federal government’s primary agricultural and food policy tool — is similarly wasteful.
What is needed is not just a politically tolerable adjustment to existing policies, but rather root-and-branch reform that emphasizes real results.
Unfortunately, it is not clear whether there are any politicians up to the task, whether in the erratic and polarized US or in the ineffectual European Parliament and Commission.
The time to step up was yesterday; the time to adopt a new approach is now.
We can discuss the UN Sustainable Development Goals — which include targets like “halving per capita global food waste at the retail and consumer level and reducing food losses along production and supply chains by 2030” — until we are blue in the face. What matters are well-designed, effective and comprehensive policies, implemented in a sustained manner, and those are nowhere to be found.
The Earth is 45 million centuries old, but our century is unique, because it is the first in which a species could destroy the entire basis of its own existence.
Yet we latter-day Easter Islanders seem unaware of this existential threat, preferring to build statues rather than sustainable systems for survival.
Will we acknowledge our predicament only when our land becomes a desert, when our health systems collapse under the strain, when even the wealthy are facing food shortages, when fresh water becomes scarce and when our national shorelines are breached? By then, it will be too late and our fate will be sealed.
The greatest threat to our planet is the belief that someone else will save it. Each of us must recognize the seriousness of our situation and demand real action to change it. That means you.
Bob Geldof is an Irish singer-songwriter, author and political activist. He is the founder and chairman of the Band Aid Trust for famine relief in Africa and a member of the Africa Progress Panel.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
On May 7, 1971, Henry Kissinger planned his first, ultra-secret mission to China and pondered whether it would be better to meet his Chinese interlocutors “in Pakistan where the Pakistanis would tape the meeting — or in China where the Chinese would do the taping.” After a flicker of thought, he decided to have the Chinese do all the tape recording, translating and transcribing. Fortuitously, historians have several thousand pages of verbatim texts of Dr. Kissinger’s negotiations with his Chinese counterparts. Paradoxically, behind the scenes, Chinese stenographers prepared verbatim English language typescripts faster than they could translate and type them
More than 30 years ago when I immigrated to the US, applied for citizenship and took the 100-question civics test, the one part of the naturalization process that left the deepest impression on me was one question on the N-400 form, which asked: “Have you ever been a member of, involved in or in any way associated with any communist or totalitarian party anywhere in the world?” Answering “yes” could lead to the rejection of your application. Some people might try their luck and lie, but if exposed, the consequences could be much worse — a person could be fined,
Taiwan aims to elevate its strategic position in supply chains by becoming an artificial intelligence (AI) hub for Nvidia Corp, providing everything from advanced chips and components to servers, in an attempt to edge out its closest rival in the region, South Korea. Taiwan’s importance in the AI ecosystem was clearly reflected in three major announcements Nvidia made during this year’s Computex trade show in Taipei. First, the US company’s number of partners in Taiwan would surge to 122 this year, from 34 last year, according to a slide shown during CEO Jensen Huang’s (黃仁勳) keynote speech on Monday last week.
When China passed its “Anti-Secession” Law in 2005, much of the democratic world saw it as yet another sign of Beijing’s authoritarianism, its contempt for international law and its aggressive posture toward Taiwan. Rightly so — on the surface. However, this move, often dismissed as a uniquely Chinese form of legal intimidation, echoes a legal and historical precedent rooted not in authoritarian tradition, but in US constitutional history. The Chinese “Anti-Secession” Law, a domestic statute threatening the use of force should Taiwan formally declare independence, is widely interpreted as an emblem of the Chinese Communist Party’s disregard for international norms. Critics
RSS