Food prices could double in the next 20 years and demand in 2050 will be 70 percent higher than now, UK charity Oxfam said yesterday, warning of worsening hunger as the global food economy stumbles close to breakdown.
“The food system is pretty well bust in the world,” Oxfam chief executive Barbara Stocking told reporters, announcing the launch of the Grow campaign as 925 million people go hungry every day.
“All the signs are that the number of people going hungry is going up,” Stocking said.
Hunger was increasing due to rising food price inflation and oil price hikes, scrambles for land and water, and creeping climate change.
Food prices are forecast to increase by something in the range of 70 percent to 90 percent by 2030 before taking into account the effects of climate change, which would roughly double price rises again, Oxfam said.
“Now we have entered an age of growing crisis, of shock piled upon shock: vertiginous food price spikes and oil price hikes, devastating weather events, financial meltdowns and global contagion,” Oxfam said in a report entitled Growing a Better Future: Food Justice in a Resource-Constrained World. “The scale of the challenge is unprecedented, but so is the prize: a sustainable future in which everyone has enough to eat.”
“The international community is sleepwalking into an unprecedented and avoidable human development reversal,” it said.
Oxfam believes one way to tame food price inflation is to limit speculation in agricultural commodity futures markets. It also opposed support for using food as a feedstock for biofuels.
Stocking said she favored the introduction by regulators of position limits in agricultural commodities futures trading, adding that financial speculation aggravated price volatility.
“The vast imbalance in public investment in agriculture must be righted, redirecting the billions now being ploughed into unsustainable industrial farming in rich countries towards meeting the needs of small-scale food producers in developing countries,” the report said.
The report said the failure of the food system flowed from failures of government to regulate and to invest, which meant that companies, interest groups and elites had been able to plunder resources.
“Now the major powers, the old and the new, must cooperate, not compete, to share resources, build resilience, and tackle climate change,” it said.
“The economic crisis means that we have moved decisively beyond the era of the G8, when a few rich country governments tried to craft global solutions by and for themselves ... “The governments of poorer nations must also have a seat at the table, for they are on the front lines of climate change, where many of the battles — over land, water, and food — are being fought,” the report said.
Oxfam is launching a campaign for reform in 45 countries, supported by former Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and South African Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu.
Solutions envisaged by Oxfam focus on cutting out waste, especially of water, and curbing agriculture subsidies in rich countries. It also calls for prizing open closed markets and ending the domination of commodities and seeds trade by a handful of firms.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY AFP
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