'As the world braces to face a deepening food crisis, the Pacific islands will have to chalk out their own survival strategies.'


The world is in the vice grip of a food crisis. Food prices, on an average, have sky rocketed by as much as 60 percent in the past 12 months and by more than 80 percent over the last three years. No country in the world has been spared.

For the first time in several decades, the world has begun to witness unrest related to the cost and supply of food. As well as the well reported food riots in Haiti, Egypt and Bangladesh, in the past few weeks, there have been violent incidents that have broken out in Italy over pasta prices, in Mexico over the price of tortilla and tofu products in Indonesia.

It is perfectly understandable to see why tempers are running so high and resulting in violence in the streets. All the foods in questionŃwhether in Bangladesh, Egypt, Italy or MexicoŃare staple foods on which people have depended for hundreds if not thousands of years.

Staple foods like rice, wheat and other grains have, by and large, been available plentifully and at affordable prices. But over the past few years this has changed dramatically and despite the economic boom in many parts of the world, staple food has become less and less affordable.

Food stocks are now acknowledged to be at their lowest in several grain growing countries in the past several decades and many countries have already placed bans on the exports of grain in a bid to shore up their own domestic food stocksŃsomething that has created increasing disappointment in the farming communities in these countries because it has hit lucrative export revenue.

Last month, India banned the export of flour amid protests from its wheat farmers. As a consequence, Indian flour prices have not only risen sharply in other countries, but stocks have quickly disappeared from supermarket shelves depriving expatriate Indians and South Asians living in other countries of their staple diet. This is beginning to affect other ethnic communities living away from their home countries as well, in today’s increasingly mobile global population scenario.

The crisis is tightening its grip on all nations, whether rich or poor. As the world’s granaries in the tropics clamp down on exports to build up their own dwindling food stocks, the rich industrialised world, now used to importing food from all over the world, is beginning to be hit hard. Food prices in New Zealand, for instance, rose a whopping 28 percent in just one year. Similar double digit increases are routinely being reported from other developed nations across the world.

In the past, staple foods have never been in short supply unless as a consequence of war or natural disasters like floods, earthquakes, droughts and devastating pest swarms like locusts (late last month landslides caused a food crisis in the highlands of Papua New Guinea prompting the government to declare an emergency and call in the army to tackle a looming riotous situation because of low food stocks). What is worrisome is that the present food crisis is neither rooted in natural disasters nor wars but is a consequence of purely man-made factors.

And it’s not just spiralling oil prices that have contributed to these red hot food prices. While oil prices have definitely played a major role in adding considerably to costs of transportationŃparticularly in remote parts of the world like the Pacific IslandsŃit is rapidly changing land use, ecological factors and economic and population growth that are now being identified as having snowballed into the present crisis over the past few decades.

Blitzing economic growth in countries like China and IndiaŃpredominantly agrarian economiesŃhas changed land use almost beyond recognition. Millions of hectares of agricultural land have been converted for building cities and housing people and constructing urban facilities for them as they make their transition from subsistence living into a modern urban living style.

The runaway growth in fuel prices has also triggered a race in developing biofuels, turning large tracts of land for growing produce not for human consumption but to be mixed with automobile fuel to make it cheaperŃand cleaner.

Farmers are now finding it easier and more profitable to grow biofuels for auto engines than food for the human belly. The biofuel race has also gripped several of the Pacific Islands including Papua New Guinea and Samoa, though at a much lower scale than in some other nations.

In addition, ecological factors such as climate change and sea level rise have waterlogged traditional farming areas including  some countries of the Pacific like the Northern Marianas.

In other islands, coastal coconut plantations are being threatened by the higher salinity wrought by the rising oceans. 

The severe crisis led to a meeting of global experts in Switzerland in March at the end of which it was concluded that drastic measures had to be taken before the crisis spiralled out of control.

Significantly, after exiting the agricultural sector nearly two decades ago, the World Bank has now re-entered the field to help sort out the growing mess.

Economists believe that even if urgent measures were taken immediately, food prices are likely to remain high for at least as many as twenty years in the futureŃparticularly in economies that grow less of their own food.

Over the decades, the Pacific Islands have increasingly forsaken their traditional agricultural and horticultural practices to more easily available imported supermarket foods.

This has not only resulted in changed land use or the neglect of otherwise fertile land; but also contributed negatively to Pacific Islanders’ health by an over-reliance on cheap processed foods dumped from overseas. 

As the world braces to face a deepening food crisis, the Pacific islands will have to chalk out their own survival strategies. Their governments have no choice but to encourage indigenous food production and try their best to minimise their reliance on increasingly costly exports propelled by the triple forces of global scarcity, competition for demand and out of control fuel pricesŃa race no Pacific Island has the muscle to compete in, much less win.