A relentless and roiling global famine amid abundance is, if anything more than monopoly capitalism preying on the working peoples and the planet, a harbinger of upheavals and, ultimately, revolutions for a better future.
At a glance:
- The current global food crisis, the largest one in modern history, is mainly caused and prolonged by colonial plunder, TNC profiteering, and ongoing imperialist wars of occupation and rivalry.
- Rural peoples and the poorest of the Global South bear the brunt of the three major crises of our time – the skyrocketing food prices, the climate emergency, and the renewed push for land grabbing.
- The upcoming UNFSS +2 Stocktaking is, at worst, a vile attempt to lock us into colonial and corporate-led false climate solutions at the expense of rural people’s rights.
- A radical transformation of our food systems is not optional but is necessary to solve the food, energy, and climate crisis, ensure a just and equitable climate transition, and forge a viable future for our planet and people.
Three global food crises in the last 15 years – each one worse than the last – are not a mere coincidence, but expected byproducts of imperialist policies that enable profiteering from plunder, famines, and destitution especially for the Global South.
Today, a compounding poly-crisis of climate emergencies, soaring energy prices, and escalating warmongering among imperialists is exacerbating the food crisis and confronting the working peoples of the Global South. In contrast, the global billionaire class in imperialist countries has hit the jackpot – increasing their wealth by U2.7 billion a day since 2020.
This July, the UNFSS +2 Stocktaking Moment will take place, a controversial rejoinder to the corporate-led UN Food Systems Summit of 2021. With Bill Gates-funded platforms still at its helm, the Stocktaking represents a continuing power grab of imperialist TNCs to shape the future of global and national food systems.
It is therefore important, if we are to emerge stronger as movements and advance just, equitable, healthy, and sustainable pathways to a better future, to understand the root causes and characteristics of the current global food crisis.
An extremely fragile food system
Since the beginning of 2020, food prices throughout the world have skyrocketed, reaching highs not seen since the Second World War. In just two years, the cost of the world’s food basket rose by 38% on average – wiping out all the supposed gains in eradicating hunger and poverty in the last decades.
In fact, we are in the midst of what the World Food Programme describes as the largest food crisis in modern history. Official estimates suggest that one in four people cannot afford to eat a healthy diet by the end of 2021 while the majority survives by cutting back on meals and other expenses.
While the COVID-19 pandemic provided a palpable excuse when this food crisis first unfolded, its rapid decay and escalating severity points to a deeper issue – our current global food system is extremely fragile.
Today, it’s clear that this global food system has continuously failed the poor of the Global South, even in periods of so-called ‘prosperity’ and ‘declining food prices.’
Contrary to prevailing narratives that imply this is caused by food shortages such as United Nations’ call to “produce enough food by 2050,” the world is producing far more than enough food to feed itself. In fact, year after year since WWII, rural food producers are breaking records in cereal, vegetables, meat, and edible oil production.
Despite the Russia-NATO-Ukraine war, we are producing more than enough food to feed twice our global population.
Why, then, are we still amid another food crisis?
1. It’s a profiteering bonanza for a handful of TNCs and billionaire speculators from the US, EU, UK, China, and Japan.
There’s a clear pattern of accelerated global plunder happening today: billionaires are profiteering from the world’s poorest through speculative inflation.
In 2022, poorest households in the 48 worst-hit nations spent an extra US$9 billion on food alone. In these same countries, extreme poverty has risen to levels not seen since the turn of the century.
Over the same period, the combined net profit of the top four grain TNCs soared to a whopping US$14 billion[1]. Collectively, these four companies– US’s Archer-Daniel-Midlands, Bunge, and Cargill, and EU-based Louis Dreyfus Company– control 70-90% of the world’s traded grains including wheat, corn, and rice.
US grain trader Cargill alone posted US$7 billion in net income last year – a 26% jump from 2021 – while ADM posted US$4.3 billion. As two of the world’s largest exporters of wheat engaged in a military, it’s clear that both firms profited immensely from Russia-Ukraine war.
In a conference call, Bunge chief financial officer John Neppl admitted: “What we’ve always found is that in times of high volatility, high prices and high volume is when we have the opportunity to make the most money.”
In fact, grain trade amid the war has been so lucrative that mining giant Glencore’s agriculture business Viterra posted US$54 billion in revenue last year – a 35% increase, while other TNCs like Vitol has announced they’re going back to wheat trading.
Meanwhile, wheat flour prices have more than doubled in Pakistan since last year while some African cities has seen flour prices triple.
Indeed, while only about 20%of food is traded globally, the price increase in global food markets has an outsized influence in domestic food inflation in many countries, especially net food-importing nations.
UNCTAD has already warned that financial speculation is worsening the food crisis, as bets outstrip hedges by 70-80% at the end of last year.
These extremely egregious wagers on famines have immensely benefited hedge funds (such as US’s Vanguard and BlackRock), banks, and speculators – many of which are also shareholders and owners of grain trading companies ADM and Bunge, among others. EU’s mining giant Glencore PLC alone, which owns Vitterra, has reported a net profit of $17.3bn for 2022, mainly from its grain trading and speculation.
In every single ‘solutions-making’ conference hosted by IFIs and governments, including the G7 Summit and the recent G20 ministerial meeting, there had been no talks about unwinding the highly leveraged financialization of food systems nor sanctions against these imperialist profiteers.
Indeed, decades of unequal trade agreements and neoliberal policies co-sponsored by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have set the stage of today’s global food crisis.
The current neoliberal food system is so rigged that the increased hunger and misery of the many in the Global South translates directly to more profits in the hands of the richest 1% in imperialist nations.
2. It’s becoming more violent than ever, triggered by intensifying inter-imperialist rivalry
Wars of aggression and inter-imperialist rivalries are pouring gasoline over the wildfire of hunger and suffering in the Global South. The decade-long stalemate between old and new imperialist enemies is crumbling as a result of the US and NATO’s aggressive military expansion in Europe beginning in 2021 and in Asia this year.
For one, the ongoing Russia-NATO-Ukraine war in the Donbas region has worsened the global food crisis in a myriad of ways. The global food crisis reached a fever pitch in 2022 as imperialist profiteers made bank on the current food system’s dependence on Ukraine and Russia for synthetic fertilizer and grain stocks. Just this week, Putin has exited from the Black Sea Grain deal, which sent the prices of wheat futures to jump once more – putting pressure to Asian countries that supply food from the region. Even before this, wheat prices have already been 25% higher than last year.
Meanwhile, in Asia, the US military has been busy creating what it’s calling a ‘first-island chain’ of deterrence against China. Hell-bent on recovering its prime position, the US imperialists have been deploying political and military realignment strategies in the region. The declining superpower has been fully supporting dictators and authoritarians in Asia, including Zionist-Israel’s Netanyahu, India’s Modi, the Philippines’ Duterte and Marcos, and PNG’s Marape among others. In fact, four new US bases have been carved out in the Philippines while the US Defense inked an unprecedented navy access deal in Papua New Guinea.
Increasing aerial bombardments on farming areas of Indigenous Peoples and rural communities in India, the Philippines, and West Papua among others have been swept under the rug to pave the way for US’ military alliances, including the QUAD and AUKUS.
Globally, the last three years signified a huge uptick in proxy wars and armed conflicts in the Global South. From the US-backed military coup in Sudan to the increasingly China-backed DRC-Rwanda conflict, wars remain the biggest obstacle for food security for at least 80% of Africa’s hungry population, even causing the resurgence of famines.
The United States has also refused to heed calls to drop sanctions, especially on food and agriculture, for countries asserting against its domination such as the DPRK, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, and Sudan. Instead, the US has included more countries to its blacklist of trade, further weaponizing hunger as a tool of imperialist war.
3. Debt collapse and currency devaluation are shrinking policy spaces for the Global South
Far from recovery, economies of the Global South today are being crushed under the weight of colonial and unequal debt regime, reaching USD 92 trillion last year.
While wealthier countries spend 3.5% of their GDP on debt service on average, Global South countries pay double of that, at 7.4% on average up to 14% of their annual GDP. For most, this represents a portion of the pie higher than their education, health, and public services spending combined.
Image source: UNCTAD
Food importing countries are by far the worst-hit of the unfolding debt crisis, as shown by the economic collapse and the explosive food crisis at its heels in Sri Lanka and Zambia among others. Today, at least 39 poor countries are at high-risk of debt default or have already defaulted as short-term loans pile up since the pandemic.
Worse, poor countries have to pay more for importing the same amount of food last year, amounting to a record high of US$2 trillion. This is due to rising interest rates in the US strengthening the dollar and subsequent currency devaluation of already debt distressed countries like Haiti, Sri Lanka, Egypt, and Pakistan.
Even the UN Secretary General Guterres has echoed calls of least developing countries to create mechanisms to wind down the usurious interest rates leveled against poor nations today.
Instead of heeding calls to cancel the highly unequal debts of the Global South, however, institutional lenders like the IMF and the World Bank are doubling down on facilitating conditional loans. Through schemes like the debt moratorium extension, adaptation swaps, and de-risking finance for mobilizing private wealth, IFIs are kicking the debt bucket down the road.
And this renewed push for privatization of public financing is even more alarming today, as private banks in the United States, EU and other imperialist countries own much of the debt held by Global South countries. US firms such as Vanguard, BlackRock, and PIMCO, which also own most monopoly TNCs in food and agriculture, are the top bondholders for sovereign debt in many debt-distressed countries.
This insistence in “reforming” the neoliberal financial architecture is still forcing poor countries to choose between their survival today and their peoples’ future.
4. Domestic elites in the Global South are betting against farmers’ and consumers’ rights.
The neoliberal foundations of today’s food and commodity trade regimes are coming into full play as attracting foreign direct investments are being prioritized at the expense of stable food prices and domestic supply.
Denationalized food systems that rely heavily on trade and foreign direct investments are rooted in colonial ties; once subservient to imperialist demands as “Banana Republics,” formerly colonized nations are now “exporting countries” with “access” to “Western markets” thanks to trade agreements mediated by transnational corporations.
Unlike the food crises in the past, little to no countries have instituted export bans and reprieves despite clear calls from rural and peasant activists to protect local and essential products to leave the country. In both the 2008 and the 2011 food crises, the WTO, IMF, and the World Bank have blamed in chorus the “protectionist policies” that banned food export for the high food inflation.
The reality, however, is that food prices have continued to soar since 2020 despite as little as 1% of food trade being affected by so-called protectionist policies. While the international old guards like the World Bank and IMF praised most of the governments for keeping their doors open for agricultural plunder, it did not acknowledge the fact that policies that prioritize domestic food production can save lives and temper rising prices, especially in mainly agrarian nations.
Moreover, a new wave of agreements on agricultural tariff in production, deregulation of exports and imports control, and denationalization of food agencies have ensued in the last three years.
In Pakistan, the government banned fresh milk from local peasant communities in its markets, in favor of transnational dairy corporations. According to Pakistan Kissan Mazdoor Tehreek, around 95% of the country’s milk and dairy supply come from small and landless peasants and the new policy will likely cause crises for both producers and consumers.
Local elites in India are also snapping up indigenous lands and farmlands at an unprecedented rate for projects ranging from plantations and mines to residential and commercial development. New land laws and policies in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Sierra Leone, among others in Africa and Latin America are posed to privatize state-owned lands to attract foreign investments.
As it is, land concentration today is more severe than in at least the last three decades. Transnational and domestic elites own up to 70 percent of the world’s total farmlands while farmers in the Global South feed most the world as smallholder farmers, serfs, and agricultural workers.
This new wave of policies aimed at attracting FDIs by opening up lands and domestic markets to corporate and foreign plunder flies in the face of even the modest goals of ‘addressing inequality’, much less eradicate hunger. Instead, these are an extension of privatization policies of wealth transfer to a narrow global elite using public coffers, at the expense of people’s rights and welfare.
5. False climate solutions peddled by the UNFSS+2 are bound to exacerbate the crisis.
And these neoliberal policies are at the heart of the UN Food Systems Summit of 2021 and unsurprisingly, the UNFSS +2 Stocktaking Moment this July.
As extreme weather events continue to demolish the paper-thin safeguards of food baskets and lifelines of rural producers in the Global South, false climate solutions are championed by corporate-bankrolled alliances at the UNFSS +2.
From corporate-led and technology-driven silver bullets (e.g., vertical farming and carbon capture) to outright colonial and plunderous schemes (e.g., carbon trading and top-down conservation), current ‘solutions’ are being planned and/or implemented at the expense of rural people’s rights to land, resources, and future.
In Democratic Republic of Congo, where more than half the population cannot afford to eat once a day, lithium and cobalt mining for electric cars are violently displacing rural peoples. Myanmar’s military junta is colluding with foreign imperialists to expand lithium mining atop the corpses of its genocidal rampage. New policies that deregulate rare earth mining and renewables are being minted or sealed into laws in Chile, Argentina, the Philippines, and elsewhere.
As it is, national determined contributions towards net zero are promising at least 1.2 billion hectares of land towards conservation and other schemes – demonstrating its huge impact to rural peoples of the world.
However, close scrutiny to the ‘nature-based solutions’ peddled by the UNFSS show (1) insistence on the same-old fossil-fuel-hungry agriculture like agricultural intensification, biofuels, and genetic modification; (2) agnostic land reform programs aimed at subverting peasant land rights to corporate interests; and (3) corporate capture of food and agriculture governance through multistakeholderism in all aspects and scope of decision-making.
Worse, UNFSS +2 is poised to influence climate financing mechanisms such as the Food Systems window of the Joint SDG Fund and the Loss and Damage Fund to be tabled at the upcoming COP 28. By claiming to be a ‘People’s Summit’ for food systems transformation, the UNFSS is trying to lock up future climate actions and financing in the sector within its corporate-led framework.
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The rural poor of the Global South are on the losing end in a longstanding and worsening global food crisis that is completely avoidable.
The global food system has, for so long, failed the working peoples of the world, especially the rural poor in the Global South. Our food systems, and our rural food producers are chained to an endless cycle of poverty, hunger, and despair. The shackles of feudal exploitation – landlessness, onerous lending, and land grabbing – are leaving food producers without agency in charting their food systems.
Whether it’s called stakeholder capitalism or green capitalism, there’s a delusional narrative among the powerful minority at the World Economic Forum and the Group of 7 that this food crisis and the climate crisis are a fluke. That a so-called ‘perfect storm’ of events have created this rather temporary global inconvenience (read: catastrophe) or that the peoples of the world will take this blatant profiteering sitting down.
With imperialists and their TNCs at the helm of global food and agriculture decision making, and local landed elites in domestic governance, it’s clear that a truly radical food systems transformation is in the hands of rural peoples.
The rise in rural unrest in the past few years proved once again that hunger is the well of national uprisings and the unjust food systems its spring.
The fight for just, equitable, healthy, and sustainable food systems is inevitably an extension of our fight against monopoly capitalism and its agents of plunder.
[1] Calculated based on publicly available company reports and press releases before April 2023.
Written by JC Mercado, PCFS Research.