In
a broadcast interview with Daniel Mermet on French radio*, former
UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler, stated that
the current world food crisis is not due to nature, but to man.

Introduction
to the interview from the web site of 'Là-bas si j'y suis'*:

"A
return with Jean Ziegler to the causes for food riots that are appearing
all over the world. Far from being a scourge like a drought or an
invasion of locusts, there are people who are responsible for the
famines that have struck thousands of men, women and children –
the speculators and their logic of maximizing profit."

The rest of this article on the issue of world hunger is largely based,
in terms of facts and numbers, on the interview with Jean Ziegler
– "La faim du monde".

World
Hunger

Over the
past few months in multiple places in the world we have been seeing
riots caused by food shortages – the revolt of the famished.
There recently have been hunger-related riots in Egypt, Haiti, Morocco,
Mauritania, Madagascar, Thailand and other poor countries. This is
a long-time issue that has cruelly affected the world for several
decades. Every day 100,000 people die from silent hunger, until very
recently seen as a normal phenomenon by the people in the North. What
is taking place today is the insurrection of the famished.

The explosion
of food prices and riots by the starving people have occurred not
only in the developing world but also in the rich countries. According
to Jean Ziegler there are today 854 million permanently undernourished
people in the world. The price of rice has risen by 53 %, wheat by
47 %, for instance. The rise of oil has obviously contributed to the
rise in the prices of commodities but there are also other factors
involved.

There are
in the world today 2.2 billion people who barely earn a living wage,
who every day experience the fear of not having enough food for tomorrow.
While people in the rich countries spend on an average 10 –
15 % of their incomes on food, people in the poor countries spend
80 – 90 %. This sudden explosion of food prices is having a
disastrous effect on the lives of poor people all over the world.
The price of rice has doubled, wheat is up by 30 %, corn by more than
74 %.

Protests,
even riots are going to intensify. People will be forced to migrate
because of lack of food – but where are they going to go?

We are
seeing the specter of August 1792 when the famished people of Paris
stormed and ransacked the Tuileries Palace, an event that was going
to change the world.

The reaction
in the West comes from fear of destabilization – of the market
and of people's behavior. Cases of malnutrition are not limited to
poor countries; even in the United States there are severe cases of
lack of nourishment.

We haven't
seen the end of the riots. This is just the beginning.

International financial institutions rule over the developing countries

What is
the cause for this sudden explosion? The causes are not natural calamities.
The causes are political. Countries that were formerly self-supporting
have become dependent on import of food products, because of the demands
of the international institutions – the International Monetary
Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization – to change
their cultures from what is needed for their daily food to export
cultures, such as coffee, sugar cane, cotton, peanuts, etc., leaving
out family farming. This neocolonial meddling in the internal affairs
of third-world countries has led to a situation where these countries
are no more self-sufficient, but almost totally dependent on import
for their daily nourishment.

Wherever
the IMF imposes a plan for 'structural adjustment', famine increases.
The people are now forced to depend on imported food and other commodities.
There is privatization of veterinary services and of transportation.
There are no roads and the trucks arrive late or can't make it to
the region in need of transportation. So what happens? The farmers
can't afford the price of vaccination or vermifuge and their animals
get sick and die. The harvest rots or the new seeds don't arrive.
Famine follows.

What forces
countries to agree to these dictates? They are all prisoners of enormous
debts to the banks in the North and in order to have those loans refinanced
they need to export what those financial masters demand. In order
just to pay the interest on those loans, they are rendered powerless
vis-à-vis the financial behemoths in the North. The external
debt, the murderous consequence of decades of dependence on the rich
countries, renders impossible the freeing of these countries to enable
the people to become self-sufficient without interference from the
international financial institutions. They were in need of help, they
got disaster.

Farmers
in those countries can not support their families, the costs of fertilizers
and herbicides are rising, they cannot afford to buy food and they
have to leave their farms and move to the shantytowns of the big cities.
The needs of the native people for a decent livelihood are of no importance.
Instead they are being robbed. This decline in the lives of the indigenous
people has been going on since the first colonial era.

The plans
for 'structural adjustments' are ratified by our ministers of finance,
by our governments, under constant pressure from the big international
corporations who are making enormous profits. In order to rid the
world of these crimes to humanity, we need to mobilize public opinion.
In a country as profoundly democratic as France or the U.S. it should
be possible for the government to raise the relatively small amount
of money it would take to render these countries self-sufficient,
to be able to afford pesticides, fertilizers, transportation for a
subsistence agriculture.

Certainly
there are also natural causes. Six years of severe drought in Australia,
probably linked to global warming, have taken a severe toll on Australian
agriculture. There are also natural reasons such as the growing middle
classes in India and China being able to afford to eat better and
especially to eat more meat. Increased demand, increased prices.

However,
there are two major criminals that have not been given sufficient
attention and which must be dealt with.

Speculation
in commodities – the first culprit

The immediate
cause for the rise in food prices is the speculation in commodities
mainly at the Chicago stock exchange. According to Jean Ziegler, one
thousand billion dollars of the world money supply have been lost
between October and January through market speculation on the world's
stock exchanges. The big speculators, the hedge funds – that's
not the Red Cross, says Jean Ziegler – now speculate in soya,
rice, millet, wheat and corn. They are looking for maximum profit
in agricultural raw materials and are thus pushing the prices up to
an explosive level. They can buy up Brazil's entire soya harvest with
only 5 % of real capital. This way they risk very little if the harvest
turns out to be less than expected but they stand a good chance of
making astronomical profits.

The cause
is the speculation in commodities, the hedge funds that create money
with money. It doesn't make money from production, from an industry,
from creating something of value. It is a way of making gold with
air ("Ils font de l'or avec du vent"). The speculators are
not bothered with food security in the world; they go where they have
to go to make maximum profits.

One thousand
billion dollars of inherited property have been lost since October
in the world's money markets which are no more profitable. The financial
markets have collapsed. The margin of profit is negative. So where
do they go? They go where the speculation is worthwhile and that is
in agricultural raw materials.

Those speculators
are criminals because we are dealing with crimes against humanity.

Since the
bi-polar world system that existed before 1991 and the fall of the
Soviet Union, there have been no obstacles to the savage capitalism
that has now conquered the world.

UNCTAD
– United Nations Conference on Trade and Development –
is trying to rein in the WTO, which is the neoliberal institution
that above all supports deregulation and privatization. UNCTAD is
making efforts to exert a stabilizing influence on speculation in
the commodities markets. However, capitalist market forces are too
strong to be subdued by the well-intentioned efforts of a UN organization.

The
World Food Program is in danger

The world’s
largest humanitarian organization, the World Food Program (WFP), attempts
to aid the people of the most afflicted countries. The survival of
over 75 million people depends entirely on trucks that bring them
food. People in Darfur for instance receive bags of powdered milk,
bags of rice, water, just to cover the most basic needs of the refugees.
They are on the edge of starvation and without food and water an emaciated
person can only live for three days. After three days, he dies.

In Bangladesh, in Madhya Pradesh (India), in Da Kao (Vietnam), very
often the only meal the children get is the biscuit with added vitamins,
the glass of milk from the food program that is now running the risk
of coming to an end. The WFP has lost 40 % of its funds. Today they
need $500 million just to be able to continue their program of supplying
food to starving children. In a few days they will have to stop supplying
school lunches, which 3.2 million children profit from. They are lacking,
among other things, money to buy gasoline for their delivery trucks,
but generally they need today – not tomorrow – millions
of dollars for the continuation of their programs. The executive director
of WFP said on April 17 in an email to Jean Ziegler: "In a few
days, at the very latest next week, we are going to stop school lunches."

The World
Bank launched an appeal to the rich countries of the North, relayed
by the Secretary General of the U.N., Ban Ki Moon, saying that we
have to give those $500 million. But in spite of the modest budget
of WFP, donor countries have not provided sufficient support and the
CERF’s (the UN’s Central Emergency Response Fund) response
to hunger emergencies will be limited and delayed without substantially
increased funding. (Are We Approaching a Global Food Crisis - Between
Soaring Food Prices and Food Aid Shortage - by Katarina Wahlberg)

Biofuels (Syngenta, Monsanto, Cargill, etc.) – the other
major culprit

President
Bush is now concluding that it is necessary to replace fossil fuel
by biofuel which is derived from raw vegetable materials (biomass).
The U.S. launched, at the cost of $6 billion to the producers, production
of ethanol for this purpose. Last year the U.S burned 138 million
tons of corn and hundreds of tons of grain for these very purposes.
In Brazil the culture of cane sugar has expanded immensely at the
detriment of the culture of food products, in spite of the fact that
there are already enormous numbers of undernourished people in the
country. This is also the case for the United States by the way. In
the EU a decree has recently been passed that says that by 2020, in
12 years, 10 % of fuels in the 27 countries of the European Union
have to come from food. There will be scientific progress in this
domain though, since it will be possible in a future to produce ethanol
from agricultural waste, the ears and stems of corn will be burned
instead of the food part in order to produce ethanol. The only problem
is that the cost of this process is much higher than the burning of
the entire plant.

The heads
of the three international financial organizations, Robert Zoellick
of the World Bank, Dominique Strauss-Kahn of the IMF and Pascal Lamy
of the WTO, are certainly well aware of the catastrophe that is underway,
says Jean Ziegler. All three are convinced that subsistence agriculture
must now receive an absolute priority, convinced of the urgency to
radically change their policies, abandon the programs of structural
adjustment and restrain forced privatization – the neoliberal
policies in the world which amount to a unilateral disarming of the
developing countries for the profit of the multinational corporations
and of the rich countries in the North.

Jean Ziegler
seems to believe in the good intentions of the three men who head
the transnational institutions.[1] He says, however, that there is
not much they can accomplish against the enormous power of the multinational
private companies (Monsanto, Syngenta, Cargill, Bung, etc.) who, the
same as the commodity speculators, have one principal goal –
that is maximum profit, which is what the shareholders are demanding.
There is a balance of power between these institutions, and behind
the IMF there are the private transcontinental companies, the huge
banks and financial groups.

Without
a total awareness in our respective countries of the looming catastrophe,
this huge problem of world hunger will not find a solution. We must
realize that this daily massacre of hunger is a crime that we can
not tolerate.

The rich
people in the world have to be made aware of this daily massacre that
is taking place right under our eyes, in the third-world countries
and even in the United States. It is strictly criminal. It is a question
of crimes against humanity. The awareness of having the means to act
against these crimes must make us impose radical change on our governments
against the interests of the transnational institutions. Without these
radical changes even the multinational institutions, says Jean Ziegler,
can do nothing. It's up to us, the people, to rebel and by means of
reasoned and democratic political acts practice international solidarity.

Addendum
on Ethanol:

Ethanol
And Biodiesel From Crops Not Worth The Energy

ScienceDaily
(Jul. 6, 2005) – ITHACA, N.Y. – Turning plants such as
corn, soybeans and sunflowers into fuel uses much more energy than
the resulting ethanol or biodiesel generates, according to a new Cornell
University and University of California-Berkeley study. "There
is just no energy benefit to using plant biomass for liquid fuel,"
says David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell.
"These strategies are not sustainable."

In terms
of energy output compared with energy input for ethanol production,
the study found that:

* 'Là-bas
si j'y suis' , Daniel Mermet's brainchild, is a progressive ("altermondialiste")
radio program – its title could be translated as meaning 'Over
there if I am there' – the implication clearly being that we
must pay attention to what is happening in the world. In 2006 this
"island of freedom" was threatened by government-subsidized
France Inter with being taken off the air. Within twenty days, 200,000
people had signed a petition to “Save Là-bas”.
The protests succeeded, even though the time slot for the airing was
changed to 3 o'clock on Friday afternoons, not a prime-time slot,
by any means. Fortunately, the program's web site archives all the
broadcasts, so anyone with a web browser can listen to them.

On April
18, 2008 Daniel Mermet interviewed Jean Ziegler, a French-Swiss national
who until March this year had been the United Nations Special Rapporteur
on the Right to Food. He is a senior professor of sociology at the
University of Geneva and at the Sorbonne, Paris. He is also the author
of 'L'Empire de la honte' (Empire of Shame - A Conversation with Jean
Ziegler)

Footnote:

[1] Olivier de Schutter, Professor of Human Rights at the University
of Louvain, Belgium, does not agree with Jean Ziegler on that account.
To the question: "Are the international financial institutions
responsible [for the increasingly serious problems of world hunger]?"
– he answers a resounding "Yes. For twenty years, they
have seriously underestimated the necessity to invest in agriculture
– the World Bank recognized this at the end of 2007." Schutter
was appointed on March 26 to be the successor of Jean Ziegler, the
United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food by the Counsel
for Human Rights, based in Geneva.

Here is a unique chance to help this article to be read by thousands
of people more. You just Digg it, and it will appear in the home page
of Digg.com and thousands more will read it. Digg is nothing but an
vote, the article with most votes will go to the top of the page. So,
as you read just give a digg and help thousands more to read this article.