Free translation
By VELIA GOVAERE - Professor UNED
A permanent ethical shadow accompanies civilizational development. Scientific and technological advances are already translating into an agricultural revolution that has the capacity to completely eradicate the world's food shortages. But ethics lags behind technology and greed prevails over solidarity. This has never been truer than now.
It is not new. As early as 1821, Percy Shelley condemned a civilization that advanced indifferent to suffering. "We have more scientific and economic knowledge than we need for an equitable distribution of the products they multiply." He was absolutely right. Politics is the condensate of social ethics and, as such, responsible for the redistribution of wealth, not science or economics.
Food security cannot be guaranteed country by country and in isolation. Therefore, the conditions of trade have an impact on food. Already in ancient Rome, Egyptian wheat ensured social peace. That is why international reconciliation, marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the emergence of globalization, created the ideal historical conditions for humanity to overcome the great historical challenge of hunger. It was the peace dividend.
The linkage of complementary and articulated international food production opened the door to the most widespread food distribution in history. Globalization and its subsequent growth of economies and employment created conditions of understanding and cooperation among peoples. The United Nations World Food Program (WFP), conceived for the total eradication of hunger, was its most emblematic corollary. In parts of the world, hunger was reduced; in some, it was even eradicated. The United Nations was able to envision a broad human development agenda for all the nations of the earth and translated it into eight flagship Millennium Challenges. The first was to eradicate poverty and hunger.
It was a civilizing ethical process never before conceived by the predatory human species. It was one of the moments in which humanity shone the brightest, at least rhetorically. This dream, based on concord, was stimulated or hindered by the specific policies of each country. Appropriate redistributive policies, especially in China, effectively lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and eradicated hunger. In other places it did not have the same impact. Neoliberal policies weakened the redistributive capacity of the state. In some places, there was protectionism, in others deregulation. Mercantilist tendencies became widespread, leaving the fight against poverty and the eradication of hunger to blind market forces.
Two major external constraints on policy came against the best collective resolutions. The negative impact of climate change first affected food production. Floods in China are causing the worst winter wheat crop in its history. A drought in the United States and Europe is threatening wheat production. Monstrous temperatures of 50 degrees Celsius are wilting wheat in India and Pakistan. Weather factors make bread on the table scarcer. Russia and Ukraine are the world's great barns. Nearly 30% of world exports of wheat, 18% of maize and more than 70% of sunflower oil are blocked by the conflict. These three foods are key components of the FAO commodity price index. Ukraine alone meets more than half of WFP's wheat. With multidimensional, short- and long-term planetary impacts, the aftermath of this war has a dramatic immediate impact on worsening hunger. While hunger plagues the poor of the poor world, grain rots in Ukraine.
The war directly affects food distribution. But its indirect impacts are also serious. In agricultural inputs and fuel prices, its negative effect is evident. Russia is the main producer of fertilizers and the second largest producer of oil. Equally important is the general economic impact of the war on food access difficulties: reduced economic activity, disruption of trade, employment restrictions and reduced incomes dramatize the purchasing power of the most vulnerable households.
Then came Covid-19. On its eve, 100 million human beings still did not meet their basic food needs, according to The Economist (19-05-2022). In two years of pandemic that figure doubled. Economic paralysis, unemployment, declining incomes, disruption of agricultural input production chains and transportation crises combined to aggravate international food security. It was a near-perfect storm. To complete its fury, the hurricane of Russia's invasion of Ukraine was missing.
Least developed countries have very limited public policy instruments to tackle the looming food crisis. Widespread inflation is tightening financial conditions for poor and indebted countries. The pressure on their currencies makes food imports even more expensive. And this creates a vicious circle that we in Costa Rica know all too well: food prices that rise as a result of currency depreciation increase inflation and provoke more aggressive monetary policies, which in turn make credit for agricultural inputs increasingly more expensive. There is no end in sight. Choosing not to subsidize food and prop up the currency increases social malaise. And the worst thing is that everything tends to happen: credit becomes more expensive, the currency is devalued, reserves are lost and food becomes more and more expensive.
No wonder the FAO commodity price index is today above its 60-year highs. A real catastrophe. And while the United States gives 40 billion in military aid for the defense of Ukraine, it offers it only 1.5 billion in food aid. A scandalous contrast of priorities!
The representatives of the multinationals were unanimous, in Davos, in their concerns about a globalization that is uncoupling. If only they were wrong! "It takes a world to feed a world, and the way the world does it is through trade," posits The Economist. I don't know how many more reasons are needed to understand that this war must stop. But geopolitics has reasons that ethics does not understand. We are facing a "collapse of the world food system," says the UN Secretary General. The anguish of unattainable food should take precedence over any other agenda. Only peace in Ukraine can stop the immoral spiral of world hunger.
