By Owei Lakemfa
A NIGERIAN soldier on international peace keeping in Haiti went out looking for food to buy. There was a riot by hungry Haitians looking for food to eat. The angry mob killed the Nigerian. Four other Haitians are killed in the riots and the government falls.

Hungry and angry citizens were also out in the streets of Egypt. At first the usually desperate Hosni Mubarak government reached out for truncheons and guns. As the crisis became more serious, it sensibly deployed policemen to bake bread and attempt to flood the markets.

The situation across the world was desperate. In Jordan , 7,000 UN employees protested for more money; in February alone, inflation in the country had risen nine per cent. In Syria it had risen 20 per cent in six months with the government trying to cut subsidies. In Yemen , wheat prices doubled in one month.

In Africa, food riots exploded in Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire and Cameroon, while trade unions called a general strike over soaring food prices in Burkina Faso. Asia, of course, exploded with Indonesia having the trophy.

Europe is not left out of the crisis; inflation has been the highest while salaries on the average increased by two percent. Prices of gas, electricity and mortgages have risen significantly. The Italians started wondering if pizza will still be affordable to the poor while Rumania , which had exploded under communist rule is again rumbling like a latent volcano.

The UN and its World Food Programme estimate that 850 million human beings do not have enough to eat, and that a child dies of hunger every five seconds. Little wonder the world is in turmoil. But the sky rocketing prices of food is not primarily due to natural causes like poor weather and drought.

The world food crisis is not natural but man-made; the two primary causes being humanity’s marriage to market forces, and the poverty it engenders. The structuring of the world based on a single set of ideas which celebrates the market place, profit and a single leadership that cannot be controverted without consequences, is a major cause. It is like the domino theory.

When the godhead of this structure suffered mortgage failures, like SARS, Britain caught the influenza, its Northern Rock Bank collapsed. The Asian Stock Exchange shook to its foundations. The weak dollar in which oil is denominated, leads to greater oil demands by a Europe with a strong Euro. This demand puts pressure on oil and the commodity climbs to $117 per barrel.

The high price of oil triggers inflation in the world, much of course leads to higher food prices. To cushion the inflation, European farmers increase the price of wheat which is needed for bread. Consequently, prices of bread rise across the world with our country recording a 25 per cent rise. Related to this is the increased use of alternative oil.

As a long term answer to usually volatile oil prices, mankind is trying out agro or bio-fuel which is produced using agricultural products like grains. This has led to a food crop competition between hungry human beings and hungry industries.

Of course, the latter is winning. To compound matters, huge lands in countries like Brazil which had been used for food crops are now diverted to grow products for biofuel production. There is a lot of attraction for this, as foreign exchange can be earned by farmers.

It seems a return to the early colonial days when the colonies were made to produce cash crops like cocoa, rubber and tea for the European markets at the expense of food crops for local consumption.

The other major cause of world hunger is poverty. We have a globalization that favours a few affluent countries and deprives most of humanity its benefits. Even within countries like Nigeria , we have the few very rich, and the poor majority.

So no matter how much food is available, there will still be large chunks of the human race with rumbling stomachs. For example, the famine in Bangladesh that killed 1.5million people, coincided with the peak of food production in that country.

The presence of huge food production or availability, does not mean the absence of hunger or malnutrition. In other words, no matter how much food the world produces, the poverty-stricken may simply have no money to put food on their table. So we need a new world order or an alternative structure.

If the food crisis over takes Nigeria, it will be due to the myophia of our elites. First, we are lucky that we do not have natural disasters like floods or drought except the desertification we fail to check. Secondly, with the possible exception of bread, our food in the main are locally produced and quite diverse.

Even the rising price of rice is due to the fact that our country abandoned its vast local production in places like Abakaliki, Ofada and the Nupe areas of Kwara State . We have high yielding lands, so what is necessary is the encouragement of farmers and a functional land and food policy. This should include investment in rural infrastructure, storage facilities, increased food production and agricultural subsidies. Part of the so called “Excess Crude” can be used to fund the policy.

Also, we need to start becoming self- sufficient, rely less on importation and the dictates of externally-driven and self-serving policies like “market forces”. For humanity, the time to have a rethink is now; we can still prevent famine in our world.