A Man-Made Famine

There are many causes behind the world food crisis, but one chief villain: World Bank head, Robert Zoellick. For anyone who understands the current food crisis, itis hard to listen to the head of the World Bank, RobertZoellick, without gagging.
Earlier this week, Zoellick waxed apocalyptic about the consequences of the global surge in prices, arguing that free trade had become a humanitarian necessity, to ensure that poor people had enough to eat. The current wave of food riots has already claimed the prime minister of Haiti, and there have been protests around the world, from Mexico, to Egypt, to India.The reason for the price rise is perfect storm of high oil prices, an increasing demand for meat in developing countries, poor harvests, population growth, financial speculation and biofuels. But prices have fluctuated before. The reason we're seeing such misery as a result of this particular spike has everything to do withZoellick and his friends.Before he replaced Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank,Zoellick was the US trade representative, their man atthe World Trade Organisation. While there, he won a reputation as a tough and guileful negotiator, savvy with details and pushy with the neoconservative economic agenda: a technocrat with a knuckle duster.His mission was to accelerate two decades of trade liberalisation in key strategic commodities for the United States, among them agriculture. Practically,this meant the removal of developing countries' abilityto stockpile grain (food mountains interfere with the market), to create tariff barriers (ditto), and to support farmers (they ought to be able to compete on their own). This Zoellick did often, and enthusiastically.Without agricultural support policies, though, there's no buffer between the price shocks and the bellies of the poorest people on earth. No option to support sustainable smaller-scale farmers, because they've been driven off their land by cheap EU and US imports. No option to dip into grain reserves because they've been sold off to service debt. No way of increasing the income of the poorest, because social programmes have been cut to the bone.The reason that today's price increases hurt the poor so much is that all protection from price shocks has been flayed away, by organisations such as theInternational Monetary Fund, the World TradeOrganisation and the World Bank.Even the World Bank's own Independent Evaluation Group admits that the bank has been doing a poor job in agriculture. Part of the bank's vision was to clear away the government agricultural clutter so that the private sector could come in to make agriculture efficient. But, as the Independent Evaluation Group delicately puts it, "in most reforming countries, the private sector did not step in to fill the vacuum when the public sector withdrew." After the liberalisationof agriculture, the invisible hand was nowhere to be seen.But governments weren't allowed to return to the business of supporting agriculture. Trade liberalisation agreements and World Bank loan conditions, such as those promoted by Zoellick, havemade food sovereignty impossible.This is why, when we see Dominique Strauss-Kahn of the IMF wailing about food prices, or Zoellick using the crisis to argue with breathless urgency for more liberalisation, the only reasonable response is nausea.

Raj Patel is a visiting scholar in the Center forAfrican Studies at the University of California atBerkeley, a Fellow at the Institute of Food andDevelopment Policy and a Research Associate at theSchool of Development Studies at the University ofKwaZulu-Natal. He has worked for the World Bank, interned at the WTO, and consulted for the UNHe is the author of Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Powerand the Hidden Battle for the World's Food System.