An economist's questions on food ...

This isn’t meant to imply that all national boundaries and all the actions of governments pursuing national ends should be eliminated.

But there many policies, enacted in the pursuit of national “political” or “economic” ends - and the two are often inextricably intertwined - that result in large numbers of people being unable to secure sufficient food even to meet their bodily needs. We should spend more time focusing on these.

In some cases the cause and effect of policies are fairly obvious. In others - particularly where economic consequences are involved - they are less so, especially where the effect of policies has been on the price of food, so putting the ability to obtain food in sufficient quantity effectively beyond the reach of large numbers of people.

One - now widely-appreciated - example is that of the perverse effects of mandating the use of bio-fuels in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This has led to an increase in the demand for products which would otherwise have been available as food, thus increasing the price of these products and putting them (at least in the quantities formerly consumed) beyond the reach of many and causing people to adjust their budgets. This adjustment is in turn reflected in the demand for and price of other food products. (The policy has also led, perversely, to more rapid deforestation - and thus the destruction of trees that can absorb greenhouse gases - in order to clear land to grow products from which bio-fuels can be made.)

Less obvious - though equally disastrous for many - are the effects of many countries (typically high-income countries) seeking to ensure that a proportion of their own population can continue to remain as agricultural producers, and by so doing be guaranteed an income compatible with that of other citizens, even if the costs of production for these producers exceeds the price of the commodity they produce that is set in the international market.

Such policies serve simply to bar agricultural producers in many countries from supplying the needs of consumers in countries which seek to “protect” their own agricultural producers, thus denying large numbers the ability to earn income which they could use in purchasing food.

Thus, if “man’s ingenuity” is needed to ensure that everyone in the world can be fed, it is ingenuity in understanding and addressing the political and economic factors behind the inability of some people to obtain sufficient food to sustain themselves. In other words we must look beyond factors of a “technological” nature (important though these are).

And when we move beyond the “crisis” stage of ensuring that everyone has at least a certain minimum amount of food needed to sustain themselves, it is these factors that are also critical in understanding what is an equally important question: the justness of the outcome in terms of who gets what, and what they have to pay for it.