As food shortages hit the world hard, it's time to review how trade and investment policies, as well as energy prices, global warming and scarce water supplies, have contributed to them. Critics have complained for years that World Bank and International Monetary Fund practices, together with regional trade agreements, have squeezed small farmers in developing countries.
Small growers are dwarfed by the scale of transnational food businesses, but their diversified products—from goats and rabbits to rice and soybeans—do a lot to ward off hunger in their villages and regions. Cheap food imports from the West, the elimination of subsidies and tariffs for farm products, and the switch from food crops to cash crops have jeopardized food sources that are vital to those countries, critics say.
The World Bank itself, or rather its program evaluation arm, the Independent Evaluation Group, issued a revealing report last year entitled "World Bank Assistance to Agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa." The IEG concluded that "the agriculture sector [in that region] has been neglected both by governments and the donor community, including the World Bank." It added that while World Bank loans had been useful for "research, extension, credit, seeds, and policy reforms in rural space," the lending programs had failed to take into account shortages of two vital elements, water and fertilizer.
The report makes an interesting observation in regard to cassava (aka manioc), a calcium-rich starchy root that is one of the most productive crops in the world in terms of food energy per acre cultivated, and—of special importance in a changing climate—drought-tolerant. The evaluators pointed out that programs sponsored by the World Bank may have involved little support for the growing of cassava in Africa because "many Western policy analysts still consider cassava an 'inferior food' whose per capita consumption is expected to decline with increasing per capita incomes. …"
In other words, an attitude problem has hampered efforts to save millions from starvation: a cultural bias about what "good" food is, combined with an assumption that money will arrive in cultures that have been traditionally almost cashless and so change their nutritional equations that a crop that is still the world's third largest source of carbohydrate for human consumption wouldn't deserve support from global donors and lenders.
