Today’s Pick: Another view of the food crisis
Are food prices too low?
Recently, MaRS hosted a Global Leadership Series event, Rising Food Prices: Global Dynamics & Canada’s Response. MaRtian Chris Evans wrote a great recap on the MaRS Blog, here.
I’ve been interested in food politics since taking a seminar on the global ecology of food with Josée Johnston. There, I discovered the work of Wayne Roberts, a journalist and activist who chairs the Toronto Food Policy Council and has a weekly column in NOW Magazine on food and environmental and social justice issues.
I was excited to see Roberts’ take on the Rising Food Prices panel in this week’s NOW. Like panelist John Johnson of RBC, Roberts points out that food prices remain at historic lows, and that, counterintuitively, cheap food actually exacerbates the global food crisis:
“Poverty, not the rising cost of food, threatens with starvation the third of the world’s people who earn less than $2 a day. Since there’s still plenty of food to go around at this point, today’s crisis is caused by lack of money, not lack of food… The most efficient way to [mitigate the effects of the food crisis] is to find ways to raise incomes, not ways to suppress food prices, which only makes the poor poorer and hungrier.”
Reinforcing nutritionist Marion Nestlé’s observation that “you can talk about anything through the lens of food,” Roberts uses the issue of food prices as a springboard, connecting the dots between cheap food, wasteful farming methods, global poverty and the twin malnutrition/obesity epidemics.
For more information on food politics, start here:
- UN Food and Agriculture Organization
- W.K. Kellogg Foundation - Food and Society
- Gourmet’s Food Politics
- The Community Food Security Coalition also has an extensive list of web resources
Kathryn is the Market Research Information Specialist Intern at MaRS. She is a graduate of the Masters of Information Studies program at the University of Toronto.
“The most efficient way to is to find ways to raise incomes, not ways to suppress food prices, which only makes the poor poorer and hungrier.â€?
So you are telling me, if a poor family always pay less money for enough food that can feed the whole family, they will end up being starved and losing all their money? Could you explain this in detail?
Anyway, deeply puzzled by what you are trying to deliver, I went to read the Robert’s take on NOW. The whole article is terribly irritating to my intelligence as the author seems to have a faith in that all human beings, except him and John Johnston, are dumb enough for not knowing the whatever ‘true’ reason he discovered for global food crisis.
And he went on to defend the biofuel (or is it the hidden true purpose of this article?) by attacking on 40% corn actually ends up as a cause for obesity. WOW, does this guy know anything about obesity? 1.6 billion people become fat just because they are fed up with the meat that has something to do with corn? This can not be serious science talking!
Posted by: Stone on August 3rd, 2008 at 2:45 pm