Food prices globally will more than double in 20 years, leading to a steep increase in the number of hungry people, who already amount nearly to a billion.
Average international prices of key staples like rice, wheat and maize, will increase by between 120 and 180 per cent by 2030, revealed a report launched by international aid agency Oxfam in London on Tuesday.
This steep increase will hit India the hardest as it is already home to one in four of the world’s hungry people, the agency warned. “Despite doubling the size of its economy in 1990-2005 the number of hungry people in India increased by 65 million — more than the population of France — because economic development excluded the rural poor, and welfare programmes failed to reach them,” according to new research in Growing a Better Future.
India has failed to tackle hunger so spectacularly despite impressive growth is because job creation and rising incomes were not broad-based, the report explained and attributed it to the “government failure in India.”
Demand for food has started to outpace food production, the report said. “Depleting natural resources, a scramble for fertile land and water, and the gathering pace of climate change is already making the situation worse,” it said. The world’s poorest people spend up to 80 per cent of their income on food. In India, people spend more than twice of what people do in the UK. “As a proportion of their income, Indian people pay the equivalent of £10 for a litre of milk and £6 for a kilo of rice,” the report explained.
A British study into global food and farming, released in January, had also predicted massive food shortages, increases in food prices and increase in hungry people in 20 years. It had also highlighted the fact that two global food price spikes in 2007 and 2008 had almost reversed the progress in the last 20-25 years in eradicating hunger. The global food system is broken for most of the people. “The failure of the system flows from failures of government — failures to regulate, to correct, to protect, to resist, to invest — which mean that companies, interest groups, and elites are able to plunder resources and to redirect flows of finance, knowledge, and food,” Oxfam warned.
Food price spikes and oil price hikes, devastating weather events, meltdowns, creeping and insidious climate change, growing inequality, chronic hunger and vulnerability, the erosion of natural resources, is making this an age of growing crises, the aid agency warned. By 2050, demand for food will rise by 70 per cent, but Oxfam warned that the capacity to increase food production is declining. “The average growth rate in agricultural yields has almost halved since 1990 and is set to decline to a fraction of one per cent in the next decade.”
“We are sleepwalking towards an avoidable age of crisis. One in seven people on the planet go hungry every day despite the fact that the world is capable of feeding everyone. The food system must be overhauled if we are to overcome the increasingly pressing challenges of climate change, spiralling food prices and the scarcity of land, water and energy. We must consign hunger to history,” Oxfam chief executive Barbara Stocking said.
The report has called for increased transparency in commodities markets and regulation of futures markets, scaling up of food reserves, and an end to biofuel policies in order to prevent acute hunger crisis.