Food prices are predicted and will be very much likely double in the next 20 years. Moreover, demand for food in 2050 will be 70 percent higher than now, U.K. charity Oxfam said in it’s latest report, warning of worsening hunger as the global food economy stumbles.
“The food system is pretty well bust in the world,” Oxfam Chief Executive Barbara Stocking told reporters. According to her, 925 million people go hungry every day.
Hunger is increasing due to rising food price inflation and oil price hikes, scrambles for land and water, and creeping climate change. The increase of the worldwide population predicted to surpass 7 billion by the end of 2011 doesn’t easy the situation.
An age of growing crisis
Food prices are forecast to surge in the range of at least 70 to 90 percent by 2030, before taking into record the effects of climate change, which would roughly double price rises again.
“Now we have entered an age of growing crisis, of shock piled upon shock: vertiginous food price spikes and oil price hikes, devastating weather events, financial meltdowns and global contagion,” Oxfam said in a report.
The report said: “The scale of the challenge is unprecedented, but so is the prize: a sustainable future in which everyone will have enough to eat.”
The study assigns part of the blame to commodity traders, saying three corporations control 90 percent of the trade in grain: “Financial speculation must be regulated, and support dismantled for bio fuels that displace food”.
Stocking said she favored the introduction by regulators of position limits in agricultural commodity futures’ trading, noting that financial speculation aggravated price volatility.
The report said: “The vast imbalance in public investment in agriculture must be righted, redirecting the billions now being ploughed into unsustainable industrial farming in rich countries towards meeting the needs of small-scale food producers in developing countries.”
The report said the failure of the food system streamed from failures of governments to regulate and to invest, which meant that companies, interest groups and elites had been able to plunder resources: “Now the major powers, the old and the new, must cooperate, not compete, to share resources, build resilience, and tackle climate change”.
“The economic crisis means that we have moved decisively beyond the era of the G8, when a few rich country governments tried to craft global solutions by and for themselves,”says the report.
“The governments of poorer nations must also have a seat at the table, for they are on the front lines of climate change, where many of the battles — over land, water, and food — are being fought.”
