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GROW: Oxfam launched GROW, a global campaign to be ready for an expected doubling of food prices in the next 20 years. The kickoff in Washington was on June 1. From left to right are: Raymond Offenheiser, Oxfam America; Djimon Hounsou, actor; Elkanah Odem (Gary Feuerberg/ Epoch Times)
WASHINGTON—Real food prices are on course to double in the next 20 years, placing the world’s poorest people, who spend up to 80 percent of their income on food, in jeopardy of food insecurity, warns Oxfam.
On June 1, Oxfam kicked off a new global campaign GROW in 37 countries to address the forecast that food prices will spike again as they did in 2007–08, when the total number of hungry people reached over 1 billion—one-sixth of the world’s population.
We are not yet experiencing a crisis at the 2007–2008 level, but millions of people’s lives are at risk, says Oxfam. By the end of 2011, extreme weather and rising food prices may put us back to the 1 billion figure.
Since July 2010, maize prices increased 74 percent; wheat rose 84 percent; sugar by 77 percent and oils and fats by 57 percent, says Oxfam on its website. Fortunately, prices for rice—the staple food for some 3 billion people mostly in Asia—have remained fairly stable, rising less than 4 percent since December 2010 over the previous year.
Today, people not only are subjected to rising food prices, but also to the extreme volatility in prices.
“I think without overstating the case that global food security is in jeopardy,” said Oxfam America President Raymond Offenheiser at the launching of the GROW campaign in Washington. “The global food system that we relied upon from the last three to five decades is broken.” The high yield varieties and the Green Revolution are “shaky, if not entirely broken,” Offenheiser said.
“The 2008 food spike pushed some 100 million people into poverty,” says Offenheiser, adding that price increases in 2011, have done the same thing to another 44 million people.
As part of the campaign, Oxfam released a new report, “Growing a Better Future,” which states that the food system is failing and only a major overhaul in the way the world grows and sells food will avert a repeated cycle of food crises and uncertainties.
The participants at the Washington kickoff often stated their opinions that the problem is not scarcity of food, but a billion people go to bed hungry “because of deep imbalances of opportunity and control of resources,” as Offenheiser put it. Up to one-half the food in the world goes to waste. This happens, he said, because of politics.
According to campaign, the primary solution to feeding the world’s hungry is to enable small-scale farmers to succeed. Too little attention and aid have been given to the half a billion farmers in rural areas where 80 percent of the world’s hungry live. They need assistance in becoming resilient to extreme weather, droughts, and floods, says Oxfam. Dr. Olivier De Schutter, United Nations special rapporteur on the Right to Food, calls for linking local producers to local consumers by building local and regional markets.
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