Let Them Eat Free Markets: How deregulation fuels the global food crisis

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from In These Times:



News > July 23, 2008
Let Them Eat Free Markets
How deregulation fuels the global food crisis
By David Moberg



In April, crowds of angry Haitians — reduced to eating mud cakes to staunch hunger — erupted in deadly protests against high food prices, forcing the prime minister to resign. The price of rice, a staple of the Haitian diet, had risen 16 percent on the world market last year, then shot up 141 percent from January to April.

Around the world, similar riots — or fears of them — have pushed governments to restrict exports, reduce tariffs, attack hoarding and take other desperate measures as prices of virtually all major food commodities have spiked — and often fluctuated wildly.

But in the months since Haitians hit the streets, leaders of the major international financial organizations — the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Trade Organization (WTO) — as well as the Bush administration and European Union (EU) have responded weakly to the crisis. Mainly, they’ve issued underfunded appeals for emergency aid and for speedy conclusion of the latest round of WTO free-trade negotiations. For the world’s poor, that’s like lifting a drowning man out of the water, only to tie weights around his ankles and shove him back in.

When world leaders met in June for a U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization summit, says Steve Suppan, senior policy analyst for the Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), a research and advocacy group, “there was an urgent recognition of the food crisis but a more urgent sense of the need to salvage neoliberalism.”

And Raj Patel, author of the recent book, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World’s Food System (See review on page 40), adds, “It’s preposterous that the Bush administration and EU are pushing us toward precisely the policies that got us into this mess.” ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3801/let_them_eat_free_markets/