This is an excerpt from Julian Cribb's book (same title as below) that was published in the NYTimes.
On the same theme, Raj Patel's "Stuffed and Starved" and his latest "The
Value of Nothing" (clip) are worth checking out.
‘The Coming
Famine’
By JULIAN
CRIBB
Lo que separa la civilización de la anarquía son solo
siete comidas. (Civilization and anarchy are only seven meals
apart.)
—Spanish proverb
Digging into a
mountain of caviar, sea urchin roe, succulent Kyoto beef, rare conger eels,
truffles, and fine champagne, the leaders of the world’s richest and most
powerful countries shook their heads over soaring grocery prices in the
developed world and spreading hunger in Africa, India, and Asia. Over an
eighteen-course banquet prepared for them by sixty chefs, the eight global
potentates declared, “We are deeply concerned that the steep rise in global food
prices coupled with availability problems in a number of developing countries is
threatening global food security. The negative impacts of this recent trend
could push millions more back into poverty.”
This statement, which
followed the July 2008 meeting of the G8 (Group of Eight) nations in Hokkaido,
Japan, was revelatory in several ways. The leaders of France, the United States,
Russia, Britain, Germany, Canada, Italy, and Japan seemed bemused by the sudden
emergence of the specter of food scarcity after de cades of apparent abundance
and cheap prices. This was a problem they clearly thought had been fixed.
Concealed within their
response were embarrassing admissions. First, in urging major increases in
global food aid, the leaders appeared to tacitly concede that wealthy countries
had failed to fulfill their pledges to the United Nations’ Millennium
Development Goals of 2000 to fight poverty. Second, in calling on the world to
reverse declining support for agricultural development and research, they were
implicitly confessing that they had let these deteriorate. Third, in demanding
food security early warning systems, the G8 leaders effectively admitted that
they had been caught unawares by the emerging food crisis — and didn’t like it.
There are few things a politician likes less than an unforeseen development, so
for good measure they backhanded the United Nations Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO), demanding its “thorough reform,” presumably for the sin of
having failed to get their attention with its previous warnings.
The “Blessings of the
Earth and the Sea Social Dinner” for the G8 leaders, hosted by the government of
Japan, had more than a touch of the fall of the Roman Empire about it. The eight
most powerful men on Earth and their partners regaled themselves on cornbread
stuffed with caviar, smoked salmon, and sea urchin roe; hot onion tart and
winter lily bulbs followed by kelp-flavored cold Kyoto beef with asparagus
dressed with sesame cream; diced fatty tuna flesh with avocado, shiso, and
jellied soy sauce; boiled clam, tomato, and shiso in jellied clear soup; water
shield and pink conger dressed with a vinegary soy sauce; boiled prawn with
jellied tosazu vinegar; grilled eel rolled in burdock; sweet potato; and fried
and seasoned goby with soy sauce and sugar. This beginning was followed by a
bisque of hairy crab and salt-grilled bighand thornyhead with vinegar-pepper
sauce. The main course was poele of milk-fed lamb flavored with aromatic herbs
and mustard, as well as roasted lamb with black truffle and pine seed oil sauce.
This was followed by a special cheese selection with lavender honey and
caramelized nuts, and then a whimsical “G8 fantasy dessert” and coffee with
candied fruits and vegetables. The food was accompanied by Le Rêve grand cru/La
Seule Gloire champagne; a sake wine, Isojiman Junmai Daiginjo Nakadori;
Corton-Charlemagne 2005 (France); Ridge California Monte Bello 1997; and Tokaji
Esszencia 1999 (Hungary). The cost of holding the G8 summit (five hundred
million dollars) could have fed for a week the additional one hundred million
people left hungry by the emerging food crisis.
With eloquent
symbolism, this Petronian banquet made clear that the well-off part of humanity
has largely forgotten what it is to go hungry and is awakening to an unpleasant
shock: starvation and the wars, refugee crises, and collapse of nation-states
that often accompany hunger have not been permanently banished after all.
Indeed, they are once more at our doorstep. Food insecurity and its deadly
consequences are again a pressing concern for every nation and each individual.
Despite the global food crisis of 2007–8, the coming
famine hasn’t happened yet. It is a looming planetary emergency whose
interlocked causes and deeper ramifications the world has barely begun to
absorb, let alone come to grips with. Experts predict that the crisis will peak
by the middle of the twenty-first century; it is arriving even faster than
climate change. Yet there is still time to forestall catastrophe.
From "The Coming Famine" by Julian
Cribb, published by the University of California Press, 2010. Excerpt courtesy
of the University of California Press.
