Food Market and the food crisis

Carlos Mora Vanegas

The planet Earth, segmented into the different countries involved, this one faces in the dynamic food markets, where many countries, especially the poor, are affected by high costs, the prices that they engage in purchase and consumption , where Venezuela, which concerns us has become a food importing country, taking huge acres of land to farm and who has not taken advantage of.

It seems he was not given importance to remark, that after the World Bank and the IMF have told countries for years that a liberalized market would provide greater efficiency in production and distribution of food, the world's poorest countries are immersed in an intense bidding war against speculators and traders, who are living a true golden age. Hedge funds and other sources of hedge funds are pouring billions of dollars into commodities to escape sliding stock markets and the credit crunch, and with it further out of reach food stocks of the poor.

Provides ecoportal.net, which according to some estimates, investment funds now control 50% and 60% of wheat traded on the world's largest commodities markets. One company estimated that the amount of speculative money in commodities futures-markets in which investors do not buy or sell a commodity, like rice or wheat, but betting on price changes, was less than U.S. $ 5,000 million in 2000 and climbed to U.S. $ 175,000 million in 2007.

This situation is not accidental, and its effects are unsustainable. Look at Haiti. A few decades ago all the rice. But conditions on foreign loans, particularly a 1994 package from the IMF, forced it to liberalize its market. Thus, since the U.S. began to get cheap rice, supported by subsidies and corruption, and local production was wiped out. Now prices for rice have risen 50% since last year, and the average Haitian can not eat. For this reason they are taking to the streets or risking their lives on a boat trip to the United States. The food crisis protests have also erupted in? West Africa, from Mauritania to Burkina Faso. There, too, structural adjustment programs and food aid dumping have destroyed a long history of rice production in the region, leaving people at the mercy of international market. In Asia, the World Bank said the Philippines repeatedly, even to the last year, self-sufficiency in rice was unnecessary and that the world market would take care of your needs. Currently the government is in a desperate situation. The national stockpile of subsidized rice is nearly exhausted and unable to complete their payments for imports because traders' asking prices are too high.

We said Manuel Moncada afrontyando in this a serious food crisis in which the food crisis is only an expression of the injustice imposed on the world capital, because its objective is to obtain constant profits by exploiting international workforce and local looting wealth from the South and from this and a very unequal exchange. The forms taken by the North to appropriate funds and resources from the South are multiple. Among them is the foreign debt

According to the World Bank in the last three years has generated a total of 83% rise in food prices, worse still, it is expected that this year's world grain stocks fall to lowest level in 25 years This is "at 405 million tons less than in 2007, up 5 percent (21 million tons) below the already reduced level last year? . Because of this, the Third World will spend this year some 38 700 million in imports of cereals, estimated at 57% higher than in 2007 and doubled over 2006. And although the problem also affects noted First World countries, in these foods represent only between 10 and 20% of consumer spending, while in the Third World are between 60 and 80% of those expenses. So, the figure of 862 million hungry people in the world, of which 52 million live in Latin America and the Caribbean may increase due to rising food prices (Manuel E.

Yepe. Ob. cit.).

The dramatic reality of the Americas is supporting Haiti: If 20 years ago this was a nation that produced 95% of the rice it consumed, the U.S. now imports 80% of the food. The military occupation of this Caribbean country, the maquila and free zones, as can be seen, have not served any good. Cuba, however, beyond the media terrorism that the empire wielded against him, represents the polar opposite of all this food and social drama that support a majority of nations in the world: in it there is a single person "to stay without a meal or free medical care 24 hours a day? . The island has 846 scientists per million inhabitants, with this index exceeds, for example, Spain, Ireland and Portugal. Annual spending on research in social and economic development, is twice the average of the investment in Latin America. The island political practices that enable leading indicators in the care of children, the elderly and the woman offers to its people free education, health, culture and sport, the life expectancy in 1993, she moved in 74 to 75 years.

The 38 700 million in imports of grain to the Third World will correspond to spend on food this year, in contrast to what America wastes to make war on Iraq and Afghanistan in 1976, those numbers stood at 379,000 million for Iraq , 97,000 million and 26,000 million for Afghanistan for military bases. In 2007, American taxpayers contributed 137 000 600 000 000 dollars for the Iraq conflict, a figure that the White House could provide care to 39 million citizens, build one million affordable housing and 142 million homes equipped with fountains of renewable energy. Considering the hidden costs, the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is double what is reported officially, according to information released by the Congressional Democrats The Washington Post. Thus, the total cost amounts to about $ 1.5 billion, almost double the 804,000 million that the White House has requested thus far to these wars

Moncada added to all this, add the wonderful image that the media everywhere surrounding the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) hides the serious irreversible concessions from rich countries, not that they provide nothing of substance to the poor to change. U.S. and European Union require deep and rapid reductions in tariff rates sometimes mean "zero tariff? for subsidized agricultural products sold at prices south of "dumping?, causing the collapse of the farmers in a situation of extreme poverty, loss of livelihood that do not know earlier, posting of workers and slave labor, degradation of human rights and the environment.

As it enough, the new TLC carried the matter much further: harmful establish rules on intellectual property, services and investments that exacerbate the situation of the poor by denying them access to patented technology (no not to protect traditional knowledge) and medicines, which seriously jeopardize the public health (11). FTAs ​​allow large transnational appropriation of traditional seeds and medicinal plants in the Third World, making it possible that the U.S. made by "peaceful means? economic objectives that regularly performed by invasions and wars must interminables.A above which signals agrregar ecoportal.net Grain in that never before has it been so obvious truth about who wins and who loses from our global food system . Consider the most basic element of food production: land. Arguably, the industrial food system is a drug of chemical fertilizers. Need more and more to keep alive, eroding soils with the cost of destroying their potential for sustaining food crops. Between 1992 and 2003, fertilizer use increased by 3% annually in the Asia-Pacific region, while, as a result, the yield of main crop to which applied, rice, only grew by 0.7% per year.

In the current context of tight food supplies, the small clique of corporations that control the global fertilizer market can charge what they want-and that's exactly what you are doing. Mosaic's earnings Corporation, Cargill controls much of the supply of potash and phosphate, more than doubled last year. The largest company in the world potash producer, Potash Crop, Canada, won more than one billion dollars in profits, which amounts to more than 70% compared to 2006. Faced with the panic of the global crisis, governments have begun to despair to increase their harvests, which have given those companies the power to raise the stakes even more. In April 2008, the joint offshore trading subsidiary of Mosaic and Potash prices increased by 40% potash for buyers in Southeast Asia and 85% for Latin America. India had to pay 130% more than last year. But it was China who took the brunt, whipped with a 227% increase in fertilizer account the previous year.

It is not surprising that Fidel Castro accuses the spokesmen of the transnationals and their media, saying we live in the best of all worlds: an economy ruled by the market, plus transnational capital, plus sophisticated technology equals a constant growth of productivity, GDP, living standards and every dream of the human species ...? However, the global reality is far from well. To begin, you should not ignore the United States-a country that already showed signs of what is capable in August 1945 ... - has an arsenal 10,000 nuclear warheads, followed by Russia and Israel 6000 400. Incidentally, this last colonial power, which has always refused to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, is the only Middle Eastern country that possesses such weapons. In this way, so that humanity can save the planet and themselves from the consequences of consumerism and productivism inherent irrational-capitalist system and its persistent criminal action against the man, the species of plants and animals nature as a whole, must necessarily assume a number of challenges, not easy.