Between 2007-2008, there were food riots in 46 countries: Mexico, Italy, Morocco, Mauritania, Senegal, Indonesia, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Yemen, Egypt, Haiti… the list could go on. The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations estimated at the time that 200 million more people than usual went hungry because of price spikes. This amounted to an estimated 1 billion people hungry, despite bumper harvests (including the highest corn crop in history) and despite bumper profits for many agribusiness conglomerates, including ADM, Monsanto, Cargill, and General Foods. In the US, 12% of the population struggled to feed themselves at some point during the year, despite $60 billion/year in food nutrition programs and over 70,000 food banks and emergency food programs.

The proximate causes of the 2007-2008 food crisis were multiple: droughts in some producing countries, higher oil prices, speculation on commodities markets, and rising meat consumption in countries such as India, China, and Brazil. But these proximate circumstances do not explain why people were so vulnerable to a price spike in the first place. As Mittal explains in your readings for this week, understanding the roots of hunger requires understanding long-standing changes in the global food system. As we discussed last week, agricultural systems have been transformed, particularly in the decades after World War II. Mechanized agriculture, irrigation, nitrogen fertilizers, new cultivars, and other innovations brought about by the industrial and green revolutions have led to unprecedented increases in crop yields. This suggests that famine is not caused by a lack of food, but by limited access to food.

Why then do people lack access to food despite sufficient quantities of food? As Mittal explains, this is partly because many countries, including previously colonized countries, have gone from being food independent to net food importing economies since the 1970s and 1980s. This reflects the globalization of food systems and the imposition of free market economics on many countries through the International Monetary Fund and later the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Agriculture. These institutions often required that developing nations open their economies to free trade and discontinue subsidizing their own production and protecting prices through tariffs to facilitate free and open trade. The irony of these policies was that as these policies opened up countries’ economies and allowed them to be flooded with cheap grains, the subsidies protecting corn and what and all the rest of it in the US were kept intact.

Your assignment for this week invites you to reflect on the strong distinctions between this way of understanding hunger and the perspective Singer presents. Contrast the approach that Singer (1972) takes to world hunger with that of Mittal (2002). How are these two positions similar? How are they different? Whose perspective, if either, do you find most compelling? Why?