The New Geopolitics of Food (5)

After the carnage of the two world wars and the economic missteps that lead to the Great Depression, countries joined together in 1945 to create the United Nations , finally realising that in the modern world we cannot live in isolation. The International Monetary Fund was created to help manage the monetary system and promote economic stability and progress. Within the U.N. system, specialized agencies from the World Health Organization to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) play major roles in the world today. All these have fostered international cooperation.
But while the FAO collects  and analyses gloval agricultural data and provides  technical assistance, there is no organised effort to ensure the adequacy of world food supplies. Indeed, most international negotiations on agricultural trade until recently focused in access to markets, within the U.S., Canada, Australia, and Argentina persistently pressing  Europe and Japan to open their highly protected agricultural  markets. But in the first decade of this century, access to supplies has emerged as the overriding issue as the world transitions from an area of food surpluses to a new politics of food scarcity. At the same time, the U.S. food aid program that once worked to fend off famine wherever it threatened has largely been replaced by the U.N. World Food Program (WFP), where the U.S. is the leading donor. The WFP now has food assistence operations in 70 countries and an annual budget of $ 4 billion. There is little international coordination otherwise. The French president Nicolas Sarkozi is proposing to deal with rising food prices by curbing speculation in commodity markets. Useful though this may be, it treats the symptoms of growing food insecurity, not the causes, such as population growth and climate change. The world now needs to focus not only on agricultural policy, but on a structure that integrates it  with energy, population, and water policies, each of which directly affects food security. But this is not happening. Instead, as land and water become scarcer, as the Earth's temperature rises, and as world food security deteriorates, a dangerous geopolitics of food scarcity is emerging. Land grabbing, water grabbing and buying grain directly from farmers in exporting countries are now integral parts of a global power struggle for food security.