I remember a time when every morning my mother used to give the spare bread loves to the servant to feed the cattle with it; gradually the servants started using them for their own food as there would not be any bread left; Now when I look at it, they take a few left over home which is barely enough for them to feed their children with. The reason is not being poor only but the scarcity of food items specially flour and grains as well. Even families belonging to agrarian backgrounds have to buy grains and flour from the market now.
The problem is not in Pakistan only; going through the list of major crises in the modern world, I had a shocking revelation that scarcity of food is one of the fast growing menaces hitting the world rapidly. Turn on your T.V or shuffle through a newspaper you will find many leaders, economists and humanitarians talking about a “Green Revolution”; ironically which reminded me of the “Industrial Revolution” to which we can trace the roots of the present food crisis.
According to the statistics, every day 25,000 people die because of causes which are hunger related; every year 3.5 million children loose their lives because of malnutrition; 50 percent of hysterectomies take place in women because of under nutrition in third world countries; more than 800million people of the world are food deficit; more than 2 Billion cannot afford the daily prices of food items; a 100 Million more are going below the level of malnutrition and poverty and finally, up till now there have been protests and demonstrations in more than 30 countries of the world, including Pakistan, against food shortage.
There are many reasons contributing to the rise in food prices as well as shortage of food items; Top of the list is the devastating and poignant trade policies of rich countries and distorting subsidies in agricultural plans. The developed countries should lift the ban on export policies as well as expand the agricultural development plans to the poor farmers of the world.
A second strong reason is the use of bio-fuels in the US and European countries. The use of corn as ethanol or bio fuel for vehicles boosted up the corn prices as a result of which farmers focused more on the harvest of corn rather than wheat or grain. The run to save and produce more fuel led to the under production of food. One cannot help thinking if we are trying to feed our cars or our children?
Rise in oil prices have also been one of the instigating factors in this regard as every rising figure in oil price causes a figure to be deducted from the budget specified for food import or agricultural development plan.
Farmers in many countries of the world still rely on traditional mode of agriculture rather than the modern technological means mostly because of unawareness and even if that awareness is created somehow, they lack the essential financial and logistic support from the government to adopt such measures.
Last but not the least to meet the food shortage crisis on emergency basis the world needs about $755 Million without which the hungry of the world are surely in danger of being starved, especially when most of the families in the third world countries are living on the basis of a daily income below $1. The world needs to be given a wake up call as most of us do not realize the grave situation when we sit at our dinner table. Let us not feed our food to our vehicles and machines but to our fellow human beings or it would be as if Mother Earth has stopped feeding its ungrateful children.