The answer may or may not surprise you, depending…
The Mexican food crisis cannot be fully understood without taking into account the fact that in the years preceding the tortilla crisis, the homeland of corn had been converted to a corn-importing economy by “free market” policies promoted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and Washington. The process began with the early 1980s debt crisis. One of the two largest developing-country debtors, Mexico was forced to beg for money from the Bank and IMF to service its debt to international commercial banks. The quid pro quo for a multibillion-dollar bailout was what a member of the World Bank executive board described as “unprecedented thoroughgoing interventionism” designed to eliminate high tariffs, state regulations and government support institutions, which neoliberal doctrine identified as barriers to economic efficiency.
Interest payments rose from 19 percent of total government expenditures in 1982 to 57 percent in 1988, while capital expenditures dropped from an already low 19.3 percent to 4.4 percent. The contraction of government spending translated into the dismantling of state credit, government-subsidized agricultural inputs, price supports, state marketing boards and extension services. Unilateral liberalization of agricultural trade pushed by the IMF and World Bank also contributed to the destabilization of peasant producers.
This blow to peasant agriculture was followed by an even larger one in 1994, when the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect. Although NAFTA had a fifteen-year phaseout of tariff protection for agricultural products, including corn, highly subsidized US corn quickly flooded in, reducing prices by half and plunging the corn sector into chronic crisis. Largely as a result of this agreement, Mexico’s status as a net food importer has now been firmly established.
and in the Philippines…
Interest payments as a percentage of expenditures rose from 7 percent in 1980 to 28 percent in 1994; capital expenditures plunged from 26 percent to 16 percent. In short, debt servicing became the national budgetary priority.
The consequences of the Philippines’ joining the WTO barreled through the rest of its agriculture like a super-typhoon. Swamped by cheap corn imports–much of it subsidized US grain–farmers reduced land devoted to corn from 3.1 million hectares in 1993 to 2.5 million in 2000. Massive importation of chicken parts nearly killed that industry, while surges in imports destabilized the poultry, hog and vegetable industries.
and in other countries…
The experience of Mexico and the Philippines was paralleled in one country after another subjected to the ministrations of the IMF and the WTO. A study of fourteen countries by the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization found that the levels of food imports in 1995-98 exceeded those in 1990-94. This was not surprising, since one of the main goals of the WTO’s Agreement on Agriculture was to open up markets in developing countries so they could absorb surplus production in the North. As then-US Agriculture Secretary John Block put it in 1986, “The idea that developing countries should feed themselves is an anachronism from a bygone era. They could better ensure their food security by relying on US agricultural products, which are available in most cases at lower cost.”
What Block did not say was that the lower cost of US products stemmed from subsidies, which became more massive with each passing year despite the fact that the WTO was supposed to phase them out. From $367 billion in 1995, the total amount of agricultural subsidies provided by developed-country governments rose to $388 billion in 2004. Since the late 1990s subsidies have accounted for 40 percent of the value of agricultural production in the European Union and 25 percent in the United States.
(above quotes from Manufacturing a Food Crisis by Walden Bello)
What about Haiti, then?
Kuyek says that U.S. farmers are largely at fault for overproducing, flooding Mexico’s market with underpriced corn and undermining Mexican growers. Growers in the States have done the same thing to Haitian rice farmers, who sufficiently fed their country as recently as a few decades ago. But in 1986, the Haitian government opened its doors to U.S. rice.
“We undercut their producers with cheaper imports,” Kuyek says. “It’s called ‘dumping.’ They had to give up on their own production, and they’ve become dependent on our imports.”
The United States also destroyed Haiti’s once prolific sugar industry, infiltrating the island with American sugar and squashing the local production. Today, Haiti is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.
According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 82 “low-income, food-deficit countries” currently depend on imported food and are forecasted to purchase 82 million metric tons of grain in 2008. These countries’ traditional agrarian systems have withered, leaving many people jobless and, ironically, scarcely able to afford the overtly cheap imported foodstuffs that put their own farms out of business in the first place. Nations worldwide have come to similar economic ruin under the crushing hammer of global agriculture.
(quote from Planting the Seeds of Crisis by Alastair Bland)
I’d propse as a metaphor here the Walmartization of the food industry, I think. Another good quote from the Planting the Seeds of Crisis article is the following:
In December 1999, the earth’s warehouses held 116 days of surplus food; today, we have 50 days’ worth.
Not precisely related to the role of globalization and debt to the food crisis, but interesting nonetheless is the section of wikipedia’s article on Food security about Fossil fuel dependence, which says that recently in Bangladesh and historically in China farmers were feeding more than 30 times the population density of the current United States- using in the case of Bangladesh (and no doubt China as well) “a tiny fraction of the USA’s usage of oil, gas, and electricity.”
