For 20 years economic and political liberalism, the ideology of markets, has triumphed. Globalization attracts protesters, but it has attracted far more investors, entrepreneurs and consumers.

Now people are starving because of the market, some believe.

“It’s clearly maybe the first major crisis of globalization,” said World Food Program spokesperson Jennifer Parmelee, based in Washington, D.C.

The WFP estimates 100 million people have been plunged into dire poverty and danger of starvation by sharp rises in food prices on international markets. From the beginning of 2005 to early 2008 food commodity prices rose 80 per cent, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

Textbook liberal economics doesn’t translate well into the real world, said Cliona Sharkey, a policy and advocacy expert for CIDSE, a worldwide federation of Catholic development agencies, including the Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace.

“Unregulated markets cannot protect food security,” Sharkey told The Catholic Register from CIDSE’s Brussels headquarters. “They might work in terms of growth and competition, etc. But it cannot guarantee food security. When production fails or prices rise, the market does not have an answer to feed people.”

Development and Peace’s trade policy expert Mary Durran says the globalized world food market is not a system built with the world’s small family farms in mind.

“The problem with the World Trade Organization rules and international trading rules in general is they have this one-size-fits-all paradigm. To put it in the words of a Sri Lankan farmer, he likened it to putting a tiger and a rabbit in the same arena. You can’t have the same rules for everybody because that’s just unfair,” said Durran, based in Montreal.

The idea that markets might be to blame for the food crisis drives the right wing Fraser Institute’s Fred McMahon crazy.

“The free market solution is lifting people out of poverty,” said McMahon. “Government intervention in markets is turning what should be a good-news story into a tragedy in many parts of the world.”

The new wealth created by markets and globalization is one of the reasons prices have risen dramatically. The new middle classes of India and China are eating more meat, eating more in general. It takes far more land and water to produce a kilogram of meat than a kilogram of rice.

“They’re eating what we eat in the West now. You know, that’s good news,” said Parmelee. “The bad news is that we’re in the tightest framework we’ve been in for the last 20, 30 years and it’s impacting prices.” 

The free market ideologue from the Fraser Institute and the lefty development workers who toil in the interests of the “global south” are in agreement about the causes of the crisis. It’s not just new wealth in Asia. It’s also fat subsidies and trade protections for farmers in Europe, the United States, Canada and Australia.

Hugely subsidized  biofuel crops, particularly corn grown for ethanol in the United States, have distorted markets, squeezed out food production and sent prices spiralling. Subsequent attempts by governments to control the situation with export controls, price caps and subsidies have hindered the chances for prices to come down and for markets to redistribute the food to where it’s needed.

“Knee jerk reaction (to climate change) such as promotion of biofuels, agrofuels — these changes in land use are having a huge impact on the prices of food staples,” said Sharkey. “There’s an increasing amount of meat being consumed, exported and produced which again means changes in land use. That kind of farming is a lot more land and resource intensive. Again, if the market is going to pay the money for meat and biofuels and agrofuels then it’s going to be at the detriment of basic food staples.”

Removed from ideological arguments over globalization and markets, director of the African Jesuit AIDS Network Fr. Michael Czerny sees the food crisis threatening the most vulnerable people on Earth — HIV-positive parents in the slums of Nairobi trying to stay alive long enough to see their children through school.

“Food of sufficient quantity and quality is important for avoiding and preventing HIV, for maintaining the immune system, for postponing the onset of AIDS and for taking ARVs (anti-retroviral medications). ARVs are a life-long prescription of daily chemotherapy, and this cannot be taken on an empty stomach or tolerated by a body which, besides having reduced immunity, is wasted by starvation,” Czerny wrote The Catholic Register.

The world can’t begin to solve problems such as AIDS if those efforts are being undermined by price-induced starvation.

“The real solution must be worldwide food security — in the short term through food aid, in the long term through more just trade and greater responsibility for the environment. And here in Africa, through effective national policies in favour of food production.”

The classic Catholic development project is aimed at giving small farmers access to markets through co-operatives and land reform, said Durran.

“When farmers come together in co-operatives and they organize they are at least better able to withstand a crisis.”

But building up co-operatives and farmers’ unions among the world’s poor, small-holder farms is slow work — typically not well understood or well funded. It doesn’t help when globalization undercuts the whole enterprise.

The classic example of global markets wrecking local agriculture comes from Haiti, where riots over food prices in April forced the prime minister out of office.

In 1986 Haiti imported just 7,000 tons of rice. The island was nearly self-sufficient in its most important staple. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund urged Haiti to open its market. At the same time the 1985 Farm Bill in the United States ensured that 40 per cent of U.S. rice growers’ profits came from government subsidies. By 1996 Haiti was importing 196,000 tons of cheap rice at a cost of $100 million a year. By then poor Haitian farmers had quit the countryside and moved to crowded slums on the edge of Port Au Prince. Social and political chaos ensued, and then prices began to rise.

“Countries like the U.S. are preaching the free market when it suits them,” noted Durran.

Dr. Andrew Simone, founder of Canadian Food For Children, isn’t interested in how markets work or the global trading system.

“I don’t think the problem is a shortage of food. I think the problem is a lack of love that man has for each other,” Simone said.

Simone said his organization, which ships containers of donated food, clothes and medical supplies to about 20 countries, has been unaffected by food inflation.

McMahon at the Fraser Institute believes the market will eventually right itself. But that doesn’t mean governments should do nothing.

“We are in the midst of a crisis now, and it is appropriate in the midst of a crisis to develop the humanitarian aid responses necessary to this,” he said.

In Canada the average household took in $48,770 in 2006 and spent $7,050, or 14.5 per cent, on food. That kind of good fortune brings with it responsibility.

“We as a wealthy nation have a moral responsibility to do something about this,” Durran said. “If that involves increasing contributions to emergency aid, that should definitely go ahead.”

Durran wants Canada to push the World Trade Organization to open up access to markets for small farmers in poor countries.

“They (Canadian officials) don’t really raise their voices all that much at the WTO. We have a moral responsibility to show more leadership on these issues,” she said.