Understanding the Global Food Crisis
by Andrew Kang Bartlett

After she woke in the dark to sweep city streets, after she walked an hour to buy less than $2 worth of food, after she cooked for two hours in the searing noon heat, Fanta Lingani served her family’s only meal of the day. First she set out a bowl of corn mush, seasoned with tree leaves, dried fish and wood ashes, for the 11 smallest children, who tore into it with bare hands. Then she set out a bowl for her husband. Then two bowls for a dozen older children. Then finally, after everyone else had finished, a bowl for herself. She always eats last.1

The Lingani family is just one of many in Africa, Asia and Latin America reeling from the current global food crisis. The global food crisis has added millions to the hungry of the world and is causing hardships in our own communities. Women and children are always hardest hit by crises. Feeding the hungry was central to Christ’s ministry, thus the gravity of this crisis draws our response.

There is a dual nature to the current food crisis, defined by both hunger and price. The hunger crisis is a death sentence for the 25,000 dying from hunger every day. Added to this is the price crisis, which sparked this year’s food riots. The riots erupted due to regional food shortages and people’s inability to purchase higher priced food.

Over the past decades, food production has been able to keep pace with population growth. The problem is not insufficient agricultural production. The persistence of hunger and the ferocity of the current food emergency are waking many to the need for a complete overhaul of the food system. Changing the food system will take a transformation of ourselves, our power structures and democracy itself.

Learn about the causes of the global food crisis, as well as ways that you can create a more just food system — read the full text of this article in the November/December 2008 issue of Horizons.

Andrew Kang Bartlett is the associate for national hunger concerns in the Presbyterian Hunger Program.

Photo by Michael Williamson.

Notes:
1. Kevin Sullivan, "Africa's Last and Least," Washington Post, July 20, 2008.

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