The (not-so) sudden crisis of the global food economy.

Rapidly rising food prices are casting millions of the world's poor into increasingly desperate circumstances of malnourishment and hunger. Various food-centred scenes of suffering and associated social tensions have become regular fixtures in the news in 2008: people staving off hunger pangs by eating mud in Haiti; guarded warehouses and grain shipments in the Philippines; export prohibitions in India; food rationing in Pakistan; and food-price riots in more than thirty countries across the Global South. Josette Sheeran, head of the UN's World Food Programme (WFP), recently likened the scale and suddenness of this humanitarian crisis to the 2004 tsunami in Asia, while noting that it is a crisis in which poor people still can often see "food on shelves, but... are priced out of the market."

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A Long-Term, Slow-Motion Crisis

The current rapid rise in food prices is both a manifestation and magnification of the contradictions of the global food economy. The global food economy is immensely imbalanced and unstable. In 2006, before food prices began to rise, 854 million people suffered from chronic hunger and malnourishment, which the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) described as a "covert famine." At the same time, the World Health Organization was calling obesity a "global epidemic," with the population of obese people topping one billion. The FAO estimated that enough food was produced to feed the world one-and-a-half times over. So, it should come as no great surprise that millions were becoming increasingly food-insecure amidst last year's record grain harvest.

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To appreciate the basic dynamics of the rise in prices and how these are magnifying global consumption imbalances, we need to focus on the system of production that dominates world trade in food, the industrial grain-livestock complex in the temperate world, and its chief actors, the transnational corporations (TNCs). More than half of the world's agro-exports and an even larger share of the world's grain and livestock exports come from a very small number of countries, like the U.S., Brazil, Argentina, Canada, Australia and France, which together represent less than two per cent of the world's farmers. The flipside of this is the precarious …