Food, and the African crisis of leadership

While Nigeria debates how many metric tones of rice it would import as part of its preparation for what has become the world’s latest affliction, Thailand, a country half the population of Nigeria is already plotting on how to cash-in on the situation. Two days ago the BBC reported that the South-East Asian nation is planning to lead the formation of an OPEC-like cartel for rice exporters. Where the rest of the world is seeing red, the Thais see opportunity: as the world’s leading exporter of rice they reckon, rationally, that with the price and demand for rice at an all-time high, now’s the best time for them to exert their dominance and reap maximum returns for their labour. And why not? OPEC Itself came into being as an opportunistic response to a similar situation back in the early 70s.

But to be fair to the government, the quantity to be imported has already been settled, which is fast for a government notorious for its ‘slow speed’. According to the Ministry of Agriculture, the country plans to import 500,000 metric tones of rice (that’s roughly 10 million 50kg bags). The debate now is arguably about who would get the contract to do the importation, right? But again, lets be fair to the government: even that is no big deal, considering that among the president’s men, there are experts on rice, er, well, importation. If the government haggles hard enough it might get to bring in a bag at the cost of $100 per bag; the Agriculture minister has hinted that the government is targeting a subsidized price of N5000 ($42) per bag. Should we clap? Yes, but with only one hand; those who survive the famine can use their two hands—to beg for the next meal.

By the way, where did this so called food crisis spring from? Most experts (meaning Northern Hemisphere scholars) such as Mr. Jeffry Sachs , writing in TIME magazine (May 5), gave multiple explanations: Low productivity of farmers in the poor countries; the desperate drive for the production of biofuels, which is heavily subsidized in Europe and America; global warming which gives rise to drought in many countries; and of course the usual suspect, the leap in population without corresponding increase in the amount of food produce, or what one might call the Malthusian syndrome.

Another capitalist expert, Mr. Mohamed A. El-Erian, also writing in Newsweek magazine (May 5), echoed Sachs but added, almost reluctantly, that "What is particularly striking about the current crisis is that this combination of factors has taken the world by surprise. In the past price spikes have tended to be caused by clear-cut supply disruptions, whether they’re droughts, floods or other natural disasters…"

You see that’s just the problem; there’s something unnatural, something sinister about the spontaneity and the media-driven seriousness about this whole ‘hunger in the air campaign’. Could there be a link between the current global financial crisis, in which western capitalist institutions are losing billions by the minute through some hitherto inexplicably freaky economic twists and turns; and this sudden panic about the world facing hunger and God-knows-what else? In recent times, several countries, especially the United States, Britain and France have had to cough out billions of dollars and pounds sterling to bail out several of their banks, mortgage and other finance institutions that have ran into trouble, while simultaneously buying their opium, oil, at record prices. It is unimaginable that the West would just sit back and fold its arms while Gulf countries indulge themselves in what the West would obviously consider undeserved luxury, without industry.

And what better way to respond than to create a massive wave of inflationary pressure that would recycle capital back from consumer countries to producer nations, since it is not only prices of food items that are skyrocketing? This may sound conspiratorial, but conspiracy theories did not emerge from the blues; they are a natural response to puzzles that rational explanations could not solve. Nobody, for instance has been able to explain how HIV/, which first manifested in homosexuals in America could have originated from African Monkeys, as western findings say; but the world swallows it because the West says so. Ditto when the West said the world’s computers would crash at the end of the last millennium, the whole world rushed into what turned out to be a needless expenditure without question. The result was a handsome harvest by western IT-savvy companies.

Of course this is not to deny that there is danger of a runaway inflation especially as it affects staple food items; there is and in many ways it has indeed started taking its toll,