The Forgotten Crisis: Rising Food Prices

September 2000. Never before in world history had so many leaders come together in the same meeting at the same time. One hundred heads of state, 47 heads of governments and eight thousand dignitaries met at the UN Headquarters in New York City to discuss the future of the world. At the end of the meeting, they adopted a text entitled the ‘Millennium Declaration’. The Declaration expressed eight ‘development goals’, the first of which was eradicating poverty and reducing the percentage of undernourished people by 50% by 2015 (based on 1990 data). At the 2005 World Summit, 192 UN member states and 23 international organisations reiterated their commitment. Optimism was widespread at the time. However, just three years later, efforts to eradicate poverty are faltering. To make things worse, instead of dropping, the number of starving people is increasing.

Bad news attracts press cameras, which usually focus on extraordinary situations. Food crises are extraordinary situations, but world hunger is not. For a very large number of people, hunger is part of everyday life. According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the UN's organisation in charge of food and agriculture, in 2000 — the year the Millennium Declaration was adopted — 840 million people (approximately one-seventh of the earth's population) went to bed hungry every night. What made this situation morally unacceptable was the fact that the world had a huge surplus of food. In reality, people starved, not because of a shortage of food, but because they did not have the money to buy the food they needed (Huliaras, 2005).