Nurul Huda, The Daily Star, 10 May 2008
THE head of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), Haruhiko Kuroda, asked for an immediate response to soaring food prices, which threaten a billion Asians with risk of malnutrition.
Sounding a note of warning, he said that the food problem could cut into decades of economic gains that the Asian-Pacific region has achieved.
“This price surge has a stark human dimension, and has greatly affected over a billion people in Asia and the Pacific alone,” Haruhiko said in ADB’s board of governors meeting in Madrid on May 5.
He deserves praise for the warning, and giving a call for a response to the situation as the purchasing power of the Asians has eroded, putting them at greater risk of hunger and malnutrition. Reduced supplies and increased demand, together with sharp appreciation of the US dollar and trade restrictions by some countries, have contributed to the price hike in recent months.
The ADB chief also called for “prudent macroeconomic management” along with targeted income support to protect food entitlement and livelihoods of the most vulnerable.
In this context, it needs to be recalled here that hundreds of thousands of Africans died after weeks and months of starvation and agony in the mid-1980s because of failures in development and environment. The famines in Africa are usually presented as the result of drought, but lack of rain has only been the immediate cause.
The causes of the famine stretch back over the decades, in patterns of over cultivation, over-grazing, soil erosion, deforestation and poor agricultural policieswhich have all severely damaged the African environment and reduced its capacity to grow food.
The decision makers of Asian countries, including those in Bangladesh, have to analyse the reasons behind the present situation and formulate innovative, concrete and appropriate plans to make sure that the African tragedy does not happen in Asia. And then they have to make sure that their plans are carried out.
Former Norwegian prime minister, Ms. Gro Herlem Brundtland, who was also chairman of World Commission on Environment and Development, in a feature carried by Earthscan of the International Institute of Environment and Development (IIED) in 1985 said: “Far too much development aid has been designed to benefit the donor more than the recipient.”
Hundreds of thousands of Africans are hungry, many of them are starving, because of the failure of donor agencies as well as of African governments to invest in economically and environmentally sustainable projects. Instead, donor agencies have poured far too much aid into prestige projects that the World Bank has called Africa’s white elephants, Ms Brundtland said.
The observation made by Ms Brundtland, more than two decades ago, appears to be partially applicable to Asia today. Earthscan in a book, Africa in crisis, said that at least 80 thousand expatriates were working in Sub-Saharan Africa under official aid programmes at a cost of $4 billion a year. And in 25 years of independence, Africa plunged from food self-sufficiency to widespread hunger and famine in the mid-1980s.
Holding European countries like Britain, Poland and Germany responsible for destroying fish and threatening forests through acid emissions of their power plants environmental experts said: “No nation should be free to pollute the common environment and inflict severe ecological and economic damage on other states.”
Environmental bankruptcy in different third world countries causes economic and political situations which force the poor, and especially the rural poor, to damage and destroy the soil, forests, rivers and coastal waters upon which they, in fact, depend for food, fuel and shelter. The situation which some of the Asian countries, including Bangladesh, have been passing through can be attributed to nothing but environmental bankruptcy.
The media has presented a picture on food crisis in Cambodia, where the World Food Programme of the United Nations can no longer supply 4,50,000 Cambodian children with a daily meal of domestically grown rice supplemented by yellow split peas from the United States and tuna from Thailand. When the breakfast programme was suspended in January, 2007 because of budget problems, attendance in some schools fell by 10 percent.
Poor Filipinos, who were hit by high food prices unseen since the 1970s, started getting some relief last week following the introduction of “rice passes” to the most impoverished families across the country. The Filipino government was also contemplating starting an unprecedented relief programme that would involve the distribution of cash subsidies amounting to $33 a month to each of the poorest Filipino families. These measures are two out of several steps that are being implemented by the Philippines government to mitigate the effects of the global food crisis.
Malaysia, Indonesia, India and Afghanistan have already witnessed street agitations over soaring food prices. Singapore, which is the second richest Asian country, has also been badly hit, and many Singaporeans cannot take regular baths and pay for laundry bills as a major chunk of their earnings goes for food.
Bangladesh policy planners should formulate strategies and plans for the country’s sustainable agricultural development without being influenced or biased by persons who are not familiar with our conditions. What is important for their successful implementation is involvement of local people with such plans so that they develop a sense of belonging.
Let us hope that the government will do everything possible to mitigate the miseries of those hit hard by soaring prices of essentials so that there is no starvation death in the country. None should, however, try to politicise the issue, as we are passing through a critical juncture at this time.
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