Add to this the action of speculators who inflate prices. this is also the subject of further inquiry. All these issues obviously contribute to the current food crisis. But they are not completely responsible for their depth. There is something more important behind. Something that brings all these issues and that popes in the world of finance and development is kept out of public discussion. No doubt that the current food crisis, food crisis is the result of the constant pressure exerted from the 1960s to the agricultural model of the “Green Revolution”, and liberalization of trade and structural adjustment policies imposed on poor countries by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund since the 1970s.
These policy prescriptions were reinforced in the mid-1990s with the establishment of the World Trade Organization and, more recently, through a jumble of bi-lateral agreements on free trade and investment. Along with a whole package of other measures, have relentlessly dismantled tariffs and other tools that developing countries had to protect their local agricultural production, and forced them to open their markets and lands to global agribusiness, speculators and food exports subsidies from rich countries. In that process, fertile lands were converted from food production to supply a local market for the production of global commodities for export or off-season crops and high value to supply western supermarkets. Today, approximately 70% of so-called developing countries are net importers of food. And of the 845 million hungry people in the world, 80% are small farmers. If this is added the retrofitting of credit and financial markets to create a massive debt industry, with no control on investors, the severity of the problem is clear.
Definitely, agricultural policy has lost total touch with its most basic goal of feeding people. Hunger hurts and people are desperate. The World Food Programme United Nations estimates there are about 100 million people who can not eat because of the recent dramatic price rises this is a government seeking frantically how to protect the system. The lucky ones who have to export stocks are retreating from the world market to separate their domestic prices of the astronomical prices. With wheat, export bans or restrictions in Kazakhstan, Russia, Ukraine and Argentina, means that one third of the world market has been closed. The situation with rice is even worse. China, Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, India and Cambodia have banned or severely restricted exports, leaving a few sources of export supply, mainly Thailand and the United States. Countries like Bangladesh can not even buy the rice they need now because of the high product cost. In the Venezuelan case, it is crucial that the government has given way to the Bolivarian revolution, under the presidency of Hugo Chavez, appears more closely the country’s agricultural policy that has left a lot to say, to the extent that the country has become more dependent on imports to other agricultural products, which should have been planted and not import them at a very serious Venezuelan agriculture and the inhabitants of the country. Venezuela is the owner of fertile soils and a climate favorable to date is forced to import more than 70% of food. In favor of reform argues the following example: one of the estates of 70 000 hectares just keeps … 4000 head of cattle, a herd while optimal for that area must be 50 or 60 thousand head. These are the actual reserves of substantial increase in meat production. Milk and other products. m