THERE is a food crisis. On this the rich and the not-so-rich world agree. But this is just the "what". As to the "why", a more critical question, two roads diverge. One is the well-trodden one and the other, the less-travelled by.
Start with the well-trodden one. When Covid-19 was demolishing the global economy, those on this well-worn road blamed the food crisis on the pandemic.
Not entirely right. If it were, with the pandemic causing less of a ruin around the world today, the food crisis should ease. But it has all the promise of staying. And growing. If numbers are needed, look at the growing list of destitutes in rich nations in the West, Europe and America.
Not to mention an old fat list of destitutes in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The well-trodden argument has now found a new pretext: the war in Ukraine.
Again, not entirely right. Both are red herrings, symptoms in the guise of causes. For those who are interested in finding out the "why" of the food crisis, a road that has a better claim — it usually does — is the one less travelled by.
Ironically, the Covid-19 pandemic offers a pointer. Think vaccines and Big Pharma. Few players in a few countries decide which arm gets injected and at what cost.
Big Finance, Big Tech, Big Pharma and now, Big Food, all show the Pareto principle of 80/20 at work. The truth may be uglier than what Pareto could have imagined. It could be a lot nearer to the one per cent of billionaires ruling over the 99 per cent of us. An Oxfam study conducted in 2012 — yes, Big Food is a 150-year-old story — uncovered four cereal "killers".
Between them they were controlling 90 per cent of the global grain trade. In the reasoning of The Guardian, such a practice has led to the polarisation of nations into super-exporters and super-importers. What is worse, the grain traders don't just stop at trading physical commodities.
Their footprints are everywhere: from farm to fork. Want seeds, fertilisers and agrochemicals? Growers have to go to them. Want to sell farm products or store them? Again, they are there. The plot thickens. Want land, cattle, poultry, transport, financing? They have them all.
Connect the dots and you will see the cereal traders in one shape or another from spade to fork. Traders have made the food system complex, global and financialised to reap the most out of it.
As they say, money is power. Cereal "killers" trade in both. They get to decide what gets produced and where. And where the harvests go. Not unlike the vaccines of Big Pharma. Or even the digital world of Big Tech, which decides who publishes what. As pointed out by Oxfam and others, the world's food system is broken.
It can't be anything else, if billions go hungry every night, including farmers who produce much of the world's food. Malaysia is part of the broken world. Like the rest of the broken world, it must think about food security and not succumb to Big Food's "wisdom" that the supply and demand of food are best left to the international market.
This is nonsense on stilts. One, there is no such thing as a free market anywhere in the world. Two, food security is too precious to leave to the market, where cereal "killers" roam unrestrained.