기아의 경제적 원인
Followed by the last article, let's talk about the causes of the famin especially in the economical perspective.
Causes of Uneven Food Distribution
1. Economic reasons
Another considerable cause of the occurrence of the food distribution problems lies on the economic structure. The reason of the food crisis is quite simple in economic aspect: few providers and a lot of consumers. According to the 'comparative advantage theory', since different countries are strong at different industries, they have to concentrate more on that specific industry they are strong at to gain more profits. Following this theory, the international organizations suggested the 3rd world countries to cultivate kacao or coffee which are consumed in developed countries for ‘international division of labor’. . However, in the world food market, it is impossible to focus their effort only on that certain industry. Also it is realistically not possible to convert their means of production from one to another suddenly even though they have noticed the industry they have been doing is not competitive anymore. Therefore, the country can’t get enough profits from both of their strong and weak industries, and get poorer. According to Bandara Siba, Indian environmental thinker, this can change self-contained economic system into dependent system. And the more country’s economy becomes dependent, the more it becomes unstable, and it makes the poor nations even poorer because of the skyrocketing cost of food supplies.
- Cost of the Food Resources
According to the United Nations World Food Program, there is enough food in the world to feed everyone. Technically, we can produce enough food. The problem is that less developed or 3rd world countries cannot afford to buy food at the prices charged by Western industrialized countries.
Five huge companies called five brothers- Cargill, ADM, Louis Dreyfus, Bunge, Andre- seize the food market of the whole world. These five companies affects enormously on the decision of the food price by controlling the food storage quantities, cornering the market, exercising their influences on the international organizations, and lobbying governments. And these top five companies are able to do this is because they have more than 87 percent of the international market share in food resources. The worse thing is the fact that these major companies are undisclosed so that people cannot figure out the actual situation concretely. So these companies secretly are able to change the cost of the food considering nothing but their own profits.
However, in the undeveloped countries, which can produce grains by itself, suffer due to the concerns opposite to the developed countries . To produce food, they should be able to afford the high costs of farming facilities such as seeds, fertilizer and machinery which are needed to increase their own food production. They need hard currency to pay for these. Hard currency can only be raised from selling of their production in the international market but they have no enough production to sell. Therefore they are caught in a vicious circle. This is exacerbated by Western governments that subsidize their farmers, enabling them to keep prices low and making it more difficult for the farmers of third world countries to compete in the world market. Something worse happens when the developed countries provide aids to 3rd world countries with such low price or no charge. Resources from these aids usually outcompete self-produced resources even in the domestic market and destroy the entire agricultural production. This eventually precludes further crop production of these countries. Then these countries go the same way as the other 3rd world countries.
-Seed monopolization
The top five companies have also collected indigenous seeds all over the world for last decades. Not only they do collect, they also select the seed that can grow better in various environments and produce better amount of crops among the millions of seeds and manipulate those genes. Then according to the patent law, the seed become intellectual property of the company. In this way companies can also control the price of the seeds which make farmers even poorer.
-Food used as feedstuff
To support majority of people’s demand for meat, most of the corns and other grains (more than 75%) are used as a feedstuff. However, the amount of the meat we can gain by catching livestock is strikingly few when it is compared with the crops they have consumed. And naturally the cost of the meat is greater than the grains, therefore there has always been the shortage of food developing countries.