Global food, a “broken” production and distribution system: it always affects the usual, both when prices rise and when they fall

ROME – The benchmark index of international food commodity prices increased in April for the first time in a year. The increases in world quotations concern sugar, meat and rice. This was reported today in a dossier by the FAO, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Meanwhile, the price indices of other major food categories, except rice, continued their downward trend.

A “broken” production and distribution system. Those who study the phenomena linked to the oscillation of prices which affect the planet’s food inform us that, all over the world, all of this is the result of a “broken” system which has effects on the poverty of many poor or low-income countries and that the “breakdown” ends up concentrating power and profits in the hands of a few. But even the downward swings in food raw materials produce negative effects, above all for small producers in low-income countries, not protected by the subsidies that their counterparts in Western nations have. And not only. But the increase in food prices – experts point out – is also causing widespread suffering in the so-called “rich world”: the combination of high food and fuel prices threatens millions of people.

Food chains dominated by little multinationals. Alex Maitland of the international NGO oxfam reported to Guardian – as we learn from the online journal ADUC — that the current crisis was “the latest in a long line of failures in the global food system,” further weakened, he added, by ongoing climate change and the economic earthquakes linked to the pandemic. “The war in Ukraine has resulted in enormous price volatility and disruption of global food supplies, but this is just the latest blow facing a global food system that was already broken,” Maitland said. “Global food chains are dominated by a small number of multinational corporations. It is no surprise that these companies can squeeze such huge profits.”

Half of the world’s undernourished people are small farmers. However, it seems that consumers are not the only ones who have to put up with the distortions imposed by the rules of global trade. Even farmers, especially those at the helm of small production cells, fight every day to survive, fighting against the almost absolute domination of large international companies. Alex Maitland – always on ADUC – in fact argues that: “The people who produce and buy food are those who suffer from a system that uses shareholder profits on people. Half of the world’s undernourished people are small farmers and their families. The poorest spend much more of their income on food than the richest.”

The data in detail. So here is theFAO Food Price Index, updated as of today, May 5, 2023.