Flora's Spaghetti and Onion Sauce - © 2022 Guadelupe Pardo

Exercise In Perspective: The Food Shortage Elsewhere

You think there’s a food crisis in North America? We come off looking pretty affluent by comparison. We wondered what they’re doing abroad to address food shortages in other countries. The BBC has just published a survey of the situation…

Donna Martin - © 2022 Ben GrayDonna Martin fights day to day to make sure the kids in her Georgia school District get fed.

The baseline case

The BBC piece uses the U.S. as its baseline case in the comparison study:

  • Annual food inflation in the US was at 10.9 percent in July
  • Americans spend 7.1 percent of their income on food (USDA 2021)

As a representative example of one challenged community, it examined a small town in Georgia. There, Donna Martin is in charge of making school kids in her district get nutrition mandated under the Federal School Meals program.

“We have two grocery stores in our entire community of 22,000 people,” Martin  says. “It’s a real food desert.”

Martin used to rely on discounts and donations from local food wholesalers to meet her organization’s needs. But over the pasty year of soaring inflation, suppliers have backed off

“They’re telling me: ‘Ya’ll are so picky, and the margins just aren’t there’,” she says.

The fact that her lunch menus rely heavily on fresh fruits and veggies doesn’t make things any easier. Her answer to the crunch has been to ‘raid’ discount grocers such as Walmart for deals and, sometimes, temporarily ‘buy the town out’ of commodities such as yogurt.

“There’s a lot of kids really excited to go back to school, and I don’t want them saying: ‘Mom, we didn’t get our smoothies today’.”

Sri Lanka

The conflict between Hindus and Tamils hasn’t let up much in decades. And in the midst of that turmoil, the world food shortage is hitting ordinary folks hard.

  • Annual food inflation in Sri Lanka hit 75.8 percent in June
  • Sri Lankans spend 29.6 percent of their income on food

There, folks have gone back to growing much of their own food, and bartering their surplus to maintain balanced, healthy diets. A true cooperative community effort.

“In what was once a rice paddy just outside Kandy in central Sri Lanka, Anoma Kumari Paranathala is plucking green beans and fresh mint from the rambling foliage of her vegetable garden, the BBC story relates. “From here it’s hard to imagine the chaos elsewhere in the country, as the government and economy crumble. […]There are shortages of everything – medicines, fuel and food. Even people with good jobs are struggling to buy the basics.”

Nigeria

This Central African nation has had a hard time of it, both at home and abroad, stretching back many decades, to the 1960s at least. For a time, it was considered the crookedest country in Africa from supporting all sorts of government scams siphoning foreign aid money to hosting the so-called ‘Nigerian Letter’ online scam.

The global food crisis has hit bakery owner Emmanuel Onuorah a heavy blow. In fact, he’s close to his limits, in terms of keeping his products affordable for his customers.

“In the past year, wheat flour has gone up by more than 200 percent, sugar has gone up by almost 150 percent, eggs that we use for baking have gone up by about 120 percent […] We are running at a loss.” he told the BBC. Add that, he’s had to lay off 305 of his 350 staff.

“How will they feed their families?” he wonders.

Peru

Another community comes together to solve its food shortage crisis in the town of San Juan de Miraflores, just outside of Lima Peru.

  • Annual food inflation in Peru hit 11.59% in July
  • Peruvians spend 26.6% of their income on food

Justina Flores, who worked as a kitchen assistant before COVID, and now coordinates the town’s community cooking pot initiative, where some 60 residents pool their food resources to get everybody fed.

“The majority of residents of San Juan de Miraflores are domestic workers — cooks, maids, nannies and gardeners [in the nearby city] — but like Ms Flores, most lost their jobs during the pandemic,” The BBC article explains.

Flores started by canvasing market vendors for food that would otherwise have gone to waste. There was also some food being grown in the town. She fed 60 of her friends and neighbours three hearty meals a week.

She started out making stews with meat and veggies, served over rice. Now, donations have fallen off, meat has become too expensive, and she’s even having trouble getting enough rice. The day the BBC correspondent visited Flores, she was preparing spaghetti to be served with a sauce based on Onions and locally-grown herbs (see photo, top of page). Enough to serve an increased group of 75 that now relies on her for supper 3 times a week.

My take

It’s downright embarrassing to see how much better we have it than many other folks in the world. The so-called privations we’ve been complaining about look like peevish by comparison.

But if worst come to worst, we can look to the adaptations folks in other countries and cultures have already made to survive and, in some cases thrive.

~ Maggie J.