The possible poverty and the increases of food prices in our country could be the magnitude of a future major political event. To the typical poor household, food is the equivalent of energy in the United States, and people expect their government to do something when prices rise.
The real challenge is not the technical difficulty of returning the country to cheap food but the political difficulty of confronting the lobbying interests and illusions on which current policies rest. Politicians have it in their power to solve the food crisis, instead they are turning their back to something else.
Politicians and policymakers do, in fact, have it in their power to bring food prices down. But so far, their responses have been less than encouraging. As it is, no action had been seriously taken to come up with an encouraging solution.
Already, there have been food riots in some 30 countries; in Haiti, they brought down the prime minister. And for some consumers in the world's poorest countries, the true anguish of high food prices is only just beginning. If our country food prices remain high, the consequences will be grim both ethically and politically.
Typically, in trying to find a solution to a problem, people look to its causes . Or, yet more fatuously, to its "root" cause. But there need be no logical connection between the cause of a problem and appropriate or even just feasible solutions to it. Such is the case with the food crisis and poverty.
The root cause of high food prices is the spectacular economic growth in our country. And because its people are still poor, they devote much of their budgets to food.
As our incomes rise, our demand for food increases. And not only that we are eating more, but we have the tendency to eat better. Carbohydrates are being replaced by protein. And because it takes six kilograms of grain to produce one kilogram of beef, the switch to a protein-heavy diet further drives up demand for grain.
Being poor, we would inevitably be squeezed by the increase in prices, but by a cruel implication of the laws of necessity, poor people spend a far larger proportion of their budgets on food, typically around a half, in contrast to only around a tenth for high-income groups. Hungry slum dwellers are unlikely to accept their fate quietly.
However for centuries, sudden hunger in slums has provoked the same response: riots. This is the classic political base for populist politics, such as Peronism in Argentina, and the food crisis and poverty may provoke its ugly resurgence.