The dangers to the world's food supply were brought home sharply in 2007-8 when grain prices internationally surged, creating the risk of starvation for hundreds of millions of people. Rising food prices were hurting many of those small farmers who bought as well as sold food. "Food security" suddenly joined energy security as a concern for governments. In the short term the ability of farmers in Europe and North America to cultivate land which had been left idle under "set aside" schemes raised the possibility of filling some of the gaps in the global food supply and there were limited falls in some prices by the beginning of 2009-although not to the level of two years earlier.
The crisis was more likely to be an omen for the future-the threat of immense hardship to hundreds of millions of peoplethan the immediate onset of global catastrophe.39 The "real risk" remained of a "food crunch at some point in the future, which would fall particularly hard on import-dependent countries and on poor people everywhere", reported one study.40 Indications were that the food price rises of 2006-8 had not simply just been a result of speculation during the last phase of the mid-2000s boom. Early in 2009 a report could tell how "food prices are poised to rise again" as long-term "resource scarcity trends, notably climate change, energy security and falling water availability", would put pressure on prices and production.41
The food shortage of 2008 showed the way in which the different elements of crisis endemic to capitalism in the 2 1 st century can interact with each other. For the shortage was not just as a result of the exhaustion of the benefits of the Green Revolution. It was also a product of the probable efects of climate change, with crop failures in Australia due to drought and in Europe due to flooding; of the typically perverse capitalist way to ofset climate change and energy security by devoting a third of the US maize crop and half the European oil seed crop to the production of biofuels;42 of the rising oil price, which forced up the costs of fertilisers and fuels on which 21st century farming depends; and of the sharpness of the boom part of the capitalist cycle in the early and mid-2000s, which massively increased middle class meat consumption, especially in China.
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The Runaway System