When you put your loose coppers in an Oxfam tin, it is tempting to think that they will be going towards a bag of grain for a drought-torn African village.
When you put your loose coppers in an Oxfam tin, it is tempting to think that they will be going towards a bag of grain for a drought-torn African village. Maybe they will, but there is also a chance they will be spent on the likes of ‘Growing a Better Future: food justice in a resource-constrained world’, a pamphlet published this week. Not alone among charities, Oxfam is diversifying into the think-tank business. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this, though it will have to be prepared to have its work subjected to critical analysis rather than meekly accepted as an enlightened contribution towards the creation of a better world.
Oxfam’s claim is that we are in the midst of the world’s first ‘global food crisis’. It predicts that global food prices will rise by 120 to 180 per cent by 2050 as a result of ‘resource pressures’ and climate change. ‘Land is running out and fresh water is drying up,’ it asserts. ‘The global food system is broken.’ It sees a solution in pouring money into small farms in the developing world and breaking up the activities of speculators.
Malthusians have been predicting starvation for more than 200 years, of course, and there is little to suggest that this time it will be any different: human ingenuity will triumph over myopic doomsayers. Like the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (which was criticised last year in a review commissioned by the Dutch government for overlooking research that predicts that some parts of the world will see rising yields and increased access to water), Oxfam has fallen into the trap of exaggerating the negative and suppressing the positive.
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