“If you had asked most mainstream development experts in the year 2000 to name those factors they thought would most imperil their efforts to reduce poverty globally in the new millennium, it is highly unlikely they would have mentioned a sudden radical spike in the price of the principal agricultural commodities, and the staple foods made from them, on which the poor of the world literally depended for their survival.” By 2006, as David Rieff goes on to show, prices of wheat, rice, corn and soybeans began to rise steeply on world markets. In Egypt, the price of bread doubled in a matter of months, and by some measures the food bill of the world’s poor rose by roughly 40 per cent. The result, in 30 of the world’s worst-affected countries, from Ethiopia to Uzbekistan, was a rash of bread riots. Food prices peaked in 2008, but rose again, almost as sharply, in 2010 and 2011, and the rising cost of bread was among the triggers of the Arab spring.
Why were the experts so unprepared? One reason is that most of them believed that a formula for ridding the world of poverty had been found. All that was needed was the will to apply it, and this determination already existed in the many transnational institutions and NGOs dedicated to eliminating hunger. As Rieff writes, “The consensus in the development world is that the early 21st century really marks the ‘end-time’ for extreme poverty and hunger.” The Reproach of Hunger challenges this consensus, showing it for what it is – an ideology that simplifies the causes of extreme poverty and systematically underestimates the difficulties of eradicating it.
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