Monday 21 April 2008

Food crisis threatens security, says UN chief

Picture (above) of Mexican food shortage protesters from Treehugger's October 2007 coverage.

Excerpts from the Guardian article from today...

The UN secretary general issued a gloomy warning yesterday that the deepening global food crisis, in which rapidly rising prices have triggered riots and threatened hunger in dozens of countries, could have grave implications for international security, economic growth and social progress.

The World Bank estimates food prices have risen by an average of 83% in the past three years, and warns that at least 100 million people could be tipped into poverty as a result. A range of factors has been blamed, including poor harvests, partly due to climate change, rising oil prices, steep growth in demand from China and India, and the dash to produce biofuels for motoring at the expense of food crops.

"One thing is certain," [UN Secretary general] Ban [Ki-Moon] said. "The world has consumed more than it has produced" over the last three years.

Food riots have broken out in at least a dozen countries, most notably in Egypt, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Yemen and Mexico. Pakistan has reintroduced rationing, while Russia has frozen the price of milk, bread, eggs and cooking oil. Indonesia has increased public food subsidies, while India has banned the export of rice, except the high-quality basmati variety.

Earlier this month, Haiti's parliament dismissed the prime minister, and cut the price of rice, in an attempt to defuse widespread anger at food price hikes that led to days of protests and looting in the capital, Port-au-Prince.

The UN food agency has warned that it will need to make "heartbreaking" choices about which countries should receive its emergency aid, unless governments donate more money to buy increasingly expensive food.
British PM Gordon Brown is calling for immediate action on the part of the UK and US to support UN food aid programmes, but I can't see how he'll get President Bush to do anything resembling anything. Brown is going to need more than angry people and possible mass starvation to activate this criminally negligent President.


Coverage of the issue by Bloomberg.com today...
``Biofuels is making the world face a lot of difficulty,'' Qatari Energy Minister Abdullah bin Hamad al-Attiyah said yesterday in Rome. ``It's created a food shortage. Sometimes I ask myself `what is more important, driving or eating?' I can't stop eating.''

A new World Bank report states that ``almost all of the increase in global maize production from 2004 to 2007 (the period when grain prices rose sharply) went for biofuels production in the U.S.'' Go back and read that sentence a second time. It is stunning.

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