The food crisis is here now and you and I don't even seem to see it...
Hint! Riots worldwide over food.
Hint! IMF,
WFP, GLOBAL LEADERS scared, grocery shelves empty of key products.
We have created the problem with faulty public policy on a global scale and we now need to fix things or at the least respond to this situation and put in place policy for the future.
Possibility of things getting better before they get worse? Slim to nil!
read this!World Food Program warns of 'silent
tsunami' of hunger
ASSOCIATED PRESS/AP ONLINE
DAVID STRINGER
LONDON - Ration cards.
Genetically modified crops.
The end of pile-it-high,
sell-it-cheap supermarkets.
These possible solutions to
the first global food crisis
since World War II - which
the World Food Program
says already threatens 20
million of the poorest
children - are complex and
controversial. And they may
not even solve the problem
as demand continues to
soar.
A "silent tsunami" of hunger
is sweeping the world's
most desperate nations,
said
Josette Sheeran, the
WFP's executive director,
speaking Tuesday at a London summit on the crisis.
The skyrocketing cost of food staples, stoked by rising fuel prices,
unpredictable weather and demand from India and China, has already sparked
sometimes violent protests across the Caribbean, Africa and Asia.
The price of rice has more than doubled in the last five weeks, she said. The
World Bank estimates food prices have risen by 83 percent in three years.
"What we are seeing now is affecting more people on every continent,"
Sheerantold a news conference.
Hosting talks with
Sheeran, lawmakers and experts, British Prime Gordon Brown
said the spiraling prices threaten to plunge millions back into poverty and
reverse progress on alleviating misery in the developing world.
"Tackling hunger is a moral challenge to each of us and it is also a threat to the
political and economic stability of nations," Brown said.
Malaysia's embattled prime minister is already under pressure over the price
increases and has launched a major rice-growing project. Indonesia's
government needed to revise its annual budget to respond.
Unrest over the food crisis has led to deaths in Cameroon and Haiti, cost
Haitian Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis his job, and caused hungry
textile workers to clash with police in Bangladesh.
Former U.N. Secretary-General
Kofi Annan said more protests in other
developing nations appear likely. "We are going through a very serious crisis
and we are going to see lots of food strikes and demonstrations,"
Annan told
reporters in Geneva.
At
streetside restaurants in Lome, Togo, even the traditional balls of corn meal
or corn dough served with vegetable soup are shrinking. Once as big as a
boxer's fist, the dumplings are now the size of a tennis ball - but cost twice as
much.
In Yaounde, Cameroon, civil servant Samuel
Ebwelle, 51, said he fears food
prices will rise further.
"We are getting to the worst period of our life," he said. "We've had to reduce
the number of meals we take a day from three to two. Breakfast no longer
exists on our menu."
Even if her call for $500 million in emergency funding is met, food aid programs
- including work to feed 20 million poor children - will be hit this year,
Sheeransaid.
President Bush has released $200 million in urgent aid. Britain pledged an
immediate $59.7 million on Tuesday.
Even so, school feeding projects in Kenya and Cambodia have been scaled
back and food aid has been cut in half in Tajikistan,
Sheeran said.
Yet while angry street protesters call for immediate action, long term solutions
are likely to be slow, costly and complicated, experts warn.
And evolving diets among burgeoning middle classes in India and China will help
double the demand for food - particularly grain intensive meat and dairy
products - by 2030, the World Bank says.
Robert
Zoellick, the bank's head, claims as many as 100 million people could be
forced deeper into poverty. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said rising
food costs threaten to cancel strides made toward the goal of cutting world
poverty in half by 2015.
"Now is not too soon to be thinking about the longer-term solutions," said Alex
Evans, a former adviser to Britain's Environment Secretary Hilary Benn.
He said world leaders must help increase food production, rethink their push on
biofuels - which many blame for pushing up food prices - and consider anew the
once taboo topic of growing genetically modified crops.
But Evans, now a visiting fellow at New York University's Center on
International Cooperation, said increasing the amount of land that can be
farmed in the developing world will be arduous.
"It's almost like new oil or gas fields; they'll tend to be the hardest to reach
places, that need new roads and new infrastructure to be viable," he said.
The will to increase food production exists, as does most of the necessary
skills, but there are major obstacles, including a lack of government investment
in agriculture and - in Africa particularly - a scarcity of fertilizers, good irrigation
and access to markets.
"Many African farmers are very entrepreneurial, but they simply aren't
connected to markets," said Lawrence
Haddad, an economist and director of
Britain's Institute of Development Studies. "They find there are no chilling plants
for milk and no grinding mills for coffee."
Haddad said the likely impact of food price increases should have been
anticipated. "The fact no one has previously made the link between agriculture
and poverty is quite incredible," he said.
Just as new land for farming is available in Russia and Brazil, new genetically
modified crops resistant to drought, or which deliver additional nutrients, could
be better targeted to different regions of the developing world, Evans said. "The
solutions are more nuanced than we previously thought," he added.
Sheeran said developing world governments, particularly in Africa, will need to
dedicate at least 10 percent of future budgets to agriculture to boost global
production.
Some experts predict other countries could follow the example of Pakistan,
which has revived the use of ration cards for subsidized wheat.
The production of
biofuels also needs to be urgently re-examined, Brown said.
He acknowledged that Britain this month introduced targets aimed at producing
5 percent of transport fuel from
biofuels by 2010, but said his government and
others should review their policies.
Production of
biofuel leads to the destruction of forests and takes up land
available to grow crops for food.
Brown said the impact of the food crisis won't just be felt in the developing
world, but also in the checkout lane of Western supermarkets. "It it is not
surprising that we see our shopping bills go up," Brown said.
Many analysts, including Britain's opposition leader David Cameron, claim that
people in the West will need to eat less meat - and consume, or waste, less
food in general. Some expect the shift in attitudes to herald the end of
supermarket giveaways and cost-cutting grocery stores that stack goods to the
ceiling and sell in bulk.
Citizens in the West, China and India must realize that the meat on their plate
and
biofuels in their expensive cars carry a cost for those in the developing
world, Evans said.
Sheeran believes many already understand the impact. "Much of the world is
waking up to the fact that food does not spontaneously appear on grocery
store shelves," she said.
---
AP writers
Ebow Godwin in Lome, Togo; Emmanuel
Tumanjong in Yaounde,
Cameroon; Anita Powell in
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and
Eliane Engeler in Geneva
contributed to this report.
