The price of some basic foods has doubled in the last twelve months. The United Nations predicts in a recent report that food prices are likely to remain high for a decade.
The high cost of food has sparked food riots in Egypt, Senegal, Cameroon and Morocco. In Thailand some farmers have taken to sleeping in their fields to guard against thieves stealing their crops during the night.
In the United States consumers are shocked at the rapid cost of basics like bread and eggs. Due to rising cost of wheat flour the price of a loaf of bread has jumped by 32 percent since January. During the last year, the average price of a carton of eggs rose by almost 50 percent.
Rapid population growth is one of the many reasons that food is becoming more expensive. As growing economic nations such as India and China become more prosperous they are consuming more of the world’s food. Good economic times affect how much and what people eat.
Global climate change is another factor. The current prolonged droughts that are affecting Australia and the Ukraine are limiting the grain production of those nations.
Oil is another contributor affecting the cost of the food basics of corn, rice and wheat. As farmers try to produce more food they use more fertilizer which is manufactured using fossil fuels. That raises the cost of food production. In the Global economy food is being shipped longer distances in search of markets. As the price of fossil fuels increases, higher transportation costs are being passed along to the customer at the green grocer.
Fuel affects the price of food in other ways. In their attempt to produce more environmentally friendly biofuels the United States and Europe are diverting soya and corn crops away from human and animal consumption towards fuels production.
This is creating political tension. Egyptian Investment Minister, Mahoud Mohieldin, during a recent visit to London charged that U.S. and European biofuel subsidies are affecting the world’s poor.
“(The market) is out of order”, he told Dow Jones. “It sends the wrong message to the world, especially the poorer nations. It takes from the food for people to feed automobiles used by the relatively rich.”
Various nations are reacting to the growing problem of food costs.
In Italy consumers took the cause into their own hands and mounted a nation wide protest by refusing to eat pasta for a day.
In March the Chinese government announced a subsidy for farmers to encourage them to grow more wheat and rice. Already embarrassed by the Tibetan protests there is growing concern among senior communist party officials that rising food costs may lead to more civil unrest prior to the Olympic Games.
The Philippines has recently negotiated the purchase of 1.4 million tonnes of rice from Vietnam while its Secretary of Agriculture has begun urging Philippinos not to throw away rice leftovers and asked fast food outlets to cut back on their rice serving sizes.
Like Global Warming the new Global Food Crisis is leaving few nations unaffected. Some governments have tried to limit food exports or cut import taxes in order to keep food costs from rising to high, to quickly. These efforts only affect the amount of food already on hand and does little to encourage farmers to introduce larger food production initiatives.
In Vietnam, a rice exporting nation, farmers are not seeing the results of rising food costs.
“The rice price has gone up 50 percent over the last three months but I am not making any more money because I have to pay double for fertilizer, insecticides and labor costs” ,one farmer reported to Associated Press.
