Food Riots Spread Across the World as Soaring Prices Impact Poor Areas
Crisis Policy Forum, Food Security: Africa, Quipu Economic Forum, Zero-combustion paradigm ::
Food riots from Haiti to west Africa, Egypt and the Philippines, in recent weeks, have sparked concern among policy-makers, diplomats and economists, that the current state of the global food supply is so precarious that such violence will spread and political and economic instability could follow. Concerns about the American economy, home to most productive grain-producing region in the world, and a shift to biofuels there, could mean added difficulty in bringing food prices down.
‘Left-of-center’ governments in Latin America have begun to organize to take action against the rapid inflation of food prices. Water policy, land-use, and also international fuel and grain trade, are all intimately related to the cost of food. While a global economy is supposed to bring down barriers to price-reduction, exploding transport costs mean a reliance on foreign food sources is harming much of the world’s population, including in the wealthiest and most agriculturally productive countries.
Some observers have speculated that the United States could be at risk of catastrophic price inflation in foodstuffs, due in large part to inadequate planning for a trend toward high-priced fossil fuels (both from decreasing discoveries and escalating speculation). One recent survey found that 70% of US respondents believe “peak oil” has already passed, with the political establishment not having planned sufficiently for the economic repercussions.
One of the push-button political solutions has been the subsidizing of bio-ethanol, made in the US primarily from corn, the effect of which is a strong upward pressure on food prices, as rising fossil fuel costs are accompanied by a falling supply of grain.
The immediate benefit of corn ethanol in terms of gasoline pricing is not enough to offset the negative impact on the domestic and international food supply. The impact has been so negative, in fact, that all three leading presidential candidates have said they will explore changing federal law subsidizing the massive expansion of the ethanol refineries, a move which will not be favored by many voters in rural states which may be hotly contested.
We may now be at the dawn of an era of protracted cross-border food-security conflicts, as governments scramble to obtain the resources and the leverage to secure the food supply needed to feed a growing population. Thousands of Somalis rioted in the capital Mogadishu, last week, demanding a solution soaring food prices and to shop-owners’ refusal to accept Somali currency.
Somalia’s risk civil unrest is intensified by the fact that its government has a precarious hold on authority and that more than one-third of the population, an estimated 2.6 million people, now need food assistance to survive. This is a startling 40% increase since January of this year.
A shift to renewable fuels will help curb the damaging upward price pressure of foodstuffs globally, caused by the steadily, and rapidly, rising cost of petroleum-based fuels. But these renewable resources should not include biofuels, where the planting of fuel-bound food crops reduces the amount of land devoted to farming for food production.
- CNN: “Somalis riot over food prices”
- Washington Times: “Obama: Rethink corn-ethanol fuel”
- HotSpring: “Food Riots in Haiti, Protests in El Salvador, as Corn Prices Skyrocket”
- EPI: “World Creating Food Bubble Economy Based on Unsustainable Use of Water”
admin @ May 10, 2008