“Sometimes, I buy a bit of dried fish, just for the smell.” Mosamed from Bangladesh doesn’t have much money for food for her family, especially since the prices went up so much. She has to do with just the smell of her favourite dish.
For one billion of the world’s people, more expensive food means hunger. There doesn’t seem to be an end in sight to the global increases in the price of food. David Dawe, senior economist at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (UNFAO):
“It’s really a very complicated problem. It’s not possible to explain the increase in food prices in one sentence.”
Failed harvests in Russia, drought in Argentina and floods in Australia lead to smaller world grain reserves. A rise in the global population means there are more mouths to feed. Greater wealth leads to more demand for ‘luxury’ food such as meat. More cattle need more fodder. Speculators on the markets also push prices up. Add the increased demand for biofuel, which puts food reserves under yet more pressure, and you have the recipe for a 30 to 40 percent increase in the price of food.
Big and small hit
It’s not just the world’s poor, trying to get enough to eat, who are being affected. Dutch-British multinational, Unilever, is also being hit by rocketing food prices. Unilever brand food products are marketed in 180 countries. Head Buyer Marc Engel:
“We try to do something about the increasing prices by introducing savings programmes which, for example, improve production efficiency and look at the sourcing of products. We can maybe find a cheaper oil to use than butter. What we can’t save will end up being passed on to the consumer.”
No difference
“How you deal with higher prices is in principle no different for a multinational like Unilever than for a middle-scale trader in Peru. At the end of the day, it’s about knowing what you’re buying and seeing if you can change anything there.”
The UNFAO has lots of recommendations for governments. Dr Dawe:
“Investing in agriculture is the most important. That’s how, for instance, new varieties of rice can be developed. Scientists have recently produced rice which can survive flooding well. This is very useful for a country such as Bangladesh that is often hit by floods.”
(mw)
• Click the red circles in the graphic to learn more about food prices
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"Higher food prices: a complex problem"
Huh?
Ever heard of over population?
Dennis Meadows's World3 simulator predicted already in 1972 that food/capita would peak around 1995.
No one - especially the press - took their work serious.
For a new series of experiments with the World3 system see:
http://rs6.risingnet.net/~ddcc/wbi/World3Again.html
What did those scientists do? They created genetically, modified rice and they modified it to resist only the insecticides they created. Because it has been patiented, farmers can not plant their rice crops unless they have bought it and they can not use the previous years rice for the next years crop because they will liable for patient infringments. Farmers also have to buy the company's insecticides because the rice has been modified to the chemicals they created. The world's food supply is controlled by companies who use GMO. The bottom line is money and the people of Bangladesh will not benefit from GMO rice. If they can't afford it now, they surely will not be able to afford it later. Use only open-pollinated seeds and share them with others.
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