Are rising food prices going to cause governments to go unstable and fall?
Bangkok, Thailand - - Rice farmers here are staying awake in shifts at night to guard their fields from thieves. In Peru, shortages of wheat flour are prompting the military to make bread with potato flour, a native crop. In Egypt, Cameroon, and Burkina Faso food riots have broken out in the past week.
Around the world, governments and aid groups are grappling with the escalating cost of basic grains. In December, 37 countries faced a food crisis, reports the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), and 20 nations had imposed some form of food-price controls.
In Asia, where rice is on every plate, prices are shooting up almost daily. Premium Thai fragrant rice now costs $900 per ton, a nearly 30 percent rise from a month ago.
Exporters say the price could eclipse $1,000 per ton by June. Similarly, prices of white rice have climbed about 50 percent since January to $600 per ton and are projected to jump another 40 percent to $800 per ton in April.
High food prices have several causes. Population growth is one cause that is going to keep happening for many years to come. Industrialization of Asia has increased buying power for meat and therefore shifted more grain toward livestock feeding. A shift of grains toward biomass energy has reduced the amount of grain available for eating. Some droughts have contributed as well. Aside from the drought most of these causes are going to keep putting upward pressure on food prices.
If you are a middle class American the cost of food is a small enough percentage of our income that there's no need to panic. But in an extremely poor place like Haiti rises in commodities prices cause hunger.
"It's not likely that prices will go back to as low as we're used to," said Abdolreza Abbassian, economist and secretary of the Intergovernmental Group for Grains for the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). "Currently if you're in Haiti, unless the government is subsidizing consumers, consumers have no choice but to cut consumption. It's a very brutal scenario, but that's what it is."
No one knows that better than Eugene Thermilon, 30, a Haitian day laborer who can no longer afford pasta to feed his wife and four children since the price nearly doubled to the local equivalent of US$0.57 (€.37) a bag. Their only meal on a recent day was two cans of corn grits.
"Their stomachs were not even full," Thermilon said, walking toward his pink concrete house on the precipice of a garbage-filled ravine. By noon the next day, he still had nothing to feed them for dinner.
Modest proposal: Use US foreign aid to offer free contraceptives and family planning classes for all the people in Haiti.
Prices for basic dietary staples are up sharply in El Salvador.
Protesters beat on pots and pan at El Salvador's Central Bank denouncing prices for staples such as maize and rice. Retail price for beans has risen 68% since January 2007; 56.2% for rice and 37.5% for maize.
Last year Mexico City was the scene of tortilla riots.
The troubles erupted early last year. First, there were the tortilla riots in Mexico City: 75,000 angry demonstrators, mostly poor, taking to the streets to protest the surging price of a food staple. Then in Italy, merchants from Milan began clamoring about the cost of pasta. By year's end, protests had broken out in at least a dozen countries: in India over onions, in Indonesia over soybeans, and, last month, in the small African country of Burkina Faso, where hundreds of looters burned government buildings to protest soaring grain prices.
You can imagine that immigration advocates will point to instability in Mexico as a reason to let in poor starving Mexicans. Not so fast. Poor starving Mexico is now the second fattest nation in the world.
MEXICO CITY – Fueled by the rising popularity of soft drinks and fast food restaurants, Mexico has become the second-fattest nation in the world. Mexican health officials say it could surpass the United States as the most obese country within 10 years if trends continue.
More than 71 percent of Mexican women and 66 percent of Mexican men are overweight, according to the latest national surveys.
People judge how they are doing versus how they were doing in the past. Younger fat Mexicans will become upset and express their anger long before they get really hungry. So even the fatter nations can be destabilized by rising food prices. America should deal with potential instability on its southern border by building a border barrier that will insulate us from some of the consequences of higher food prices.