As the media turns to face the food crisis, few pieces strike me as particularly thoughtful. One of the ones that does is this one by Claire Melamed on the profiteering behind the price rises.
Just by way of coda to the previous post, there are many folk who will not be silenced. Check out one group (whose t-shirts I’m proud to wear) here.
If Josette Sheeran, head of the United Nations World Food Programme, is to be believed the current food crisis is “a silent tsunami which knows no borders sweeping the world.”
If I get time, I’ll tell the whole story behind the rationing of rice in the United States. It’s a sordid tale of export quotas, harvest failures and hoarding, and one of the very few times when the word ‘quota’ gets to be associated with something not entirely boring.
Robert Zoellick isn’t the only man who thinks the best way out of the current food crisis is yet more of the same policies that got us into it. Stephen Pollard over at The Spectator believes this too.
I have to say, I’m not a huge Chavista. I’m *very* pleased with the social change and equality that he’s brought to Venezuela, but I’ve just got a thing about any model of politics that is ultimately hostage to the good intentions of just one guy. But he’s come out with the goods on the world food crisis, calling it ‘a massacre of the poor’. He’s dead right, of course. What gets to me is that even in a good year, 850 million people were going hungry, thousands of whom died. Was that not a massacre too?
“Being a mother, you want to cut back on things for yourself first before you cut back for the family.” It’s the sort of sentiment we hear a lot of in developing countries, as mothers skip meals so that the rest of their families can eat.
Just when you thought it couldn’t get any more apocalyptic, the food crisis looks like it’s getting a helping hand from another horseman: pestilence.
There are five main reasons that food prices are rising: increased meat consumption, climate-related bad harvests, biofuels , the price of oil, and speculation.
From the African Biodiversity Network comes a tale of plunder, opportunism, and greed, a story of how biofuels are providing a pretext for privatisation. Full story below the fold.
Two important bits of news from the world of agricultural technology. First, we’ve a report that genetically modified soy beans yield less than ordinary ones. The study was motivated by a professor who heard soybean farmers asking “how come I don’t get as high a yield as I used to?”. A good question indeed. One answer – it wasn’t designed to yield more, it was designed to withstand a herbicide sold by the same company that sells the seed.
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