A worldwide food crisis

Food prices have soared around the world, up 40% since mid 2007. There are 660 million people, equivalent to half the population of China, living on less than $2 per day. These people already spend such a large percentage of their income on food that the increase means they are either starving or in great danger of starving.

We’re already seeing the effects of this, in these poorest nations:

Food riots have rocked Haiti and impoverished Burkina Faso, gripped by a nationwide strike, is the latest African nation to face unrest over the increasing cost of basic foods. Dozens have died in other riots in Africa.

Africa, of course, is hardest hit

Forty people died during price riots in Cameroon in February. There have also been deadly troubles in Ivory Coast and Mauritania and other violent demonstrations in Senegal. Only threats from the government headed off a general strike in Egypt on Sunday.

but Asia will not be immune

Bangladesh and the Philippines, where the poor currently spend around 70 percent of their income simply on food, will be among the worst hit.

There are three main factors contributing to this situation:

1. Climate change and local droughts are partly to blame. African deserts are expanding, other countries including Australia and Khazakstan are affected by drought, and storms have damaged crops in India and Bangladesh. The poorest one sixth of the world’s people are also by and large located in regions where water shortages and ecological changes will bite deepest.
2. Meanwhile a growing middle class in China are demanding, and paying for, more meat in their diet. Each extra cow uses land and water which could otherwise grow ten times that number of calories in the form of grain.
3. In this growing crisis biofuels may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. The UN’s special rapporteur on the right to fuel, Jean Ziegler, called them “a crime against humanity”.

The world is distracted by the Iraq war, the threat of terrorism, and the price of oil, but political stability is critically dependent upon food security – and that is hard enough for all sorts of reasons related to distribution, quite apart from these fundamental production problems.