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| THE WORLD FOOD CRISIS 16/04/2008 |
| (2008-04-16) |
| Last updated: 2008-04-17 13:40 EET |
The last several months have seen an increasing number of protests worldwide, some of which resulting in victims, over the alarming rise in food prices. Many international institutions have warned that if this increase continues, the consequences will be disastrous at world level. The United Nations secretary general Ban Ki Moon has recently said that the food crisis in the world has reached a critical stage and that unless urgent measures are taken in the short and medium rum, political and security consequences will be hard to predict. He urged the international community to take steps to prevent starvation in many regions on the globe and create long term strategies.
At the same time, the World Bank estimates that the doubling of wheat and rice prices, as well as food, might sentence millions of people in underdeveloped countries to dire poverty. According to the World Bank, the price of food has gone up by 83% worldwide in the last 3 years. The reasons that led to this increase in prices are the growing population of the planet, the reduction of farmland along with the increasing use of farmland to produce bio-fuel, and the climate change, especially draught and flooding, which have seriously affected crops. The inhabitants of developing countries are the most likely to suffer from these increases in prices because food accounts for 60 to 80% of their expenses, as compared to 10 to 20% in industrialised states.
UNICEF also warns that as a result of the rise in food prices, parents in poor countries faced with a reduced budget will sacrifice their children’s education and will send them to work instead of school. In the last few weeks, the situation has become even more worrying in Haiti, Mexico, Mozambic, the Ivory Coast, Senegal, Egypt, Camerun, India and Indonesia. 37 countries across the world, of which 21 in Africa, 10 in Asia and 5 in Latin America are confronted with a serious food crisis. In Europe, there is only one state that needs emergency food aid according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, namely the Republic of Moldova, once an important supplier of food for the former Soviet Union market. The United Nations warns that the world’s cereal stocks are diminishing every day, and the grain reserves are the lowest since the 1980s.
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