Latin America Food Fights
http://zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/17083

April 06, 2008
By Laura Carlsen

excerpt:

You had to duck to miss the food issues flying through the global cafeteria this week.

For the first time since widespread famines devastated whole populations, serious doubts about global food supply have gripped societies throughout the world.

The problem this time is not so much the quantity of food produced (if it ever was), but what productive land will be used for, who will feed us, and who will eat.

In Argentina, soybean producers blocked roads to protest a tax hike on exports levied by the government of President Cristina Fernandez. Soybean producers have reaped a financial bonanza over the past years, harvesting high prices with the full support of the government and driving basic food producers off the land. As politicians and exporters hurled insults back and forth, urban consumers experienced food shortages due to interruption of food transport between the cities and the countryside.

In Bolivia, cooking oil producers demonstrated against the government's temporary prohibition on exports. The Bolivian government of President Evo Morales has frozen exports until domestic demand can be met at affordable prices. Producers in the province of Santa Cruz used the occasion to reiterate demands for regional autonomy and intensify opposition to government social welfare policies.

In Mexico, the biotech lobby moved one step closer to legalizing genetically modified (GM) corn in the country with new rules on a biosafety law made-to-order to their interests. Farmers' organizations warned that the measure threatens native corn varieties, livelihoods and the nation's food sovereignty. GM corn cross-pollinates naturally with native varieties, creating genetic contamination of varieties that indigenous farmers have developed over centuries. Their use also makes farmers dependent on transnational seed companies, instead of relying on millennia-old practices of seed-saving.

Each of these conflicts is inserted in its own complex national political scenario. But they share something in common: they are part of a battle over the future of food and agriculture. As prices for basic commodities soar, small farmers, instead of reaping the benefits, find themselves facing a new set of threats to their livelihoods.

A recent report by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) cautions that global food prices will stay high. The report blames in part the biofuels boom for rising food costs.

"With grains and oil seeds the key feedstocks for bio-fuels, the oil price rise exerted a strong push on agriculture commodity prices in 2007, which enjoyed their best performance for almost 30 years. As oil hit $100 per barrel in January 2008, soybean prices jumped to a 34-year high, corn prices approached their recent 11-year high, wheat prices were just below their recent all-time high, rapeseed prices rose to record highs and palm oil futures hit a historic high." The report concludes "Governments need to carefully consider the impact of bio-fuels on the poor."

Other factors that have joined to create the crisis in the food supply include climate change, concentration in production and marketing, spreading urbanization, erosion and pollution of natural resources, higher demand for livestock and government policies that have made smallholder farming—still the source of most of the world's food supply—a "non-competitive" (and therefore non-viable) economic activity.

My satellite provider is from the Philippines, so I get Philippines news. RICE dominated the news every day --prices, shortages, hoarding, limitations on exports by the main exporters, Thailand and Vietnam, even the race issue, combined with implications of corruption/cronyism -- the fact that Chinese Filipinos control the rice trade and the head of the Agriculture Dept is Chinese Filipino, who unfortunately suggested the solution was to at less rice instead of wasting it. That didn't go over well since for most Filipinos apparently, rice is a three times a day staple and not a grain is wasted.

Here is HK there were rumours of a shortage as Thailand cut back exports, since 90% of our rice comes from Thailand, so there was a run on rice at the supermarkets.

People get pretty excited when their basic food takes a 25% price jump in one day and there are warnings of a severe shortage.

Indications of things to come.

Food riots fear after rice price hits a high
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/apr/06/food.foodanddrink

Shortages of the staple crop of half the world's people could bring unrest across Asia and Africa, reports foreign affairs editor Peter Beaumont

* The Observer,
* Sunday April 6 2008

excerpt:

A global rice shortage that has seen prices of one of the world's most important staple foods increase by 50 per cent in the past two weeks alone is triggering an international crisis, with countries banning export and threatening serious punishment for hoarders.

With rice stocks at their lowest for 30 years, prices of the grain rose more than 10 per cent on Friday to record highs and are expected to soar further in the coming months. Already China, India, Egypt, Vietnam and Cambodia have imposed tariffs or export bans, as it has become clear that world production of rice this year will decline in real terms by 3.5 per cent. The impact will be felt most keenly by the world's poorest populations, who have become increasingly dependent on the crop as the prices of other grains have become too costly.

Rice is the staple food for more than half the world's population. This is the second year running in which production - which increased in real terms last year - has failed to keep pace with population growth. The harvest has also been hit by drought, particularly in China and Australia, forcing producers to hoard their crops to satisfy local markets.

The increase in rice prices - which some believe could increase by a further 40 per cent in coming months - has matched sharp inflation in other key food products. But with rice relied on by some eight billion people, the impact of a prolonged rice crisis for the world's poor - a large part of whose available income is spent on food - threatens to be devastating.

The consequences are visible across the globe. In Bangladesh, government-run outlets that sell subsidised rice have been besieged by queues comprised largely of the country's middle classes, who will queue for hours to purchase five kilograms of rice sold at 30 per cent cheaper than on the open market.

In Thailand yesterday - where the price for lower-quality rice alone has risen by between $70 and $100 per tonne in the past week alone - Deputy Prime Minister Mingkwan Sangsuwan convened a meeting of key officials and traders yesterday to discuss imposing minimum export prices to control export volumes and measures to punish hoarders. The meeting follows moves by some larger supermarkets in Thailand to limit purchases of rice by customers.

In the Philippines, where the National Bureau of Investigation has been called in to raid traders suspected of hoarding rice to push up the prices, activists have warned of the risk of food riots.

Human greed will be the downfall of our species. I know, I know, we have heard this our whole lives, but the truth of the adage is being played out before our very eyes!

On an unbelievably fertile planet, in a world literally bursting with life, we are going to starve to death...

PAUL SCHEMM
AP News

Apr 06, 2008 17:50 EST

Thousands of demonstrators angry about rising prices and stagnant salaries torched buildings, looted shops and hurled bricks at police who responded with tear gas Sunday in a northern industrial town as Egyptians staged a nationwide strike.

.......Nearly 40 percent Egypt's 76 million people live below or near the poverty line of $2 a day. The prices of staples such as cooking oil and rice have nearly doubled in recent months, amid widespread shortages of government-subsidized bread.

http://www.rawstory.com/news/mochila/Egyptian_workers_riot_over_rising_p_04062008.html

April 18, 2008
Across Globe, Empty Bellies Bring Rising Anger
By MARC LACEY

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Hunger bashed in the front gate of Haiti’s presidential palace. Hunger poured onto the streets, burning tires and taking on soldiers and the police. Hunger sent the country’s prime minister packing.

Haiti’s hunger, that burn in the belly that so many here feel, has become fiercer than ever in recent days as global food prices spiral out of reach, spiking as much as 45 percent since the end of 2006 and turning Haitian staples like beans, corn and rice into closely guarded treasures.

Saint Louis Meriska’s children ate two spoonfuls of rice apiece as their only meal recently and then went without any food the following day. His eyes downcast, his own stomach empty, the unemployed father said forlornly, “They look at me and say, ‘Papa, I’m hungry,’ and I have to look away. It’s humiliating and it makes you angry.”

That anger is palpable across the globe. The food crisis is not only being felt among the poor but is also eroding the gains of the working and middle classes, sowing volatile levels of discontent and putting new pressures on fragile governments.

In Cairo, the military is being put to work baking bread as rising food prices threaten to become the spark that ignites wider anger at a repressive government. In Burkina Faso and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, food riots are breaking out as never before. In reasonably prosperous Malaysia, the ruling coalition was nearly ousted by voters who cited food and fuel price increases as their main concerns.

“It’s the worst crisis of its kind in more than 30 years,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, the economist and special adviser to the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. “It’s a big deal and it’s obviously threatening a lot of governments. There are a number of governments on the ropes, and I think there’s more political fallout to come.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/world/americas/18food.html?ex=1366171200&en=d321b03d9e1db16c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all