I love food

From BBC: World Bank echoes food cost alarm:

The rapid rise in food prices could push 100m people in poor countries deeper into poverty, the head of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, has said.

His warning follows that from the leader of the International Monetary Fund, who said hundreds of thousands of people are at risk of starvation.

Mr Zoellick proposed an action plan to boost long-run agricultural production.

There have been food riots recently in a number of countries, including Haiti, the Philippines and Egypt.

"Based on a rough analysis, we estimate that a doubling of food prices over the last three years could potentially push 100 million people in low-income countries deeper into poverty," Mr Zoellick said.

The World Bank and its sister organisation, the IMF have held a weekend of meetings that addressed rising food and energy prices as well as the credit crisis upsetting global financial markets.

Food prices have risen sharply in recent months, driven by increased demand, poor weather in some countries that has ruined crops and an increase in the use of land to grow crops for transport fuels.

GLOBAL FOOD PRICE RISES

Wheat: 130%
Soya: 87%
Rice: 74%
Corn: 31%
Time: Year to March 2008

The price of staple crops such as wheat, rice and corn have all risen, leading to an increase in overall food prices of 83% in the last three years, the World Bank has said.

It's only been very recently in our history that the world has been able to experience a situation where there's enough food for everyone. For millennia, people have had to fight for food and live on subsistence. Today, we've become so comfortable that we've moved from eating to live to living to eat. And I can attest to the 'live to eat' philosophy.

This is scary to us, because our generation has never faced this. We've always had an abundance of food and been spoiled for choice. We've been guilty of gluttony more than once. Riots due to lack of food have been happening ever since governments formed. Food riots littered the history of the Roman, Egyptian and Greek empires, and now they're happening again.

What's interesting is that TIME magazine reports ethanol fuel as a cause. Not all ethanol fuel, simply the ones that come from corn. It takes too much land and too much corn for ethanol fuel from this source to be efficient. Rainforests are being razed to grow the corn to sell to Americans to make ethanol fuel. Counter-intuitive, isn't it? The amount of corn it takes to produce just 1 tank of gas for 1 SUV could feed a person for 1 year. Yet, corn is the source of choice being promoted by politicians worldwide as the saviour to our energy crisis. In the process, they've also caused a food crisis which, is much more serious than a mere energy crisis.

The effects are dire. 1 billion people are below the poverty line, and much closer to famine than we are. A small increase in the price of food would seriously mitigate the amount of food that they get from goodwill organisations. The head of the United Nations Food Programme is calling a state of emergency. They say that they will need an additional US$500 million to simply meet their projections for the year. The number of poor, previously forecasted to decrease in the next few years, is now predicted to increase.

How do we stop the snowball? In this day and age of social responsibility and social consciousness, how easy is it to tell someone that this kind of ethanol fuel is bad for both the environment and people? Trying to simply say the words will get you a series of looks of horror that you would simply suggest such a thing.

The fact of the matter is that there are other sources of ethanol fuel that are much more efficient, such as sugar cane, which can be produced on much smaller pieces of land. Malaysian petrol companies (company?) are looking at a whole different kind of source: a poisonous berry that grows on semi-arid land, which takes little processing to produce oil. A source that doesn't take away food from people, can be grown on land that isn't already used for grazing or agriculture, and can be used to combat desertification.

The answer to the world's problems? We've heard that before.