The World Food Crisis

In the past few days there were a lot of talking about the world going, in addition to financial crisis, in a food crisis. It wasn’t just a breaking headline, news TV’s were focusing on that subject big time, and were interviewing experts to find a solution for this crisis.

Now let’s look at some facts a got from the World Food Program’s (WFP) site:

* Top international experts say millions of people are being pushed deeper into poverty and hunger by high food prices. According to the World Bank, the number is at least 100 million. WFP’s research indicates that it could be as high as 130 million.

* On international commodity markets, food prices have gone up 54 percent over the last year, with cereal prices soaring 92 percent. (Source: FAO – World Food Situation).

* Over the first four months of 2008 WFP paid an average of US$430 for a metric ton of wheat, compared to US$207 for the same period of 2007, an increase of 108 percent.

* WFP is also paying more for other key elements in its food basket: 33 percent more for maize, 50 percent more for rice, 73 percent more for vegetable oil and 61 percent more for pulses.

* World cereal reserves are expected to fall 5 percent this year, to their lowest point for 25 years. (Source: FAO - Crop Prospects).

* Approximately 1 billion people still live on less than US$ 1 dollar a day, the threshold defined by the international community as absolute poverty, below which survival is in question.

In the interviews there were a lot of reasons causing the crisis mentioned, the developing countries’ economics growth, higher energy prices, the growth of bio-fuel production, and the climatic conditions resulting in flooding the crops. But out of this darkness I still can find something to laugh at, in the matter of fact it’s even extremely funny or extremely sad, that thing was, non of the experts interviewed, or at least those I watched, came to mention the civil wars in the hungry countries.

Let’s look at the most affected countries by the crisis and see if the civil wars have anything to do with that or not. These countries are, Somalia, Central Africa, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh. Other countries like Philippines, Sudan, India, and Sri Lanka, have got their shares of poverty too.

Now let’s try to find the solution, in my opinion, stopping the emerging countries from developing will not solve the problem, although this is the “first world” target, but it’s just stupid. Higher energy prices have something to do with the solution that I’m going to propose. Bio-fuel production takes only 5% of the world cereal production, so stop stressing that point just because Brazil is the world largest producer not the USA.

In the end, I think that the solution is stopping the civil wars, so Europe and America, stop feeding your dogs of war, they will die, and innocent people will live.