Recent spikes in staple food prices resulting from the invasion of Ukraine have once again highlighted the difficulty faced by low-income countries that rely on imports for a substantial portion of their
World rice output is expected to hit a record high this year, but growing demand and export curbs should keep prices high, at least in the short term, the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation said on Monday. Rice prices have been surging as governments and importers rush to stock up, spurred by growing fears the food staple will be in short supply. "World paddy production in 2008 could grow by about 2.3 percent, reaching a new record level of 666 million tonnes, according to our preliminary forecasts," FAO rice expert Concepcion Calpe said in a statement on Monday.
With the Congress often seeking to blame the Agriculture Ministry for inflation, the Nationalist Congress Party, headed by Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar, on Sunday sought to turn the table demanding "more stringent' measures from the Finance Ministry, headed by P Chidambaram, to control price rise. Expressing deep concern over the soaring prices of essential commodities and unbridled inflationary trends, a resolution adopted by the NCP National Committee here on Sunday appealed to the Government to "have a thorough review of the fiscal management policy'.
The global food crisis has brought on riots in about a dozen countries and left many panicked world leaders scrambling for answers. Alarming increases in once-affordable basic food staples such as rice, corn, and wheat have made millions more of the world's poor vulnerable to hunger and malnutrition. Past food market emergencies have been mainly regional in scope.
Managing Inflation has become a bugbear for everyone in this country. The galloping inflation has made the life of ordinary citizen miserable in as much as it has become very difficult to make both ends meet. Prices of foodgrains, oil, milk, vegetables and other essential commodities which constitute an average of more than 50% of the family budget have hit the roof. The situation has become alarming. The main reasons are the fall in agriculture production in the country and all over the world.
UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling will call on European Union finance ministers to combat rising food prices by removing import levies and scrapping rules that keep food prices in the 27-nation bloc artificially high. Darling said the action is needed to curb headline inflation rates and to help the poorest households deal with a 7% increase in food prices that took place in the year through March, according to a letter he will send his EU counterparts tomorrow. Darling is due to meet with ministers in Brussels this week.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will chair the first meeting of the UN Task Force on the Global Food Crisis on Monday, the UN has announced. It will bring together representatives from across the UN system to discuss a global response to rising food prices, UN spokesperson Marie Okabe told reporters at the UN Headquarters. Meanwhile, the secretary-general has sent out urgent letters of invitation to all heads of state of UN member countries to join him in next month's meeting in Rome to discuss short-term and long-term strategies to address the global food crisis, she added.
A senior World Bank official said on Thursday that countries should not greatly increase biofuels production until there is more clarity about how much they have contributed to the global food price crisis. Juergen Voegele, director for agriculture and rural development department at the World Bank, cautioned against shifting a lot of the blame to biofuels but also said massive subsidies for the biofuel industry was not helping the crisis.
THE Chichewa people in Malawi have a saying: Njala ndi chilombo. It means "Hunger is a beast". Today, the beast is rampaging around the world and particularly Africa, where shortage of food threatens to undo recent economic and political gains. Climate change is partly to blame. But there is another less well recognised cause: long-term neglect has left African agriculture in a woefully inadequate state.
The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has appealed for urgent funds to sustain its operations in Sri Lanka in the wake of the rapid surge in commodity prices. The price of staple food such as rice has doubled over the year in Sri Lanka and in some countries tripled; reducing the volume of the commodities WFP can procure within the allocated budget by almost 50 per cent, a WFP news release said.
"The United States consumes more cereals including wheat, rice and maize than India.' In answer to a question during his press conference on inflation, Convener of the Congress party's National Media Committee Kapil Sibal quoted the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) to say that while the projected growth in the consumption pattern of cereals in India was 2.17 per cent between 2006-07 and 2007-08, it was 11.81 per cent for the United States during the same period. The average percentage increase globally was only 2.06 per cent.
