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Food Crisis Eclipsing Climate Change By JOSH GERSTEIN, Staff Reporter of the Sun | April 25, 2008 The campaign against climate change could be set back by the global food crisis, as foreign populations turn against measures to use foodstuffs as substitutes for fossil fuels. With prices for rice, wheat, and corn soaring, food-related unrest has broken out in places such as Haiti, Indonesia, and Afghanistan. Several countries have blocked the export of grain. There is even talk that governments could fall if they cannot bring food costs down. One factor being blamed for the price hikes is the use...

UNITED NATIONS - The World Food Program appealed for hundreds of millions of dollars to cope with rising food prices that have sparked protests and food riots and led to bans on food exports in dozens of countries. Josette Sheeran, the WFP's executive director, said the U.N. agency is facing a 40 percent increase in the cost of food and requests for food aid from countries unable to cope with the rising prices. It expects additional requests from nations like Haiti whose citizens are becoming part of "the new face of hunger," she told a video news conference from Rome...

World consumption of rice continues to rise and outpace production. The trend will continue in 2008, bringing with it a host of factors that will impact U.S. rice producers. Speaking at the recent Mid-South Farm and Gin Show in Memphis, Tenn., Carl Brothers, senior vice president of Riceland Foods, outlined the current status of the U.S. rice industry and gave a summary of key issues on the horizon. Global ending stocks finished in December 2007 at 72 million tons, an all-time low in supply/use comparison. “If we look at these low stock numbers and the demand we’re seeing around the...

Wheat prices climbed for a fifth consecutive session Thursday, and the most heavily traded contract hit a new all-time high on the Chicago Board of Trade as traders continue to price in robust worldwide demand and shrinking supply. The U.S. Department of Agriculture said Thursday that wheat supplies available for export plummeted in July and said "stocks could be driven down to unprecedented low levels." Rain, frost and drought in different parts of the European Union ravaged wheat crops this year, leaving the EU with less to export and boosting its import requirements. Poor weather also ruined crops in the...

(BEIJING) — Potatoes may soon join rice as a staple diet for China's 1.3 billion people as the nation searches for alternative crops to deal with a sharp decline in farmland, state press reported Thursday. China is facing increasing difficulties in feeding its massive population partly due to the widespread conversion of its farming areas into industrial zones and residential areas, as well as the impacts of global warming. Potatoes, which can grow in dry areas not suitable for rice, are now being seriously looked at as a way to get more food from a smaller area, the China Daily...

World Bank president calls for action as food prices cause rioting Jenny Booth The president of the World Bank has called for immediate action to deal with rapidly rising food prices that have caused hunger and deadly violence and threatened the economic stability of the world's poorest countries. A doubling of food prices over the last two years was potentially pushing 100 million people deeper into long-term poverty, said Robert Zoellick. “We have to put our money where our mouth is now, so that we can put food into hungry mouths. It is as stark as that,” Mr Zoellick said...

As the world faces its first global food crisis since World War II, even American consumers are starting to fret. Media reports are starting to trickle in about grocers limiting some food purchases, while Costco Wholesale Corp. is seeing higher-than-usual demand for staple foods such as rice and flour as consumers appear to be stocking up. Costco Chief Executive James Sinegal told Reuters news service in an interview Tuesday that the Issaquah-based wholesale company is managing the situation. "If we run out, we're usually back in stock the next day," he said. The Reuters story followed a Monday article in...

DENILIQUIN, Australia: Lindsay Renwick, the mayor of this dusty southern Australian town, remembers the constant whir of the rice mill. "It was our little heartbeat out there, tickety-tick-tickety," he said, imitating the giant fans that dried the rice, "and now it has stopped." The Deniliquin mill, the largest rice mill in the Southern Hemisphere, once processed enough grain to satisfy the daily needs of 20 million people. But six long years of drought have taken a toll, reducing Australia's rice crop by 98 percent and leading to the mothballing of the mill last December. Ten thousand miles separate the mill's...

To paraphrase the late, great William F. Buckley, Jr., someone must stand athwart the federal ethanol program yelling, “Stop!” The emergency brake should be pulled -- NOW -- before ethanol wreaks further havoc. Poor Haitians rioted last week outside Port-au-Prince’s presidential palace, forcing Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis’ April 12 ouster. Haitians are enduring food prices 40 percent higher than last summer’s. Some have resorted to eating cookies made of salt, vegetable oil, and dirt. That’s right: Dirt cookies. Developing-world denizens are taking it to the streets with growling stomachs. In Bob Marley’s words, “A hungry man is an angry...

BRASILIA (Reuters) - President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva defended Brazil's production of biofuels on Wednesday, rejecting criticism that they are furthering a surge in global food prices and harming the environment. "Don't tell me, for the love of God, that food is expensive because of biodiesel. Food is expensive because the world wasn't prepared to see millions of Chinese, Indians, Africans, Brazilians and Latin Americans eat," Lula told reporters. "We want to discuss this not with passion but rationality and not from the European point of view." His comments follow a week of protests in Brazil and Europe against...

<p>The idea of the starving masses driven by their desperation to take to the streets and overthrow the ancien regime has seemed impossibly quaint since capitalism triumphed so decisively in the Cold War. Since then, the spectacle of hunger sparking revolutionary violence has been the stuff of Broadway musicals rather than the real world of politics. And yet, the headlines of the past month suggest that skyrocketing food prices are threatening the stability of a growing number of governments around the world. Ironically, it may be the very success of capitalism in transforming regions previously restrained by various forms of socialism that has helped create the new crisis.</p>

Bush Orders $200 Million Drawdown From Emergency Reserve to Help Nations Deal With Hunger WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush on Monday ordered the release of $200 million in emergency aid to help nations where surging food prices have deepened hunger woes and sparked violent protests. The move comes one day after the president of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, called on the international community to act urgently in helping needy people and "put our money where our mouth is." Haiti, Egypt and the Philippines are among the countries facing civil unrest because of food prices and shortages.

Finance ministers gathered this weekend to grapple with the global financial crisis also struggled with a problem that has plagued the world periodically since before the time of the Pharaohs: food shortages... Even as the ministers met, Haiti's Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis was resigning after a week in which that tiny country's capital was racked by rioting over higher prices for staples like rice and beans... Rioting in response to soaring food prices recently has broken out in Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Ethiopia. In Pakistan and Thailand, army troops have been deployed to deter food theft from...

Energy: The world's poor are learning what happens when government subsidizes the burning of food. It's time to end this madness and let the market decide if any biofuels make sense. For most Americans, the rising prices at the supermarket are definitely an annoyance, but hardly a threat to life and health. It's a different story in countries like Haiti, where food inflation has led to real hunger and, last week, to riots. News reports say the poorest Haitians are trying to get by on cookies made with dirt, vegetable oil and salt. Food riots also have roiled Egypt and...

Haitians say their hunger is real Thu Apr 10, 2008 4:45pm EDT By Jim Loney PORT-AU-PRINCE, April 10 (Reuters) - Elta Petithomme has been scouring the Haitian capital's garbage-strewn main market street for hours, searching for something to feed her four young children. Today, pickings are slim. Yesterday she sold a cellphone for 50 gourdes, the equivalent of about $1.30, enough to buy some bread, sugar and fried plantains. That's all the children, all under the age of 6, had to eat for the day. "Some days neighbors will cook and give us some food, as little as it is....

In the last year, the price of wheat has tripled, corn doubled, and rice almost doubled. As prices soared, food riots have broken out in about 20 poor countries including Yemen, Haiti, Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, and Mexico. In response some countries, such as India, Pakistan Egypt and Vietnam, are banning the export of grains and imposing food price controls. Are rising food prices the result of the economic dynamism of China and India, in which newly prosperous consumers are demanding more food—especially more meat? Perennial doomsters such as the Earth Policy Institute's Lester Brown predicted more than a...

Governments across the developing world are scrambling to boost farm imports and restrict exports in an attempt to forestall rising food prices and social unrest. Saudi Arabia cut import taxes across a range of food products on Tuesday, slashing its wheat tariff from 25 per cent to zero and reducing tariffs on poultry, dairy produce and vegetable oils. On Monday, India scrapped tariffs on edible oil and maize and banned exports of all rice except the high-value basmati variety, while Vietnam, the world’s third biggest rice exporter, said it would cut rice exports by 11 per cent this year. The...

As if a housing crisis, rising energy costs and a soft labor market weren't enough to cause economic anxiety for the average American, now consumers are feeling the pinch of rapidly escalating food costs. The United States has long prided itself in being the breadbasket of the world, and Americans have traditionally paid a smaller share of their income on food than citizens of other developed countries. But the days of cheap milk, bread, beef and poultry may well be over — and Uncle Sam is partly to blame. In 2007, the cost of a gallon of milk increased 26...

Nearly six million North Koreans are in chronic need of foreign food aid this year with children, nursing and expectant mothers and the poor most at risk, the World Food Programme said Sunday. The UN agency said the nation would be short of an estimated 1.4 million tonnes of food this year, nearly a quarter of its total needs, following severe floods last August which wiped out more than 10 percent of the grain harvest. "Young children, pregnant and breast-feeding women and poor families in both urban and rural areas will be most at risk of hunger," the WFP said...

The United Nation’s agency responsible for relieving hunger is drawing up plans to ration food aid in response to the spiralling cost of agricultural commodities. The World Food Programme is holding crisis talks to decide what aid to halt if new donations do not arrive in the short term. Josette Sheeran, WFP executive director, told the Financial Times that the agency would look at “cutting the food rations or even the number or people reached” if donors did not provide more money. “Our ability to reach people is going down just as the needs go up,” she said. WFP officials...