Spiralling Food Prices Pose a Threat to Development in the World’s Poorest Countries
By Reinaldo Velandia
Increasing food prices are affecting millions of people across the world, in particular those living on the edge of poverty. Some of the effects of this situation are devastating and represent a threat to progress in developing countries, stated the UN World Food Programme (WFP).
According to a WFP press release issued on 20 March, over 90 per cent of the world’s hungry are trapped in poverty. If the rising food price crisis is not immediately addressed, poor women and children living in developing countries will be directly affected, the level of attendance to primary school will drop, and the achievements already reached in the fight against HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria might be threatened, according to the report.
At the Dubai International Humanitarian Aid and Development Conference in early April, John Powell, Deputy Executive Director of the WFP, warned of the rise of a “new face of hunger”. He added that “this new phenomenon is hunger characterized by markets full of food, with scores of people unable to afford it. Food prices are now rising at rates that few of us can ever have seen in our lifetimes.”
According to a WFP study, soaring food prices are the result of a combination of different factors. For instance, the rise in oil prices and energy costs is affecting the complete chain of food production, and fertilizer prices are higher, as well as the costs of transporting food from production centres to markets. The continuing economic growth of nations like China and India has produced a rise in food demand. Increasingly, harsh climate- and weather-related events like the recent floods in West Africa, the extremely cold winter in China, the prolonged droughts in some regions of Australia and Africa, among others, have caused disruptions in harvests and, hence, a decrease in food production. Moreover, the use of millions of agricultural output for the production of biofuels has created a competition between crops for food and crops for fuels, directly affecting food prices and supply, the report noted.
This situation is also posing difficulties to the work of WFP. In 2007, the agency estimated that it would need $2.9 million to cover projects in 2008. Due to soaring food and fuel prices, the programme requires at least a half billion dollars more than initially projected. The new estimate for 2008 projects is $3.4 billion. In March 2008, Josette Sheeran, WFP Executive Director, announced that despite the Programme’s mitigating efforts, the cost of its food purchases has risen 55 per cent since June 2007. “This decrease in our purchasing power led us to announce on 25 February a $500-million shortfall in our budget for food rations. In the three weeks since that announcement food prices have increased another 20 per cent and such increases show no sign of abating any time soon”, she explained. WFP entirely depends on voluntary donations and has called on Government donors to increase funding to make up the gap. Mr. Powell stressed that in order to overcome this situation the combined efforts of Governments, the private sector and humanitarian organizations were needed.
Meanwhile, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs John Holmes, at the Dubai conference warned that increasing food prices could produce worldwide unrest and lead to further tensions such as those witnessed recently in Haiti, where violent protests over rising food prices have erupted. Ms. Sheeran commented: “What we see in Haiti is what we are seeing in many of our operations around the world, soaring prices that mean less food for the poor.” Recent demonstrations related to the food prices crisis have been also observed in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Egypt, Indonesia, Côte d’Ivoire, Mauritania, Mozambique and Senegal.
