The headline that grabbed my attention was posted on March 29th, 2008, High Rice Cost Creating Fears of Asia Unrest (New York Times).
The author, Keith Bradsher, writes from Hanoi, “The price of rice, a staple in the diets of nearly half the world’s population, has almost doubled on international markets in the last three months. That has pinched the budgets of millions of poor Asians and raised fears of civil unrest.”
Reading this article I was reminded of another story also written by Bradsher several months earlier: A New, Global Oil Quandary: Costly Fuel Means Costly Calories. Bradsher highlights on how the price on cooking oil – oil in which to cook food – has also risen to levels beyond the reach of many who really do need the calories in their already short-changed diet. The switch to palm oil from trans-fat for cooking in the United States hasn’t helped. The price of palm oil alone has gone up 70%.
Anyone reading this blog, even us Americans, knows that the price of food is going up because we see it on the shelves for ourselves. Those who are involved with food banks also know that the prices of stocking the shelves is going up along with the need to fill in the growing gap between what food stamps can cover and the price totals at the head of the checkout line. But none of us are starving… (so far).
In search of the causes of rising food prices, Paul Krugman writes, “The answer is a combination of long-term trends, bad luck — and bad policy,” in an excellent opinion piece in today’s New York Times opinion piece, Grains Gone Wild.
Krugman lists some of the reasons as 1) increases in the percent of the world population eating meat; 2) bad weather in key places around the world causing crop failures; and 3) how bio-fuel, especially ethanol, is pulling land and crops off the food market and into the transportation market alongside of rising petrol prices that show up in fertilizers and simple transportation costs. Krugman also points toward what he calls compliancy where a number of governments that used to stockpile essential foods started keeping a lower amount in reserve thinking that food could always flow from one part of the world that had it in abundance to another that didn’t. These decisions now appear to be contributing toward hoarding by price speculators.
People have been rioting over food shortages in Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia. The Christian Science Monitor lists food riots taking place in Haiti and on the Ivory Coast in their editorial, Price Shock in Global Food, posted April 7th. Chillingly, they quote the UN International Fund for Agriculture as forecasting an increasing number of food riots in the months to come. Not a reduction, not even an maintenance of the same but an increase. The IFA has an interesting video debate, Who Pays the Price? which was in part produced by the BBC, posted on their website exploring the complicated causes of the crisis.
Bread for the World has a strong page both laying out how Global Warming will have the highest affect on the poorest of this world and some straight forward suggestions on how to respond.
I wish I knew exactly what should be done.
I think we’d better start paying attention. This is a very big issue. It is complicated, unpleasant and without immediate and easy-to-implement solutions – at least any it seems that I can help make happen right away. It’s the kind of thing I personally much prefer to ignore, stashed away in the random junk drawer alongside… well, pretty much everything else. But this is too important to hide from. It needs to be on the front page of all our newspapers, not just the NYT or the Christian Science Monitor. It needs to be a lead story on CNN and Fox.
Joseph had a plan – a way to keep grain from the good times for the not so good times. Maybe we need to start teaching the Bible Stories in street dramas like the old medieval morality plays or in the latest technological You-Tube videos. Maybe we need to remember the injunction from Paul to the church in Corinth: First come isn’t first serve. We need to be thinking about the latecomers, the ones who barely make it to the dinner table –if they can show up at all. It is Christian to make sure there is enough to go around. One loaf of bread and a couple of fish and 5,000 people (not counting the women and children) in the middle of a field. Its been done before.
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