Understanding basic economics could have avoided the food shortages now occurring, but elitist environmentalists and those who pushed ethanol as an energy solution, don’t seem to care much about economics or science.
Wall Street Journal: Food Inflation, Riots Spark — Worries for World Leaders IMF, World Bank Push for Solutions; Turmoil in Haiti By BOB DAVIS and DOUGLAS BELKIN
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.
Surging commodity prices have pushed up global food prices 83% in the past three years, according to the World Bank — putting huge stress on some of the world’s poorest nations. 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.
As food prices soar, protests are breaking out around the world, including this riot Saturday in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
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 fields and warehouses. World Bank President Robert Zoellick warned in a recent speech that 33 countries are at risk of social upheaval because of rising food prices. Those could include Indonesia, Yemen, Ghana, Uzbekistan and the Philippines. In countries where buying food requires half to three-quarters of a poor person’s income, “there is no margin for survival,” he said.
Many policy makers at the weekend meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank agreed that the problem is severe. Among other targets, they singled out U.S. policies pushing corn-based ethanol and other biofuels as deepening the woes.
And those “U.S. policies” didn’t come from conservatives.
Filed under: Everything Else , Environment, ethanol, food, Haiti, Jacques Edouard Alexis, prices, shortages, World Bank
