Cheap food era is over: UN official

The Telegraph 19 May 08;

In Crewe and Nantwich, the rise in the weekly shopping bill is turning voters against Labour. In Mogadishu, the same phenomenon is provoking violence.

Food prices have been soaring since 2001. But, as Sir John Holmes, the UN's senior humanitarian official, tells this newspaper, governments have been slow to react.

In recent weeks, Mexicans have marched over the cost of tortillas, Mauritanians have rioted over grain prices, Yemenis have paraded their hungry children.

But it is hard to see what any government can do. Commodity prices are rising, pushing up the cost of fuel and fertiliser.

China, for a long time having had a deflationary impact on the world by turning out cheap exports, is now sucking in raw materials so prodigiously that it is having the opposite effect. Ground once given over to the cultivation of grain is now being used for biofuels.

Western governments can, however, do two things. First, they can stop imposing restrictions on genetic manipulation, which is the best way to increase yield from finite terrain (and which reduces the need for pesticides into the bargain).

Second, they can scrap the EU's Common Agricultural Policy, instead allowing each state to make direct payments to its farmers. Doing so would cut the average family's food bill by around £20 a week.

More important, though, it would open Europe's markets, enormously boosting the economies of Third World countries.

Reform of the CAP was supposed to be granted in return for Tony Blair's renunciation of the British rebate in 2004 but, since that deal, the percentage of the EU budget devoted to agriculture has, in fact, increased.

As long as the EU keeps the system in place, it is causing needless poverty both within its borders and beyond, more than cancelling out the effect of its foreign aid programmes. The time has come to scrap the CAP.

World food price crisis 'here to stay'
David Blair, The Telegraph 19 May 08;

High food prices are here to stay and the world needs a "green revolution" to feed its rising population, the senior humanitarian official at the United Nations has told The Telegraph.

Sir John Holmes, Britain's former ambassador to Paris who now serves as the UN's under-secretary for humanitarian affairs, said structural changes in the global economy are the cause of the sudden rise in food prices.

"It is possible that in the next two or three years prices will come down a bit from the peaks we've seen in the last few months – but not to where they were before," he said.

Sir John said the emergence of hundreds of millions of middle class consumers in China and India has increased demand for food. High oil prices make transporting food more expensive. The supply of grain has been hit by bad weather and the transfer of land to grow biofuels instead of food crops.

With the global population forecast to reach nine billion by 2050 compared with six billion today, Sir John said, the world needed a "green revolution", especially in Africa.