Food crisis: A 'silent tsunami' for the world's poor

Straits Times 16 May 08;

WASHINGTON - THE global food crisis has sparked riots in more than 30 countries and poses a threat to 'peace and stability', the executive director of the United Nations World Food Program told a US Senate committee.

With more than 860 million people already going hungry worldwide, sharp price spikes threaten to put basic staples out of reach for another 100 million poor people this year alone, said UNWFP director Josette Sheeran.

She likened the surging catastrophe to 'a silent tsunami' washing over the world's poor and threatening to loosen the moorings that hold poor nations together.

'Some say there are only seven meals between civilisation and potential anarchy,' Ms Sheeran told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday.

'At the seventh meal lost, people are reduced to fending for their survival and the survival of their children,' she said. 'We are facing a challenge that is humanitarian as well as strategic.'

Democrat Senator Joseph Biden, the committee chairman, echoed those concerns.

'People are worried, they're angry,' said Mr Biden. 'From Haiti to Egypt to Bangladesh, riots have broken out as people demand the right for affordable food,' he said.

World food prices jumped 43 per cent last year and are on track to eclipse that this year. It is even worse for many staples of the developing world diet: wheat prices are up 146 per cent over just the past year. A tonne of rice fetched US$400 (S$550) on the world market last winter; by last month the cost had risen nearly threefold.

Economists blame soaring prices for oil and fertiliser; drought, cyclones and other weather disasters that have destroyed millions of acres of agricultural land in countries like Bangladesh, Myanmar and China; and the growing diversion of traditional food sources, especially corn, to make alcohol- based fuels.

Against that backdrop, food consumption is on the rise in emerging powerhouses like India and China, where hundreds of millions of people have risen to middle-class status in a single generation.

Skyrocketing food prices have hit US consumers as well, though prices overall rose just 4.5 per cent last year.

For most Americans, however, the issue is not life-threatening, as it can be for the estimated one billion people worldwide living on US$2 a day or less.

'For some it is a painful pinch,' said Ms Sheeran. 'For those living on less than a dollar, or even just 50 cents a day, it is a catastrophe.'