Published: January 19, 2008
KUANTAN,
Malaysia — Rising prices for cooking oil are forcing residents of Asia’s largest slum, in Mumbai,
India,
to ration every drop. Bakeries in the United States are fretting over
higher shortening costs. And here in Malaysia, brand-new factories
built to convert vegetable oil into diesel sit idle, their owners
unable to afford the raw material.
This is the other oil shock. From India to Indiana, shortages and
soaring prices for palm oil, soybean oil and many other types of
vegetable oils are the latest, most striking example of a developing
global problem: costly food.
The food price index of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations,
based on export prices for 60 internationally traded foodstuffs,
climbed 37 percent last year. That was on top of a 14 percent increase
in 2006, and the trend has accelerated this winter.
In some poor countries, desperation is taking hold. Just in the last week, protests have erupted in Pakistan
over wheat shortages, and in Indonesia over soybean shortages. Egypt
has banned rice exports to keep food at home, and China has put price
controls on cooking oil, grain, meat, milk and eggs.
According
to the F.A.O., food riots have erupted in recent months in Guinea,
Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen.
“The
urban poor, the rural landless and small and marginal farmers stand to
lose,” said He Changchui, the agency’s chief representative for Asia
and the Pacific.
A startling change is unfolding in the world’s
food markets. Soaring fuel prices have altered the equation for growing
food and transporting it across the globe. Huge demand for biofuels has
created tension between using land to produce fuel and using it for
food.
A growing middle class in the developing world is
demanding more protein, from pork and hamburgers to chicken and ice
cream. And all this is happening even as global climate change may be starting to make it harder to grow food in some of the places best equipped to do so, like Australia.
In
the last few years, world demand for crops and meat has been rising
sharply. It remains an open question how and when the supply will catch
up. For the foreseeable future, that probably means higher prices at
the grocery store and fatter paychecks for farmers of major crops like
corn, wheat and soybeans.
(READ THE REST OF THE STORY HERE)
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