Posted on 04/13/2008 7:49:32 PM PDT by blam
Soaring food costs risk 'starvation and unrest'
By Alex Spillius in Washington
Last Updated: 2:41am BST 14/04/2008
The world's poorest countries face starvation and civil unrest if global food prices keep rising, the head of the International Monetary Fund has said.
There have been serious disturbances in more than a dozen developing countries, including Haiti [pictured]
Dominique Strauss-Kahn said in Washington that "hundreds of thousands of people will be starving". "Children will be suffering from malnutrition, with consequences for all their lives," he said.
He predicted that increasing food prices would push up the cost of imports for poor countries, leading to trade imbalances that might also affect developed nations. "It is not only a humanitarian question," added Mr Strauss-Kahn.
Global food prices have risen sharply in recent months, driven by increased demand, poor weather and an increase in the area of land used to grow crops for bio-fuels.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, 37 countries currently face food crises. Robert Zoellick, the president of the World Bank, urged members yesterday to provide £250 million to help alleviate the problem. There have been serious disturbances in more than a dozen developing countries, including Haiti, where a Nigerian peacekeeper serving with the United Nations police force was dragged from his car and shot dead as he was taking food to his colleagues on Saturday.
Violence had flared in Haiti's capital Port-au-Prince following the dismissal of Jacques Edouard Alexis, the prime minister, earlier in the day and the announcement of a plan to slash the price of rice.
In Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, 20,000 workers rioted over high food prices and low wages on Saturday. There have also been protests in neighbouring India.
Some experts, including Prof John Beddington, the British Government's chief scientific adviser, and Mr Zoellick, have identified the growth of bio-fuels as a major cause of higher food prices.
Several major agricultural nations, such as the United States, have used subsidised crops such as soya bean, sugar cane and corn for ethanol production, reducing the amount of crops available for food and pushing up prices.
"It is very hard to imagine how we can see the world growing enough crops to produce renewable energy and at the same time meet the enormous demand for food," Prof Beddington said last week.
European Union agriculture ministers will meet in Luxembourg today. Michel Barnier, France's agriculture minister, said he would urge his counterparts to devise a "European initiative on food security".
This was so predictable.
Thank you, al gore. You really deserved that Nobel Peace Prize for this. You must be smiling all the way to the bank.
You mean that not allowing us to drill for oil and then compounding the foolishness by requiring us to instead burn our food for fuel, isn't a good idea!
An idiotic plan that only a politician could dream up.
Thank you Grammy Pelosi, and wet brain Ted Kennedy.
Let the muzzie oil barons feed them!
Mr. President, the uneducated, the lefties, the dems and the stupid will hate you no matter what you do.
Tell algore to go make friends with the polar bears.
Drill for oil, build refineries, build nuke plants, dig coal.
Corn and beans belong on the plate next to the critters.
Blam, blame the environmentalists and the politicians who hate fossil fuels so much that the price of them has gone through the roof. I always have had an ethical problem with growing food to make fuel instead of using it to feed people and domestic animals. In addition to transfer of food crop production to biofuels, in some parts of the world, like Indonesia, remaining wildlife habitat is being destroyed to make room for growing biofuel crops.
The environmentalist global warming movement will end up destroying our lifestyle, hinder that in developing nations and may cause widespread famine in parts of the world. The sooner scientists can demonstrate that carbon dioxide is not the cause of global warming/global climate change the quicker we are going to salvage our way of life.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
Perhaps if they got rid of all the despots running these third world hell holes, the people either might just be able to grow their own crops in peace, or actually get the food that’s been shipped to those countries for them.
It’s power plays and corruption that’s the problem, not lack of food.
But it’s so much easier to blame the US.
I saw the Moron interviewed last night and Chris Wallace mentioned that "the Vice President is opposed to ethanol...." Gore said, "Dick Cheney?" Gore is so stooopid, he's not even sure who his successor is. What a dunce.
[That biofuels scheme has worked out really well. The Law Of Unintended Consequences at work. ]
This was the the dems plan all along. Promote food grains for fuel and starve the blacks, browns and other poor populations. Good plan... NOT
;-}>
Actually, this works out quite well for the “Zero Population” (Ted Turner, Algore, et al) crowd who believe there are too many people on the globe now.
Hey, starve ‘em to death so there will be more room and resources for the elites and their lucky sperm off-spring.
It’s really a win-win for these people: They get to control the rest of us via the man-caused global warming idiocy which prompts us to burn our food in our vehicles, causing world food scarcity (and consequent population thinning starvation).
Sounds like a plan.
“Thank you, al gore. You really deserved that Nobel Peace Prize for this.”
Don’t only blame Algore for this and coming disasters. He could not have done it on his own — he is just a small fly caught in the great web of deception that the environmentalists weave.
Blame those who supported him in coming up with and animate these hairbrained ideas, unchallenged. Don’t we have someone in the WH right now who believes in global warming and three pretenders for POTUS who also do? Algore is an idiot, but the three candidates can do more damage if they were to implement Algore’s ideas.
That’s funny!
I really think the plan was to starve the world so their would be less people! I’m sure with fuel prices as high as they are and everything going up with them will cause our own populaton to suffer. American hasn’t seen real starvation for a very long time I’m afraid we will see some by next harvest. Burning grain is a very bad idea.
I think that this is a deliberate plan to destabilize oil-rich countries incapable of feeding themselves. If there is no grain on the open market available (some countries have actually banned grain exports, Google “banning grain exports”), exactly how much is oil going to be worth? For toppling a government, I’ll take an enormous and angry mob of hungry, angry people over planes, bombs, tanks, etc anytime. And we don’t have to fire a single shot. It’s an interesting game of brinkmanship.
Get some popcorn, if you can find/afford some! This should be interesting, and it’s going to happen a lot sooner than the oil...uhhh... “runs out”. When the dust settles, I predict a very chastened OPEC selling oil at $70.
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