| THE UN World Food Programme (WFP) is to hold an emergency meeting in Rome today, as rising food prices across the world threaten to create a new constituency of millions of city-dwellers who are unable to afford basic foodstuffs.
The Organisation for Economic and Co-operative Development (OECD) has warned that food prices could rise by between one fifth and one half over the next ten years.
The sudden leap in the worldwide price of grain and other basic foodstuffs could mean that millions of hitherto relatively affluent people in cities would not be able to afford food, Greg Barrow, a London-based spokesman for the WFP, said on Tuesday.
He said the key factors behind the price-shift were:
• demand for meat from India and China, as their economies grow. Feeding livestock diverts grain stocks from markets;
• high oil prices, which have pushed up the costs of oil-based fertilisers and the cost of transport;
• arable land that has been switched to biofuel production, and so is lost for food supplies;
• weather extremes caused by global warming, which have damaged farming in the developed countries that supplied the global market.
The WFP was already struggling to feed its core constituency of 73 million people in 78 countries this year, Mr Barrow said. But those people, who are affected by natural or man-made disasters, could expand “quite dramatically”. “We are looking at 30 countries around the world where city-dwellers are at risk. This is a new constituency.”
The WFP says that it needs US$3.4 billion this year, $0.5 billion more than it had previously thought.
David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative Party, told members of the National Farmers Union on Monday: “Analysts say that politicians should start to rank the issue of food security alongside energy security and even national security. . . We face the potential prospect that the abundance of food that we all take for granted will come to a crashing end.”
The head of humanitarian and emergency affairs for World Vision UK, Ian Gray, said on Wednesday: “Where we are around the world, we are seeing 30-per-cent, 40-per-cent, even 50-per-cent increases in food prices. . . People will struggle to meet their food needs.” |
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