Millions of the world’s poorest people and the state of the global economy are threatened by the food price rises
Geoffrey Lean
Telegraph
‘Within a decade,” promised the top representative of the world’s mightiest country, “no man, woman or child will go to bed hungry.”
Dr Henry Kissinger, at the height of his powers as US Secretary of State, was speaking to the landmark 1974 World Food Conference. Since then, the number of hungry people worldwide has almost exactly doubled: from 460 million to 925 million.
And this week the airwaves have been full of warnings that the formidable figure could be about to increase further, as a new food crisis takes hold. Some experts warned that the world could be on the verge of a “nightmare scenario” of cut‑throat competition for the control of shrinking supplies.
The cause of such alarm? On Wednesday, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) reported that global food prices had hit a record high and were likely to go on rising, entering what Abdolreza Abbassian, its senior grains economist, called “danger territory”.
That is bad enough for Britain, adding to the inflationary pressures from the soaring cost of oil and other commodities, not to mention the VAT increase. But for the world’s poor, who have to spend 80 per cent of their income on food, it could be catastrophic.
Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, warns that the rising prices are “a threat to global growth and social stability”, and Nicolas Sarkozy has identified them as a priority for the G20, which he chairs this year.
Already they are higher than in 2008, when they drove the tally of the malnourished briefly above a billion for the first time in history, and caused riots in countries as far apart as Indonesia, Cameroon and Mexico. That ended nearly two decades during which the number of hungry people had stayed the same, while the world population grew by 1.2 billion, so that the proportion of an increasing humanity without enough to eat steadily fell.
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