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From the rice paddies of Asia to the wheat fields of Australia, the
soaring prices of food are breaking the budgets of the poor and
raising the specters of hunger and unrest, experts warn.
A billion people in Asia are seriously affected
by the surging costs of daily staples such as rice and bread, the
director general of the Asian Development Bank, Rajat Nag, has said.
“This includes roughly about 600 million
people who live on just under a dollar a day, which is the
definition of poverty, and another 400 million who are just above
that borderline,” he said.
Globally, the World Bank last month estimated
that 33 countries were threatened with political and social unrest
because of the skyrocketing costs of food and energy.
Across Asia, workers made a campaign against
high food prices their May Day battle cry in marches through cities
including the capitals of Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand.
While the demonstrations were mainly peaceful,
concern is growing over the potential for political instability and
unrest if high prices persist.
“Once people get hungry they start also
getting quite desperate and take desperate measures,” Damien
Kingsbury of Australia’s Deakin University told Agence France-Presse.
India’s top farm scientist and architect of
the 1960s “Green Revolution,” Monkombu Sambasivan Swaminathan,
said India needs a second agricultural revolution to boost food
supplies or face huge social turmoil.
Experts blame the high food prices on a
confluence of factors, including increased demand from a changing
diet in Asia, droughts, the rising use of crops for biofuels, and
growing energy and fertilizer costs.
In Australia, which usually ranks second after
the United States as a global wheat exporter, several years of
drought cut harvests to just 13 million tons last year from an
average of 22 million tons.
So while consumers are struggling, Australian
farmers are not getting rich on the backs of the poor, said National
Farmers Federation chief executive Ben Fargher.
“It’s been the worst drought in our history
and many, many farming families are under significant financial and
emotional stress and it will take our communities a long time to
recover,” he said.
And even in a relatively prosperous country like
Australia, people are feeling the squeeze in the supermarkets,
prompting the government to launch an inquiry into how to stem
rising grocery prices.
Varying degrees
Around the rest of the region, the impact varies
from traumatic to minimal.
In Afghanistan, millions are finding it
“problematic” to meet their basic food needs with prices of the
staple, wheat, doubling in some areas over recent months, the World
Food Program (WFP) has said.
About 400 people demonstrated in eastern
Afghanistan last month, blocking a key road linking the eastern town
of Jalalabad to the capital Kabul, and demanding the government step
in to control prices at food markets.
In Bangladesh, one of the world’s poorest
nations, the prices of the main staple, rice, in the past year has
doubled, and many low paid workers say they have been forced to make
do with only one meal a day.
Last month about 20,000 garment workers rioted
near the capital Dhaka for higher wages to cover food prices.
In Cambodia, soaring rice prices have forced the
WFP to indefinitely suspend a program supplying free breakfasts to
450,000 poor Cambodian schoolchildren.
In China, a nation on its way to prosperity,
Premier Wen Jiabao told a meeting of the State Council last month
that high prices were the biggest problem in the domestic economy.
“The inflation is led by food price rises,
which especially hurt the poor,” said Ma Qing, a Beijing-based
analyst with the CEB monitor group. “So the pressure [on
maintaining social stability] is certainly quite large.”
-- AFP
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