Rising food prices starve charities

from the Minneapolis Star Tribune

By MATT McKINNEY, Star Tribune

A pair of Minnesota charities, one called Kids Against Hunger and another Feed My Starving Children, sent 70 million meals overseas last year, but in recent weeks have found themselves at the eye of an unfolding global storm over food. Prices are up, costs have skyrocketed, and without more funding they'll cut back just as the need for food aid mushrooms.

Some international agencies now say that food inflation threatens to undo years of work to stop children from starving to death, which occurs at a numbing rate of 18,000 times a day, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

"The World Food Program is describing this as a silent tsunami," said Daniela Colaiacovo, a spokeswoman for the United Nations frontline agency fighting hunger. "It's the worst challenge the group has faced in its 45-year history."

It's the same crisis that's driven up the cost of eggs, bread and milk at American supermarkets, but it wears a more sinister face among the world's poor, threatening to shove 100 million people into poverty, according to the United Nations.

"In the U.S. we are feeling the stress as well, but overseas when you have a billion people living on $1 a day or less, that stress hits the most vulnerable the hardest," said Robert Zachritz, director of advocacy and government relations at World Vision, a Christian relief organization headquartered in Washington state.

Riots and protests have erupted in Haiti, Egypt, Peru, Indonesia, Cameroon and elsewhere. Many of the hardest hit areas are in Africa.

Food prices will rise 4 percent to 5 percent this year in the United States, and may hit some grocery shelves harder than others. The increases have been blamed on the high price of oil, biofuels, climate change and rising global demand.

"Some of these trends are with us for the long haul," Zachritz said.

"We usually get probably three or four calls every week from someone in some country saying we've heard of you, can you send us some food," said Kathy Stinchfield, spokeswoman for Kids Against Hunger, a charity based in New Hope that shipped 27 million meals overseas last year. "We've been getting two to three calls every day in the last couple of weeks."

She had hoped to send more meals this year, but economics is playing havoc with that plan. Rice prices started creeping up last fall, rocketing up 30 percent between March and April, she said. So her group is spending $526,000 more to ship the same amount of food as last year, about 27 million meals. Rice has nearly doubled in the past year; wheat is up 69 percent, soy 78 percent.

It's the same story at Feed My Starving Children, said Mark Crea, executive director of the group.

The cost of a meal packet rose from 15 cents three months ago to 17 cents today. It's a small bump, but when extended across the millions of meals shipped out each year it means a $1.1 million hole in the budget. That equals 7 million fewer meals, cutting the group's production from a projected 55 million down to 48 million.

"That's not an option for us," said Crea, walking through the group's Brooklyn Park warehouse. Nearby, school children who had volunteered for a two-hour shift were packing up meals of rice, soy powder, dried vegetables and artificial chicken flavoring.

The meals, designed by food scientists from Cargill and General Mills, come fortified with the vitamins and minerals most needed by a severely malnourished child.

The group began a direct mail advertising campaign last month. Crea plans to appeal to corporate donors as well.

He said rice prices are his largest headache. "Annual contracts are out the window," said Crea. "Rice could be $900 a bag for us by summer." He paid $340 for a 2,000-pound bag in January.

Fears of a shortage -- Costco and Sam's Club announced limits on rice purchases last week -- set off a panic. And while the federal government says there is no rice shortage in the United States, domestic supplies are at their lowest point in five years.

The tight supply means occasional empty shelves if demand suddenly increases, as it has in recent weeks because of a clampdown on exports from some of the world's largest rice producers, including Egypt, India and Vietnam.

Crea's rice comes from Colorado County Rice Mills Inc., a Texas rice miller. Owner Don Adams said he's got nothing left to sell. "Usually at this time of the year there's plenty of rice in the drawers, in the storage, still to be bought. But at this point there's none in Texas available," he said.

The problems befalling the Minnesota charities mirror those at the international organizations supplying food aid, about half of which comes from the United States.

The World Food Program said in February that they faced a $500 million shortfall. It's since grown to $755 million. The U.S. government's food aid program, U.S. Agency for International Development, expects a $200 million budget deficit by the end of the year.

The Bush administration on Thursday asked Congress to approve some $770 million in additional international food aid, adding to some $200 million made available earlier last month.

Yet funding isn't the only problem. Food shipments have been exacerbated by a shortage of shipping containers, the 20-foot and 40-foot-long metal boxes used to move food and other products around the world. A weak U.S. dollar has more companies exporting. Containers go with them.

Love a Child, a Tampa, Fla.-based charity that distributes the food packaged by Feed My Starving Children to children in Haiti, is waiting for three shipments of food from the local group, each containing 270,864 meals, but because of a shortage of shipping containers has had to wait, said Sandra Smith, the group's director. Such delays have typically ranged from one to three months so far.

On a recent day at Feed My Starving Children, a team of schoolchildren ticked along like factory workers, small arms scooping dried powder into plastic bags.

It was Sarah's turn. "Chicken!" someone shouted.

Sarah Moraczewski, 8, dropped a scoop of yellowish powder -- artificial chicken flavoring -- into a bag. Other children added soy powder, dried vegetables and rice.