The Poor Go Hungry As Food Prices Climb Higher

from Red Orbit

KANSAS CITY - Blame Australian drought. Blame the shrinking dollar. Blame ethanol. Blame $100-a-barrel oil and $3-plus gasoline. Blame China for finding prosperity. Blame India, too. Blame humankind for liking the taste of meat.

Whatever's to blame, it's the world's poor who go hungry.

The number of hungry poor on the planet had stabilized in recent years. But soaring costs for food and for shipping it to the starving form the basis of a burgeoning global food shortage.

In Haiti last week, anger about runaway food prices sparked deadly protests and looting that led Saturday to the dismissal of the prime minister and a cut in rice prices. People clashed violently with police in Egypt about ballooning food costs. Cameroon and Burkina Faso saw food riots late last month. Earlier in the year, it was protests in Pakistan about rice and wheat shortages.

Some analysts say food wars could be next.

"This is not something that's going to go away overnight. It's not just cyclical," said Ellen Levinson of the Alliance for Food Aid, a coalition of humanitarian groups. "We are definitely into this for a couple of years."

A food aid conference this week in Kansas City will be dominated by what anyone who checks out at the supermarket or picks up a restaurant tab knows too well: Food prices are up.

For American households that spend typically less than 20 percent of their income on food, it's a painful adjustment. For the world's truly poor, who might use 70 percent to 80 percent of their money to stay ahead of starvation, it's a disaster.

"As the price goes up, they can't buy the same amount or the same quality," said Gawain Kripke, a policy director for the Oxfam America aid group. "It's almost a certainty that there will be more hunger as food prices go up."

The world's stockpiles of grains are about 150 million tons, or roughly 20 percent, below what they were at the start of the decade. Shortages of wheat, rice and corn drove world food prices up 45 percent in the last nine months. Last year, cooking oils jumped 50 percent, and dairy prices rocketed up 80 percent.

"And our best guess is these high prices will continue to stay high," said John Hoddinott, a researcher for the International Food Policy Research Institute.

What has been good news for Midwestern farmers - demand finally catching up to American agriculture's unmatched ability to grow food - could mean disaster to the world's poorest people.

Last week, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization called for a June summit of international leaders to manage what the agency is calling a worldwide food shortage emergency. The World Bank's president, Robert Zoellick, also called for a global response to address the escalating prices and prevent mass starvation.

The annual gathering in Kansas City will wrangle about how best to feed the world. Humanitarian groups think, for starters, that industrial countries need to resign themselves to spending more. And many want reforms, saying it might be time to sever ties that link aid to efforts to bolster U.S. agriculture and shippers.

Several factors have combined to make for a looming cost crisis:

- Protein. First, and paradoxically, many people are eating better. Economic awakenings in India and China have lifted millions out of abject poverty and put them higher on the food chain.

But by eating more meat, they effectively consume more grain needed to raise livestock.

- Biofuels. More food is being converted to energy. The shift to renewable fuels such as ethanol in the United States, Brazil, Thailand and elsewhere has left less acreage available to stock the dinner table.

- Weather. Back-to-back drought years devastated Australian crops. Europe had a poor harvest last year. Food aid specialists worry climate change could mean that such crop disasters will become more routine.

- Exchange rates. Because the United States is the biggest provider of food aid, the dollar's tumbling value means the same amount of assistance buys less overseas.

- Energy. It jabs at food costs at every stage, from the cost of fertilizer, to running farm machinery, to processing, to shipping.

Exploding food costs mean that hunger is shifting from Asia to sub-Saharan Africa and from remote villages to fast-growing cities.