Word: pricing
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...world will need more than divine intervention to end the food crisis that has ripped across the planet during the past few months. Prices for almost every staple food - rice, wheat, maize, sugar, milk - are soaring at rates of inflation not seen on such a global scale in a generation, resulting in hoarding, widespread food shortages and fears of outright famine in the world's poorest countries. Rice prices have nearly tripled since January, reaching $1,000 per metric ton last month in India. Wheat has doubled in price in a year and jumped 25% in just...
...Price of Success The current crisis can be traced to a perception of plenty stemming from the Green Revolution of the 1960s. Dramatically improved crop yields sent world food prices plunging, beginning a 40-year period when billions of people ate relatively cheaply. The illusion that such progress was permanent and irreversible seemed to take root alongside the high-yield hybrids, and the threat of widespread famine was assumed to have passed...
...Government agricultural policies have always been tailored to the times. Many wealthier countries - notably the U.S. and members of the European Union - have for years propped up their agricultural industries with generous subsidies and trade barriers; this has skewed the real price of food on international markets and stunted farming in poorer countries. With food relatively abundant, Western countries over time also reduced the amount of assistance going to poor countries to improve farming practices and build agricultural infrastructure such as irrigation systems and dams. Global assistance for agricultural development plummeted from about 18.7% of total foreign assistance...
...There's little immediate relief in sight, because Africa's farmers face their own inflation problems and can't easily boost output. The FAO predicts that food prices will remain high for years to come, but that galloping price rises will begin to slow down. For poor farmers that is little cause for cheer. The surging price of oil has made using tractors costly, and the cost of fertilizer has doubled in Uganda over the past year, says Kenneth Kaboi, a 19-year-old farmer who was out in his family's maize field recently in Uganda's lush Kapchorwa...
...while it looked like a boneheaded move. At the end of 1998, the price of oil fell below $10 per bbl. Regular gas sold for 90¢ a gal. While Internet billionaires were being minted to the right and left of him, Rainwater was getting poorer...