Word: vietnams
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...question millions of Asians are asking. Across the region, the price of food, from wheat to pork, is increasing at dizzying rates. But it is rice, the foundation of Asia's diet and a potent symbol of its cultures, that is causing the most anxiety. In Thailand, Vietnam, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and elsewhere, the price of rice has doubled in the past year, a hike that hurts all the more because Asian families often spend half of their weekly budget on food, more than double what Western households spend. In an effort to contain spiraling domestic prices, major rice producers...
...last year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But prices are spiking for several reasons: rising long-term demand in countries such as China and India, where millions of increasingly prosperous people are eating more; short-term supply shocks thanks to unusually cold weather and pest infestation in Vietnam, the world's second largest supplier of rice; and the diversion of a huge chunk of America's corn crop to ethanol production, which has boosted demand for other staples, including rice...
...Philippines, which are dependent on imported rice to feed their large populations. A November cyclone in Bangladesh ravaged the fall crop, destroying some 800,000 metric tons of rice and forcing the country to import an extra 2.4 million metric tons from India simply to stave off famine. In Vietnam, bad weather and pest outbreaks hurt harvests. In the Philippines, where some 68 million people live on less than $2 a day, the government recently urged restaurants to halve their portions of rice. Credit Suisse estimates a shortage could cost the Philippines up to 1% of GDP in 2008. Manila...
...blames a lack of investment in agriculture. In much of Asia, rice farming remains small-scale and inefficient. In Thailand, for example, average yields are less than half that of either Chinese or U.S. farms. At the same time, Asia's rapid urbanization has gobbled up fecund farmland. In Vietnam's Bac Ninh province, 12 miles (19 km) from downtown Hanoi, shimmering emerald paddy fields are now bisected by a four-lane highway. Not far from where rice farmer Nguyen Thi Lan stands weeding her fields in calf-deep muck, a Singapore-Vietnamese joint venture will soon build...
...Obama's father quickly drew a crowd of friends at the university. "We would drink beer, eat pizza and play records," Abercrombie says. They talked about Vietnam and politics. "Everyone had an opinion about everything, and everyone was of the opinion that everyone wanted to hear their opinion-no one more so than Barack...