Rocketing food prices spark fear of more global chaos
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In Russia, whose economy is still struggling following this summer's heat wave and wildfires that destroyed a fifth of the grain crop, the price of food has risen by at least 20 percent. President Dmitry Medvedev has condemned food price speculators for "taking advantage of the crisis". He personally visited several supermarkets to check prices himself. According to the Russian newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, one supermarket lowered its prices for the president's visit and put them back up after he left.
At a market in southern Spain, expatriates from the UK and locals alike are complaining about the rising price of vegetables.
"At first I thought it was just another case of one price for the British expats and another for the locals, but then I heard a Spanish lady on the stall next door moaning that the price of tomatoes had gone up," says Brian Reynolds, a British expatriate living in the area.
With the catastrophic floods that engulfed Pakistan this year, the food situation there is in disarray. Although Pakistan's crops have been deteriorating since 2008, a high demand for sugar cane, Pakistan's second largest cash crop, has far outstripped supply. As a consequence dealers are illegally smuggling the crop into Afghanistan where they get much higher prices.
Smuggling and hoarding fuel the turmoil and deepen the crisis. In Brazil, Kenya, Indonesia and Uganda, governments are warning that crop shortages will lead to traders "stocking up" to sell at a higher price when the scarcity really strikes.
Unscrupulous dealers, volatile markets and extreme weather, arguably a result of global warming, are not the only factors being blamed for the rising price of food. The cultivating of bio fuels is also squeezing the amount of agricultural land. Oliver de Schutter, UN special rapporteur on the right to food, believes a combination of urbanization, environment degradation and large-scale land acquisitions for bio fuels is constricting land available for food production and causing crop shortages and price rises.
"Worldwide, 5 to 10 million hectares of agricultural land are being lost annually due to severe degradation and another 19.5 million are lost for industrial uses and urbanization," he said.
So intense is the concern about a repeat crisis to the one in 2008, that the World Bank has appealed to governments to donate to a crisis fund to assist developing countries through what might be an impending catastrophe.
In the light of such developments some urban residents are resorting to growing their own food. Despite being in her late 70s, my mother-in-law is digging up her garden and replacing flower beds and shrubs with lettuce seeds, tomato seeds and potatoes.
"If they are going to put the prices up by an outrageous amount, they're going to have one less customer to fool. Grow your own and boycott the supermarkets, that what I say," she said. She might have a point.
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