By Linda S. Heard
Who would have believed that in this day and age people would be rioting over food prices?
With rice, wheat, maize and feedstock up between 30 and 50 percent this year, ordinary people around the world are struggling to afford a simple life-sustaining diet. Indeed, since 2005, the prices of essential commodities have risen by an average of 75 percent.
People in Egypt would be in dire straits if it wasn’t for the government’s quick action to broaden food subsidies, no doubt with memories of the bloody 1977 bread riots in mind that threatened to bring down the government.
Pakistan has had to act, too, to alleviate public outrage at flour being sold at a record high. It has given ration cards to the underprivileged enabling them to benefit from subsidies.
In Yemen, over a dozen people were recently killed while rioting over food prices that have doubled over past months. And last month, 34 rioters were imprisoned in Morocco, while protests and strikes in Jordan forced the government to raise public sector wages.
There’s been recent rioting in Burkina Faso, Mauritania and Senegal, countries dependent on imports of rice and wheat; rioting by tortilla-consuming Mexicans and by Indonesians complaining they could no longer afford to buy soybeans.
Drought, high oil prices, population increases and the use of arable land to feed the biofuel industry have combined to produce a global food crisis.
Who could have predicted that 21st century cutting-edge technology designed to improve lives would, instead, contribute to starvation. According to the United Nations World Food Program (WFP), “the increasing scarcity of food is the biggest crisis looming in the world”; yet more and more agricultural land is being turned over to the production of crops used to manufacture biofuels, such as ethanol...
