Rising food prices threaten 1 billion with chronic hunger

By Naomi Spencer, World Socialist Web site

Food inflation has reached “dangerous levels,” the World Bank said last week, with prices rising by 15 percent globally between October and January. The warning came as governments around the world are shaken by protests driven in part by rapid increases in the prices of food and other basic goods.

Since June 2010, the soaring cost of staple foods has pushed 44 million more of the world’s poor into “extreme poverty,” surviving on less than $1.25 per day, according to the World Bank’s February “Food Price Watch.” This figure reflects 68 million people who fell into extreme poverty, minus 24 million that the organization says were “able to escape” as “net food producers.”

The World Bank classifies 925 million people as undernourished, and projects that by year’s end the number will exceed 1 billion—one in every six people on Earth.

The World Bank’s food price index stands 29 percent higher than a year ago, and is only 3 percent below the levels that precipitated mass protests around the globe in 2008. The United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) index recorded average January prices 3.4 percent higher than December and the highest level since it began in 1990, surpassing the 2008 record.

Because the poor often spend a majority of their income on basic foods, rising grain, oil and sugar prices threaten masses of people with malnutrition and starvation.

Between June and December of 2010, the global wheat prices soared by 75 percent. Over the past quarter, wheat prices have risen 20 percent; sugar climbed 20 percent, and fats and oils have risen 22 percent. Rising wheat and rice prices are affecting food-importing countries most sharply. In Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Mongolia, Azerbaijan, Pakistan and many other countries that import grain, wheat constitutes between one-third to more than one-half of the average daily caloric intake.

~ more... ~