Website review: Food prices and protest | Taking th...
orangeguru discovered this in Politics
•1 reviews since May 11, 2008
developing-nation
•economist.com/daily/news/displaystory.cfm
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orangeguru discovered 3 months ago- Political fallout has been limited--so far AP WHEN Haiti's prime minister resigned last month after a week of food riots, it seemed to confirm a warning that Bob Zoellick, the president of the World Bank, had given ten days before. He said 100m people were being pushed into hunger and malnutrition--and 30-odd countries faced social upheaval unless food policy improved and the rich world got its act together to help. A month on, policy has not improved, and the rich world's response has mostly been muddled--yet surprisingly, poor countries have been able to contain the unrest, albeit at heavy cost. Simon Maxwell, head of Britain's Overseas Development Institute, a think-tank, says one problem is that donors need a single, simple guide on how and where to help, not a clamour of competing United Nations bureaucracies with different plans. There are moves in this direction. The first priority has been to finance the World Food Programme (WFP), the world's largest distributor of food aid. The WFP asked for $750m this year and has so far got about two-thirds of that. The UN is also trying to make the international response more coherent. Ban Ki-moon, its secretary-general, has set up a task-force to co-ordinate what the UN agencies are doing and has called a food summit in early June to work out a plan. Rich countries are already managing to be fairly incoherent without any UN infighting. The hope, at least among economists, was that higher prices would induce rich countries to cut state aid to farmers and--says Paul Collier, a development expert at Oxford University--"lead people to question their pleasant fantasies about GM [genetically-modified] food in Europe and biofuels in America." So far, there are few signs of that. The current American farm bill proposes only modest cuts in ethanol subsidies. The EU has not changed its biofuels target (10% of all fuel by 2020); it continues to bully developing countries not to plant GM crops and this week refused permission to grow varieties of GM maize and GM potatoes in Europe. While donors squabble, poor countries face riots. But so far, these have had less political impact than many expected. Around 30 countries have suffered protests but only Haiti has seen its government fall. In the Middle East, the part of the world most dependent on food imports, there have been demonstrations and strikes in Egypt, Morocco and Jordan. But all three countries withstood more serious food riots in the late 1970s and 1980s.
