World Food Gloom Looms

Oh, what a revelation.  I open the business page of a UAE national paper and was stumped over a matrix of the world’s top rice exporters and importers.  The Philippines is the number one importer, with 1.9 million metric tons sourced from different countries.  Indonesia and Nigeria follow.  The top exporters are Thailand, Vietnam and India.

And there’s this news about our president cracking down on rice hoarders.  The price of rice and other food items in our country had risen dramatically, my kid sister says, so she decided to clean our vacant residential lot beside her house and plant vegetables.

Here at the UAE, things aren’t that well either.  The neighborhood supermarket’s cashier had warned me that the price of rice would increase every week.  It used to be 14 dirhams per pack of five kilos.  Now it’s 24 dirhams, and rising.  Eggs have doubled in price.

Statistics point to a 40 percent rise in UAE food prices.  Factor in the UAE currency’s permanent peg with the US dollar, and what was one dirham to 15 pesos a year ago is now one dirham to 11 pesos.  Maybe those of us with breadwinners working in the UAE could imagine their loved ones scrimping on food just to send home the usual remittance.

There were already warnings of a world food crisis last year.  In November, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) declared that global food reserves are at their lowest in 25 years.  What caused this?

There is no one cause, a FAO official had said, but a lot of things are coming together to lead to this.  A record high in oil prices means more expensive fertilizers and transport costs.  The growing demand for food from populous India and China, climate change and its ensuing natural disasters like flood and drought, and US farmers growing biofuel crops instead of food grains all contribute to price rises of food, according to the UN.  A combination of oil price increase and food price increase are elements of a future social crisis, the FAO pointed out.

A Washington-based think tank harks to the competition for grain between the world’s 800 million motorists and two billion poorest; the former want mobility while the latter simply want to survive.

Seventy percent of the world’s corn exports come from the US.  When US farmers allocated 20 percent of their corn for ethanol for vehicles in 2006, it took out millions of hectares of land from food production, causing a worldwide rise in the price of corn.  Corn is a staple in many countries and is also used as animal feed.    Using food, like corn, for fuel for vehicles therefore diminishes food supply.  If production of food as a source for vehicle fuel expands, serious implications are to be expected.

The outlook seems dim because agro-industries look at biofuel production as more profitable.  Research by a food resource group shows that India has 14 million hectares, Brazil 120 million hectares, and Africa 400 million hectares committed to planting for biofuels.  Even if these areas may be unproductive land, it would still force millions of people off the land, the research shows.

One can look at the bright side though.  Markets tend to readjust to shortages, the optimists say, and higher prices would make growing crops for food rather than cars more profitable.  Also, new crop varieties and technologies may help crops adjust to the world’s climate tantrums.  There’s also the scenario that people will learn to eat less meat and thus free more land for human food rather than animal feed.

There, too, is the hoped-for deceleration in population growth.  It would naturally lessen the pressure on the food market.  And unproductive land made productive would expectedly help the food supply.

As for us Filipinos, well, we are not creative and resourceful for nothing.  We’ve been through worse times and have always managed to come through.  That is why my kid sister’s move to cultivate our vacant residential lot for her personal supply of vegetables wasn’t surprising.  What I dread is the thought that she may soon tell me that she had dug part of the lot so she could raise tilapia.

(13 April 2008)