Costlier food unleashes silent tsunami: UN
Foreign Desk Report

LONDON—A “silent tsunami” unleashed by costlier food threatens 100 million people, the United Nations said on Tuesday, but views differed as to how to stop it. Aid bodies said there was enough food to go round but the key was to help the poor afford it, and urged producing nations not to curb exports to stockpile food at home.
In London, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Britain would seek changes to EU biofuels targets if it was shown that planting crops for fuel was driving up food prices — a day after the bloc stood by its plans to boost biofuel use.
Britain also pledged $900 million to help the U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) alleviate immediate problems and address longer-term solutions to “help put food on the table for nearly a billion people going hungry across the world”.
The WFP, whose head Josette Sheeran took part in a meeting of experts Brown called on Tuesday to discuss the crisis, said a “silent tsunami” threatened to plunge over 100 million people on every continent into hunger.
“This is the new face of hunger — the millions of people who were not in the urgent hunger category six months ago but now are,” she said ahead of the meeting. Riots in poor Asian and African countries have followed steep rises in food prices caused by many factors — dearer fuel, bad weather, rising disposable incomes boosting demand and the conversion of land to grow crops for biofuel.
Rice from Thailand, the world’s top exporter, has more than doubled in price this year. Sheeran said artificially created shortages, such as those caused by countries that have slowed or stopped exports, were worsening the problem
Major food exporters including Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Egypt and Cambodia have closed their stocks to safeguard supplies. “The world has been consuming more than it has been producing for the past three years, so stocks have been drawn down,” Sheeran said. “The world knows how to produce food and will do so. But we will have a couple of challenging years.”
Rising prices meant the WFP was running short of money to buy food for its programmes and had already curtailed school feeding plans in Tajikistan, Kenya and Cambodia. Sheeran said WFP, which last year estimated it would need $2.9 billion in 2008 to cover its needs, now calculated it would have to raise that figure by one quarter because of the surge in prices of staples like wheat, maize and rice.
She said this was the biggest challenge in the WFP’s 45-year history. “The era of cheap food is over,” said Rajat Nag, managing director general of the Asian Development Bank. He urged Asian governments not to distort markets with export curbs but use fiscal measures to help the poor.
“We want to temper what we think is a bit of an over-reaction. There is still enough supply,” he said. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has said dearer food risked wiping out progress on cutting poverty.
Brown raised further doubts about the wisdom of using crops to help produce fuel, an idea whose recent popularity in the United States and Europe has been dented by fears it harms the environment and makes food dearer.
“We need to look closely at the impact on food prices and the environment of different production methods and to ensure we are more selective in our support (for biofuels),” he said. “If our UK review shows that we need to change our approach, we will also push for change in EU biofuels targets,” he said a day after the EU stood by its target of getting a tenth of road transport fuel from crops and agricultural waste by 2020.
The era of cheap food is over, an Asian Development Bank (ADB) official said Tuesday. Rajat Nag, the ADB’s managing director general, said a variety of factors have contributed to soaring food prices which, even if they ease, will not return to the lower levels which the world became used to. “We just have to accept the era of cheap food is over,” Nag told the Foreign Correspondents’ Association. The ADB last week said soaring food prices have hampered Asia’s fight against poverty and some countries may need foreign aid to feed their hungry millions.
Nag suggested there may be a distribution problem. “I don’t think we are talking in any way about a famine situation. The supplies are not where we need them and that is the problem. They are not available where the demands are,” he said. While Asia’s stock of rice is its lowest in decades, the ADB believes it is still enough to meet demand, Nag said. “So we do want to temper what sometimes may appear to me is a bit of an over-reaction.”
The Manila-based ADB aims to reduce global poverty. Nag cited a variety of factors for rising food prices. These include escalating prices of oil and other production costs, conversion of arable land to urban development and biofuel production, and environmental problems such as drought in Australia.
\ In a report early this month the ADB cautioned that the biggest risk for the region was soaring inflation, which it foresees rising to 5.1 percent this year — the highest in a decade.