World food crisis eats into grain reserves
World food crisis eats into grain reserves.A shopper inspects the price of rice at a Tesco store in Bangkok, Thailand.
THE FOOD crisis is spreading beyond the specter of empty stomachs. Politicians worldwide are facing the wrath of voters, and the potential for social unrest looms. But there seems to be no quick fix to the problem.Over the weekend, Ban Ki-moon, UN Secretary-General, sent further waves. "One thing is certain, the world has consumed more [grain] than it has produced" in the past three years.
Statistics from the US Department of Agriculture show that since 2000, the only year that humans produced enough to eat was in 2004. In 2007, for example, the world produced 2,075 million tons of grain, but consumed 2,098.
The short supply, a result of climate change and the development of bio-fuels, has led to the price hike of grains and social unrest in 30 countries worldwide. Over the past year, the price of rice, the staple diet of half the world's population, has surged 165 percent on the international market. The price for wheat surged 130 percent.
"Past shocks have quickly dissipated, but that's not likely to be the case this time," said Ali Ghurkan, a UN Food and Agriculture Organization analyst. "Supply and demand have become unbalanced, and... can't be fixed quickly."
Currently, the gap between supply and demand is being closed by eating into food stocks accumulated in better times. The world's food stocks have shrunk by half since 1999, from a reserve big enough to feed the entire world for 116 days then to a predicted low of only 54 days by 2007, according to the US Department of Agriculture.
The miracle that has fed people from 1950 to the 1990s was the Green Revolution: higher-yielding crops that enabled humans to almost triple world food production during the four decades while increasing the area of farmland by no more than 10 percent. Meanwhile, the global population more than doubled in that time. But since the beginning of the 1990s, crop yields have essentially stopped rising.
A new world policy on food was proposed by World Bank President Robert Zoellick to tackle the crisis. "This new deal should focus not only on hunger and malnutrition, access to food and its supply, but also on the interconnections with energy, yields, climate change and investment," said Zoellick. "We can't be satisfied with studies and paper and talk. This is about recognizing a growing emergency, acting and seizing opportunity, too."
Plenty of grain to go round in China
China is self-sufficient in grain. In 2007, production reached 500 billion kilograms, or 385 kilograms for each person in the country. This is 74 kilograms higher than the world 2007 average. Currently, China has a grain reserve of 150-200 million tons.