prices rising higher

[Djedi Maaur]

President of the Supermarkets’ Association Heeranand Maharaj is warning consumers to brace themselves for an increase in all flour-based products as the National Flour Mill (NFM) declares a further hike in the price of flour.

In a telephone interview yesterday, Maharaj said the NFM has informed them of the pending price increase, but not the quantum or the date when it will go into effect.

“Flour is a basic item and once that price increase kicks in, bakery items for sure will go up.

“Things like roti, doubles, pasta, biscuits....the price increase is imminent. We wait to see what happens,” Maharaj said.

However, he dispelled reports of a shortage in the supply of rice and flour.

Maharaj said NFM has been delivering adequate supplies, but people are panic buying and putting pressure on the system.

“They have been supplying us, although they are not producing all of the sizes. The only thing is that people are buying more than they need.

“As soon as you put them out customers are picking them up.

“We have to tell consumers that NFM has assured us they would be able to supply the market needs and to not panic-buy.”

guardian.co.tt/news10.html

[Djedi Maaur]

The coming food catastrophe
Gwynne Dyer

Thursday, March 27th 2008



"This is the new face of hunger,'' said Josetta Sheeran, director of the World Food Programme (WFP), launching an appeal for an extra US$500 million so it could continue supplying food aid to 73 million hungry people this year.

"People are simply being priced out of food markets....We have never before had a situation where aggressive rises in food prices keep pricing our operations out of our reach.''

The WFP decided on a public appeal three weeks ago because the price of the food it buys to feed some of the world's poorest people had risen by 55 per cent since last June. By the time it actually launched the appeal, prices had risen a further 20 per cent, so now it needs US$700 million to bridge the gap between last year's budget and this year's prices.

Last year it became clear that the era of cheap food was over: food costs worldwide rose by 23 per cent between 2006 and 2007. This year, what is becoming clear is the impact of this change on people's lives.

For consumers in Japan, France or the US, the relentless price rises for food are an unwelcome extra pressure on an already stretched household budget. For less fortunate people in other places, they can mean less protein in the diet, or choosing between feeding the kids breakfast and paying their school fees, or even, in the poorest communities, starvation. And the crisis is only getting started.

It is the perfect storm: everything is going wrong at once. To begin with, the world's population has continued to grow while its food production has not. For the 50 years between 1945 and 1995, as the world's population more than doubled, grain production kept pace - but then it stalled. In six of the past seven years, the human race has consumed more grain than it grew. World grain reserves last year were only 57 days, down from 180 days a decade ago.

To make matters worse, demand for food is growing faster than population. As incomes rise in China, India and other countries with fast-growing economies, consumers include more and more meat in their diet: the average Chinese citizen now eats 50 kilos (110 lbs) of meat a year, up from 20 kilos (44 lbs) in the mid-1980s.

Then there is global warming, which is probably already cutting into food production. Many people in Australia, formerly the world's second-largest wheat exporter, suspect that climate change is the real reason for the prolonged drought that is destroying the country's ability to export food.

But the worst damage is being done by the rage for "bio-fuels'' that supposedly reduce carbon dioxide emissions and fight climate change. Thirty per cent of this year's US grain harvest will go straight to an ethanol distillery, and the EU is aiming to provide ten per cent of the fuel used for transport from bio-fuels by 2010. A huge amount of the world's farmland is being diverted to feed cars, not people.

Worse yet, rainforest is being cleared, especially in Brazil and Indonesia, to grow more bio-fuels. A recent study in the US journal Science calculated that destroying natural ecosystems to grow corn (maize, mealies) or sugar cane for ethanol, or oil palms or soybeans for bio-diesel, releases between 17 and 420 times more carbon dioxide than is saved annually by burning the bio-fuel grown on that land instead of fossil fuel. It's all justified in the name of fighting climate change, but the numbers just don't add up.

"It would obviously be insane if we had a policy to try and reduce greenhouse gas emissions through the use of bio-fuels that's actually leading to an increase in greenhouse gases,'' said Prof Robert Watson, former chief scientific adviser to the World Bank and now filling the same role at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in London. But that is the policy, both in Europe and in the US.

This is the one element in the "perfect storm'' that is completely under human control. Governments can simply stop creating artificial demand for the current generation of bio-fuels (and often directly subsidising them). That land goes back to growing food instead, and prices fall.

Climate change is a real threat, but we don't have to have this crisis now. "If...more and more land (is) diverted for industrial bio-fuels to keep cars running, we have two years before a food catastrophe breaks out worldwide,'' said Vandana Shiva, director of the India-based Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Natural Resource Policy, in an interview last week. "It'll be 20 years before climate catastrophe breaks out, but the false solutions to climate change are creating catastrophes that will be much more rapid than the climate change itself.''