World Leaders Discuss Global Food Crisis Over 18-Course Meal

Like anybody would want beetroot foam, anyhow.

A few words on the food crisis, though.

I remember before I left the states bitterly complaining about how high the cost of food was getting. It seemed like the cost of milk had doubled, as had all dairy products, really...

And if you wanted to get nice fruits and vegetables, well, forget about it.

In Moldova, in the four months since I've been here, the price of flour has doubled. The price of rice has tripled. I'm not sure of the price of corn products, but you can bet they've skyrocketed as well. In *four months.*

Right now, maybe this isn't that big of a deal because Moldova is rich in fruits and vegetables in the summer. But come autumn and winter, things could get seriously messy.


From the Washington Post:

"In Chicago, Minneapolis and Kansas City, traders watched from the pits early last summer as wheat prices spiked amid mediocre harvests in the United States and Europe and signs of prolonged drought in Australia. But within a few weeks, the traders discerned an ominous snowball effect -- one that would eventually bring down a prime minister in Haiti, make more children in Mauritania go to bed hungry, even cause American executives at Sam's Club to restrict sales of large bags of rice.

As prices rose, major grain producers including Argentina and Ukraine, battling inflation caused in part by soaring oil bills, were moving to bar exports on a range of crops to control costs at home. It meant less supply on world markets even as global demand entered a fundamentally new phase. Already, corn prices had been climbing for months on the back of booming government-subsidized ethanol programs. Soybeans were facing pressure from surging demand in China. But as supplies in the pipelines of global trade shrank, prices for corn, soybeans, wheat, oats, rice and other grains began shooting through the roof.

At the same time, food was becoming the new gold. Investors fleeing Wall Street's mortgage-related strife plowed hundreds of millions of dollars into grain futures, driving prices up even more. By Christmas, a global panic was building. With fewer places to turn, and tempted by the weaker dollar, nations staged a run on the American wheat harvest.

Foreign buyers, who typically seek to purchase one or two months' supply of wheat at a time, suddenly began to stockpile. They put in orders on U.S. grain exchanges two to three times larger than normal as food riots began to erupt worldwide. This led major domestic U.S. mills to jump into the fray with their own massive orders, fearing that there would soon be no wheat left at any price.

"Japan, the Philippines, [South] Korea, Taiwan -- they all came in with huge orders, and no matter how high prices go, they keep on buying," said Jeff Voge, chairman of the Kansas City Board of Trade and also an independent trader. Grains have surged so high, he said, that some traders are walking off the floor for weeks at a time, unable to handle the stress.

"We have never seen anything like this before," Voge said. "Prices are going up more in one day than they have during entire years in the past. But no matter the price, there always seems to be a buyer. . . . This isn't just any commodity. It is food, and people need to eat."

People in the south of Moldova wake up every day and pray for rain. Maybe in the United States in the Midwest, y'all are waking up every day and praying for less rain.

Personally, at this point I'm praying for a discontinuation of subsidies to the farming industry for biofuels (well, to the farming industry as a whole, really), an investment and institution of subsidies to public transportation i.e. a national train system, and a release on tariffs from places like Brazil, who have managed to make turning sludge sugar into fuel an act of art.

But that's just me.