Impending Food Crisis
Impending
Food Crisis
By Dr Arvind Kumar
The recent drought in the US has shrivelled most of its maize crop.
The US is world's largest producer of maize. Hot weather has also affected
crops in South America, Russia, Kazakhstan and China. Maize and wheat prices
have climbed in the past two weeks. The question is, ‘Are we headed for another
crisis?’ Though food security experts differ on this issue, but there is
concern that staple grains like maize and wheat could become less affordable
for the poor and sharp fluctuations in prices or volatility could disrupt the
efforts of grain-importing poor countries to stay within their budgets.
"It is still early days - it might just rain in the US and the situation
could improve dramatically," said Abdolreza Abbassian, secretary of the
Intergovernmental Group on Grains (IGG) at FAO. "Our stocks of cereals are relatively
comfortable and the situation is not comparable to 2010/11 [when wheat stocks
were smaller] or to 2007/08 [when stocks of the main staple grains, wheat and
maize, fell to record lows]."
While one cannot do
anything about the weather, economists and food experts like Barrett and Steve
Wiggins, development and agriculture expert at the Overseas Development
Institute, a UK-based think-tank, said sharp fluctuations in prices are a
symptom of a structural problem of low stocks.
FAO's Abbassian said the problem was that the bulk of global production
of the world's main staple grains relied on a handful of countries. "If
climatic or any other exogenous shock affects either of these, then it impacts
the global prices and volatility." As levels of man-made greenhouse gas
emissions rise in the atmosphere, temperatures are expected to rise and affect
rainfall patterns. This in turn will affect crops.
#Food #FAO #Rainfall #Patterns #GlobalPrices #Exogenous
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