World Bank Meeting Warns of Food Crisis
[1/5 of American Croplands converted to fuel crops: Happy Al Gore?]
WASHINGTON, April 13: The world is moving towards a food crisis that may lead to wars and riots, warn financial experts meeting at the World Bank headquarters in Washington.
“People are dying because of their reaction to the situation,” said Jacques Diouf, director-general of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation.
The UN agency also warned that this food crisis was not going to end quickly. The World Bank agreed and predicted that prices would remain above 2004 levels through to 2015.
World Bank President Robert Zoellick noted that people living in the developed world struggled with the high cost of fuel to run their cars, while poor people in developing nations struggled to feed themselves.
“In many developing countries, the poor spend up to 75 per cent of their income on food. When prices of basic foods rise, it hits hard,” he said.
The price of wheat had risen 120 per cent over the past year, Mr Zoellick added. Over the past three years, food prices overall have risen 83 per cent, the World Bank estimates.
The crisis of surging food prices could mean “seven lost years” in the fight against worldwide poverty, he said.
IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn also issued a dire warning about the food crisis and its economic and political impact.
“Food prices, if they go on like they are doing today … the consequences will be terrible,” he said, adding that if they continued, “hundreds of thousands of people will be starving”.
“As we know, learning from the past, those kind of questions sometimes end in war,” he said.