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Surging
food prices bite across Asia
SYDNEY, (AFP) - From the rice
paddies of Asia to the wheat fields of Australia, the soaring
price of food is breaking the budgets of the poor and raising
the spectres of hunger and unrest, experts warn.
A billion people in Asia are seriously affected by the surging
costs of daily staples such as rice and bread, the director
general of the Asian Development Bank, Rajat Nag, has said.
“This includes roughly about 600 million people who live
on just under a dollar a day, which is the definition of poverty,
and another 400 million who are just above that borderline,”
he said.
Globally, the World Bank last month estimated that 33 countries
were threatened with political and social unrest because of
the skyrocketing costs of food and energy.
Across Asia, workers made a campaign against high food prices
their May Day battle cry last Thursday in marches through
cities including the capitals of Indonesia, the Philippines
and Thailand.
While the demonstrations were mainly peaceful, concern is
growing over the potential for political instability and unrest
if high prices persist.
“Once people get hungry they start also getting quite
desperate and take desperate measures,” Damien Kingsbury
of Australia’s Deakin University told AFP.
India’s top farm scientist and architect of the 1960s
“Green Revolution,” Monkombu Sambasivan Swaminathan,
has said India needs a second agricultural revolution to boost
food supplies or face huge social turmoil.
Experts blame the high food prices on a confluence of factors,
including increased demand from a changing diet in Asia, droughts,
the rising use of crops for biofuels, and growing energy and
fertiliser costs.
In Australia, which usually ranks second after the United
States as a global wheat exporter, several years of drought
cut harvests to just 13 million tonnes last year from an average
of 22 million tonnes.
So while consumers are struggling, Australian farmers are
not getting rich on the backs of the poor, said National Farmers
Federation chief executive Ben Fargher.
“It’s been the worst drought in our history and
many, many farming families are under significant financial
and emotional stress and it will take our communities a long
time to recover,” he said.
And even in a relatively prosperous country like Australia,
people are feeling the squeeze in the supermarkets, prompting
the government to launch an inquiry into how to stem rising
grocery prices.
Around the rest of the region, the impact varies from traumatic
to minimal:
AFGHANISTAN: Millions of Afghans are finding it “problematic”
to meet their basic food needs with prices of the staple,
wheat, doubling in some areas over recent months, the World
Food Programme has said.
About 400 people demonstrated in eastern Afghanistan last
month, blocking a key road linking the eastern town of Jalalabad
to the capital Kabul and demanding the government step in
to control prices at food markets.
BANGLADESH: One of the world’s poorest nations, Bangladesh
has been hit by a doubling in the price of the main staple,
rice, in the past year and many low paid workers say they
have been forced to make do on only one meal a day.
Last month about 20,000 garment workers rioted near the capital
Dhaka for higher wages to cover food prices.
CAMBODIA: Soaring rice prices have forced the World Food Programme
to indefinitely suspend a programme supplying free breakfasts
to 450,000 poor Cambodian schoolchildren.
CHINA: Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao told a meeting of the State
Council last month that high prices were the biggest problem
in the domestic economy.
“The inflation is led by food price rises, which especialy
hurt the poor,” said Ma Qing, a Beijing-based analyst
with the CEB monitor group. “So the pressure (on maintaining
social stability) is certainly quite large.”
The finance ministry announced a special 100 percent duty
on exports of fertilisers and the raw materials used to make
them in order to ensure domestic supply over the ploughing
season and “guarantee this year’s grain harvest”.
--
INDIA: A general strike against spiralling food prices paralysed
Kolkata on April 21 as thousands of police were deployed across
West Bengal state to stop protests turning violent.
New Delhi has already slashed food duties and banned exports
of lentils and other staples, and will not hesitate to further
“sacrifice revenues to control prices,” Finance
Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram said.
-- INDONESIA: Anger over rising food prices was a focus for
some 10,000 Indonesians who took to the streets of the capital
Jakarta for Labour Day rallies.
High prices for rice, cooking oil and soybeans helped drive
Indonesia’s annual inflation rate to 8.17 percent in
March.
-- JAPAN: In resource-poor Japan, which relies on imports
for 60 percent of its food, companies have hiked prices on
everything from beer to beef, mayonnaise and “miso”
paste made from fermented soy beans in recent months.
Although Asia’s largest economy has been struggling for
years to end deflation, rising food and commodity prices have
not been welcomed because of the pain they inflict on small
businesses and low-income households in particular.
-- MALAYSIA: Anger over rising prices was a major factor in
March elections which saw the ruling coalition lose a third
of parliamentary seats and five states in its worst results
in half a century.
-- NEPAL: Nepal last week banned the export of grains as prices
soared.
“There is a high possibility of food crisis in a poor
country like ours where domestic production is not enough,”
said Hari Dahal, a spokesman at the ministry of agriculture.
-- NORTH KOREA: North Korea’s food crisis has already
seen some people starve to death in remote rural towns, according
to an aid group which works in the impoverished communist
nation, South Korea’s Good Friends organisation.
Prices of staple foods have almost tripled over the past year.
-- PAKISTAN: Analysts say public anger over food shortages,
particularly wheat flour for the staple roti bread, was a
factor in the defeat of President Pervez Musharraf’s
allies in elections in February.
-- SOUTH KOREA: Rising rice prices abroad have almost no impact
on South Korea, which imports less than five percent of its
annual consumption and heavily subsidises its rice farmers.
-- SINGAPORE: Singapore is the wealthiest economy in Southeast
Asia but charities say inflation is driving more people to
join queues for free meals. Consumer price inflation reached
6.6 percent in January-February, officials said.
-- TAIWAN: Taiwan is self-sufficient in rice so international
prices have no impact. However, domestic rice prices hit a
26-year high earlier this year due to typhoons affecting the
harvest.
-- THAILAND: In Thailand, export and domestic rice prices
have risen about 50 percent in a month. Some farmers have
taken to arming themselves and staking out their fields at
night to protect their precious crop from rice thieves.
In a phrase particularly chilling for Asia, the World Food
Programme has described rising food prices as a “silent
tsunami”.
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