| A Revolting Situation
Food Prices and Ethanol
By: Chuck Colson|Published: March 4, 2011 12:00 AM
If you ask the average American what lay behind the recent revolts in Tunisia and Egypt, you are likely to hear words like freedom, democracy, and even Facebook and Twitter. A word you probably won’t hear is food. But just as much as social media, what brought people onto the streets of Tunis and Cairo was food: too little of it at too high a price.
"This past December, the food price index, as measured by the U.N.’s Food & Agriculture Organization, hit an all-time high and shows no sign of coming down. This year, countries are expected to spend more than one trillion dollars on food imports. In the past year, the price of corn has risen fifty-three percent, wheat is up forty-seven percent, and rice is at a two-year high. These increases caused the price of food staples to rise in places like North Africa, where much of the population was already struggling to make ends meet.
This food stress was behind much of the discontent that fueled the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt. In countries where forty percent of the population makes less than two dollars a day, steep rises in food prices can make a difference between eating or not eating.
Here in the U.S., the rise in food prices isn’t that tough for most Americans. Yet the fact is we’re playing a role in this unfolding story. At a time when commodity price hikes are threatening to destabilize swaths of the developing world, much of our most productive farmland is dedicated to growing biofuels, especially ethanol."
FAO Initiative on Soaring Food Prices
FAO food price indices |
