Food shortages....

Food shortages: how will we feed the world? (From Telegraph (UK))

The era of cheap food is over. In Britain, a standard white loaf costs more than £1, grocery bills are driving up inflation and land prices are going through the roof. But steep rises in the price of staples such as wheat and rice are having an even bigger impact on poor countries.

In Cameroon, 24 people have been killed in food riots since February, while in Haiti, protesters chanting, "We're hungry" forced the prime minister to resign this month.

In the past month, there have been food riots in Egypt, Cote d'Ivoire, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Madagascar.

The World Bank now believes that some 33 countries are in danger of being destabilised by food price inflation, while Ban Ki-Moon, the UN secretary-general, said that higher food prices risked wiping out progress towards reducing poverty and could harm global growth and security...

Bob Watson, the chief scientist at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, puts the rise in the price of commodity crops such as wheat down to a number of factors: higher demand for grain to feed livestock in China, where increasing affluence means more people want to eat meat; drought in Australia for three years, meaning it has had to import wheat; market jitters brought on by the sight of several countries stopping exporting grain; speculators seeing a chance to make money; and, of course, the sudden extra demand for food crops such as maize for use in biofuels, in both Europe and the United States...

Food represents about 10 to 20 per cent of consumer spending in the rich world, but as much as 60 to 80 per cent in developing countries, many of which are net food importers, according to Henri Josserand, of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.

Bob Zoellick, president of the World Bank, calculates that food inflation could push 100?million people back into poverty, wiping out the gains of a decade of economic growth.

Food Riots Begin: Will You Go Vegetarian? (From Wired.com)

As food riots break out around the globe, vegetarianism seems like more than a way of being kind to animals. It's about eating as efficiently as possible, so that grains destined for livestock will reach people instead... It takes an estimated five pounds of grain to produce a single pound of beef...

In the last month, something largely ignored by the public but long predicted in organizational white papers and academic studies has come to pass: widespread food shortages. Ballooning prices. Outright riots. Neighbor fighting neighbor. Countries scrambling to feed themselves, export partners be damned.

Even before this crisis, food experts said the world could not feed itself in coming decades if growing populations in developing countries insisted on a meat-rich western diet. That time may already have arrived -- and largely without climate-change induced agricultural disruption. Add droughts and years of failing harvests, and things get seriously scary...