DUSHANBE, February 17, 2011, Asia-Pus — There is no risk of food riots in Tajikistan because the great bulk of the country’s population lives in rural areas and they provide themselves by agricultural products by themselves, Firouz Saidov, head of the social sphere and labor market department at the Center for Strategic Studies, said commenting on predictions from UN experts that some countries are most at risk of food riots as prices advance.
According to him, a system of village subsistence production is well-developed in the country and more than 70 percent of the rural population in Tajikistan has been living off land. “Even during the hard 1990s, when there had been the civil war on in the country, major part of the population had managed to provide itself by agricultural products by itself,” said a senior expert from the Tajik thin tank, “Food riots may break out somewhere in Africa where devastating droughts may occur, but not in Tajikistan.”
Besides, the high level of labor migration may help Tajikistan avoid food riots, he noted. Major part of Tajikistan’s able-bodied population is currently working in Russia and we will able to import food products due labor migrants’ remittances,” Saidov said.
The expert, however, added that it could not be ruled out that Tajikistan would experience a shortage of food products in the first half of the year. “It is a seasonal shortage because we are running out of stock at the end of winter and the beginning of spring and prices are sharply rising, whether we want that or not,” said the expert, “To add to this problem, drought hit Kazakhstan and Russia that provide the bulk of Tajikistan’s grain imports last year.”
We will recall that the United Nations experts predict that countries in Latin America and Africa, including Bolivia and Mozambique, are most at risk of food riots as prices advance. Abdolreza Abbassian, a senior economist and grains expert at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), notes that the low-income food deficit countries are on the front line of the current surge in world prices. According to him, other countries where expensive food imports may become a “major burden” include Uganda, Mali, Niger and Somalia in Africa, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan in Asia and Honduras, Guatemala, and Haiti in Latin America.
