DUSHANBE, February 16, 2011, Asia-Plus — 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, Bloomberg reported on February 16.
The past month’s protests in North Africa and the Middle East were partly linked to agriculture costs. World food prices climbed to a record in January, the UN said on February 3.
World Bank President Robert Zoellick said on February 15 that Food prices are rising to “dangerous levels and threaten tens of millions of poor people” globally.
Bloomberg reports that Abdolreza Abbassian, a senior economist and grains expert at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), said on February 14 that the low-income food deficit countries are on the front line of the current surge in world prices. “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,” he said.
Wheat traded at a record in Zhengzhou, China on February 14 and the grain, corn and soybeans rallied to the highest levels in 2 1/2 years in Chicago the past week. Governments from Beijing to Belgrade are raising imports, limiting exports or releasing supply from stockpiles to curb inflation, Bloomberg reports.
The future wheat harvest may not be enough to meet world’s requirements, experts note. It is necessary to increase wheat production at least by 3-4 percent, Abbassian said.
Global wheat production will probably drop 4.3 percent to 653 million metric tons in 2010-2011 from the previous year, while demand may expand 1.2 percent to 667 million tons, the FAO said in December. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates output at 645.4 million tons and demand at 665.2 million tons.
Higher prices of wheat, rice, sugar and dairy products helped push the FAO’s Food Price Index to a record last month. According to the updated FAO Food Price Index, a commodity basket that regularly tracks monthly changes in global food prices, world food prices surged to a new historic peak in January, for the seventh consecutive month. The Index averaged 231 points in January and was up 3.4 percent from December 2010. This is the highest level (both in real and nominal terms) since FAO started measuring food prices in 1990. Prices of all monitored commodity groups registered strong gains in January, except for meat, which remained unchanged.
