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Riots Due to Inflation and Food Shortages Concern Government Leaders |
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Health News -
Latest Health News
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Commodity prices as of late have been soaring. The global food prices have raised nearly 83% in the past three years. For those who live in modern countries, this is a small inconvenience when shopping at the grocery store. For those in some of the world’s poorest nations, this means that many thousands of people are going hungry each day. Finance ministers have gathered in Washington to work out a plan in order to combat the problem of food shortages around the world. The most recent news about food shortages are those in Haiti. Haiti’s Prime Minister Alexis decided to resign after there were surging riots because of high prices on basic staples of the Haitian diet, such as rice and beans. But Haiti is not the only nation that has been experiencing rioting over the surge of food prices. Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Senegal have all seen riots within the past two weeks. Countries such as Thailand and Pakistan have been combating food theft by deploying troops that check for theft in warehouses and straight from the fields.
The World Bank is concerned about the riots that are happening in these countries and wants to prevent any further disruption caused by high food prices. Since the problem is so severe, policy makers are trying to come up with a plan to be able to lessen the world’s food supply that goes into biofuels. Biofuels have been eating up a good percentage of the world’s crops and this is mostly due to the U.S. and their push for biofuels to replace oil. Some say that not all the blame can be put on biofuels. The other problem making food prices soars is the price for energy and electricity. Larger countries also create a large demand on food, which raises the price as well.
No one can yet agree what should be done, but all agrees that something needs to happen and it needs to happen quickly. Editors notes:
One obvious solution for the United States, which uses very large amounts of energy, is to increase the supply of energy by allowing off-shore drilling and exploration and drilling for gas on the vast areas of government land that is now off limits. Some experts have suggested there be a crash program to build the new types of small, safe nuclear power plants. This will require political courage to enact legislation to clear all the regulations and "red tape" that typically delays construction and unnecessarily runs up additional costs. Most industrialized countries are producing their energy with clean "green" nuclear power and the United States should catch up. One way to help pay for the vast new costs is to allow new nuclear plants to depreciate their costs of construction over 5 years with deductions on income taxes. Any increased production of ethanol fuel from grain should be stopped.
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Last Updated ( Friday, 19 December 2008 )
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