Kimberly Mega Wed March 5th 9:20 Food Scarcity
The United Nations announced on Monday that it can no longer support global malnutrition due to an huge increase in commodity prices. They will need an extra half billion dollars to make up the difference from inflation. The World Food Programme feeds 73 million people in 78 countries with help from the world’s healthier nations but this only a tenth of the world’s undernourished population. They will be unable to make the same amount of food deliveries due to the increase in food and fuel costs. People in many of this areas are unable to find and provide their own food supply, for example Afghanistan just increased their people at risk for malnutrition to 2.5 million. This increase in commodity prices due to climate change, use of agricultural produce for biofuel and higher demand for animal feed has caused many riots around the world. Some countries have resorted to rationing and freezing of food supplies, and India has even stopped exporting rice. For the poorest countries more than half of their income goes to food purchases already and they can’t afford any more inflation. The rates of malnutrition are sure to soar. I was glad to find after this article that the WFP was holding an emergency meeting on Friday where they will discuss the severity and hopefully solutions to this problem. They will do a case study of the countries who ar worse off and then decide how to increase their budget. Unfortunately, its not only the food prices that are the problem. The fuel cost to transport the supplies are outrageous and account for 65 percent of the WFP’s budget. I can’t help but to think back to our reading about world war. The US spends trillions of dollars on military efforts yearly and is the leading weapons supplier in the world. If we spent a fraction of that budget on humanitarian issues the world and it’s people might be a little better off.
http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=333307&area=/breaking_news__international
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