But a brief aside before getting to the actual topic...
So, first of all, my one-month hiatus from the blog accidentally turned into a three-month hiatus. Instead of trying to figure how that's possible, and how that much time went by, I'm going to focus on the fact that I'm excited to get back to the blog, and the whole monthly theme plan that I have been working on.
In the time since I last posted, I went on a month-long work trip to Indonesia, and one tiny blog-related thing came full circle: the image at the top of the blog is of rice paddies, and while I was in Indonesia I went on a hike outside of Jakarta through some amazingly beautiful actual rice paddies.
Even though I've been back for a few months, I've still been thinking a lot about my trip, and so it seemed like a good time to do a post on international food policy issues. And then with the next couple of posts, I'll post some internationally-inspired recipes!
And now to the topic at-hand: food prices.
Maybe you remember the news coverage on the global food crisis in 2007-2008; that was the first time I remember learning about some of the complicated causes of escalating food prices and the potential impacts.
That particular food crisis was blamed on factors including rising energy costs and an increase in demand for food brought on by a growth in the middle class in China and India. In addition, demand for biofuels in developed countries was also blamed, including by the World Bank; since biofuel production requires food sources as an input, theoretically their production competes with food resources and increases prices through an increase in demand.
Why does this matter? Even though households in the US are obviously also affected by increases in food prices, because households in developing countries spend a higher portion of their income on food, they are adversely affected. According to a 2008 NYT article, "Even the poorest fifth of households in the United States spend only 16 percent of their budget on food. In many other countries, it is less of a given. Nigerian families spend 73 percent of their budgets to eat, Vietnamese 65 percent, Indonesians half."
In the food crisis of 2007-2008, these stressors affected not only people's access to food, but led to social unrest; increases in food prices lead to riots in several countries, including Haiti and Egypt.
And now, upon observing high food prices in 2011, many have predicted that another food crisis is on the horizon. An article by Lester Brown in Foreign Policy names similar causes for this crisis as the one in 2007-2008, but adds that climate change-induced effects such as soil erosion, which shrinks production.
What can be done? Obviously this is an incredibly complicated issue, but suggested policy options to deal with this issue include convincing the US and EU to lesson subsidies and tax benefits for biofuel production, and programs to increase agricultural productivity in developing countries so as to decrease prices (see NYT 2008 article). In addition, it seems that legislation targeting climate change should be a long-term policy goal, with development programs that work on the effects of climate change on agriculture helping in the short term.
This policy topic is as bit harder to tie directly back to "your own table" (other than maybe not using biofuels and trying to limit climate change). For me, it's more of a reminder to think of ways to affect and change developed country agriculture policy, including biofuel policy, since it seems that this is one factor among the many complicated ones that combine to cause food crisis in developing countries.
