Welcome

Dennis Jones is a Jamaican-born international economist, who has lived most of the time in the UK and USA, and latterly in Guinea, west Africa. He moved back to the Caribbean in 2007. This blog contains his observations on life on this small eastern Caribbean island, as well as views on life and issues on a broader landscape, especially the Caribbean and Africa.

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Friday, April 25, 2008

Chicken, my foot. Redux. No rice with that?

I wrote my little piece on the pending food crisis a bit too early in the sense that I had not read articles that came out yesterday. Now I know things are really serious. Rice is being rationed! Not in Africa or India, but in England (see report in The Times) and the heartlands of the USA (also reported in The Times). In Britain rice is being rationed by shopkeepers in Asian neighbourhoods to prevent hoarding; while in the US Wal-Mart has created a first--there has never been food rationing in the US. The restrictions are being imposed on retail and wholesale customers.

As one of the reports notes, world rice prices have more than doubled in the past year partly because countries such as China and India — whose economies are booming — are buying more food from abroad. Also, major rice producers banned exports to ensure that their own people could continue to afford to buy the staple: India, China, Vietnam and Egypt have all blocked exports and so demand for rice from countries such as the United States has increased.

But the crisis is having some worrying ripple effects. The United Nation's World Food Programme has seen its costs escalate by 40 percent (see Reuters report). The WFP is funded by donations and it has now put out bids for an extra US$755 million, up from a US$500 million estimate two months ago.

Both the World Bank (see BBC report) and the International Monetary Fund (see IMF website) are now reviewing how they can assist countries facing escalating food costs.

So do more than spare a thought this weekend as you heap another spoonful of rice on the plate. Those of us who have not had to live with rice as our main staple have never really understood what it means for the price or availability to be outside our reach. I experienced how each year it dislocated much of economic and social life in Guinea and now I see the crisis spreading and the results could be very nasty. People will fight over food.

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