Rising Food Prices Continued Impact…
April 14th, 2008 at 1:15 pm | posted by Virginia SimmonsThe Wall Street Journal is featuring a major article today about the impact of rising food prices around the world. The article states that the cost of basic staples, which have risen 83% in the last three years, have instigated recent riots in Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Ethiopia and in “Pakistan and Thailand, army troops have been deployed to deter food theft from fields and warehouses.”
From the WSJ piece:
“In a Sunday news briefing, [World Bank President Robert Zoellick] said, “We have to put our money where our mouth is now — so that we can put food into hungry mouths.”
But the weekend’s meeting produced few concrete results. Mr. Zoellick recently urged rich nations to contribute another $500 million to the United Nation’s World Food Program, but he said that the U.N. has received commitments for only about half the money.”
You can read more about rising food prices at one.org/worldfoodcrisis.
-Virginia Simmons
April 14th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
Riots in Argentina, the collapse of the Haitian government - all because people can’t afford food. I talked with my mom today and she mentioned that, as a senior citizen in the US, she is seeing such a steep rise in overall prices that her budget is becoming more limited than it is. We live in the 21st century, we have such great minds to create solutions to problems, why can’t we figure this out? How can someone starve to death when Americans throw away millions of dollars of agricultural products daily? My Development Economics professor used to always tell us that “we know what has to happen to create growth?” I always had to ask him, then why don’t we?
April 22nd, 2008 at 3:40 pm
From the number of urgent solicitations I receive every week I would direct the world’s attention to the problem of hunger that exists in the continental United States on Indian Reservations across this country. This is one more continuing national disgrace, as is the failure to impeach a President who has failed in his Constitutional duty in this and so many other ways!