Impending Food Crisis
By Dr Arvind Kumar
The recent drought in the US has shrivelled most of its maize crop. The US is world’s largest producer of maize. Hot weather has also affected crops in South America, Russia, Kazakhstan and China. Maize and wheat prices have climbed in the past two weeks. The question is, ‘Are we headed for another crisis?’ Though food security experts differ on this issue, but there is concern that staple grains like maize and wheat could become less affordable for the poor and sharp fluctuations in prices or volatility could disrupt the efforts of grain-importing poor countries to stay within their budgets. “It is still early days – it might just rain in the US and the situation could improve dramatically,” said Abdolreza Abbassian, secretary of the Intergovernmental Group on Grains (IGG) at FAO. “Our stocks of cereals are relatively comfortable and the situation is not comparable to 2010/11 [when wheat stocks were smaller] or to 2007/08 [when stocks of the main staple grains, wheat and maize, fell to record lows].”
While one cannot do anything about the weather, economists and food experts like Barrett and Steve Wiggins, development and agriculture expert at the Overseas Development Institute, a UK-based think-tank, said sharp fluctuations in prices are a symptom of a structural problem of low stocks. FAO’s Abbassian said the problem was that the bulk of global production of the world’s main staple grains relied on a handful of countries. “If climatic or any other exogenous shock affects either of these, then it impacts the global prices and volatility.” As levels of man-made greenhouse gas emissions rise in the atmosphere, temperatures are expected to rise and affect rainfall patterns. This in turn will affect crops.
