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one in every six people on earth are going hungry this year. Fully half the world is now at risk of hunger and malnutrition.
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The FAO estimates it will take $30 billion a year to eliminate global hunger. For the price of the bailout, we could make sure no one on earth goes hungry for the next 23 years. We could re-build food systems as engines for local economic growth. Instead of exacerbating global hunger, for $700 billion dollars we could fully fund the millennium development goals to eradicate global poverty, the root cause of hunger.

Decades of free market fundamentalism has left food systems around the world in tatters and our financial systems poised on the edge of disaster. Instead of throwing money at a system in crisis, we need to use the crisis as an opportunity to fundamentally restructure both food and finance. We need to re-regulate the financial services industry, re-establish national grain reserves, and use anti-trust legislation to break up the power of the oligopolies holding us hostage. Instead of considering a $700 billion dollar gift to financiers, Congress needs to jettison the laissez-faire policies that let Wall Street spin out of control in the first place.

--Annie Shattuck and Eric Holt-Giménez,
Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy

Original story: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/10/03-4

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[ 05 October 2008: Message edited by: gram swaraj ]

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Riots and other forms of civil unrest have already broken out around the world in response to a global grain shortage and surging food prices.

According to data from the World Food Program and the early warning and global information system of the Food and Agricultural Organization, street protests and rioting over high food prices have broken out in Guinea, Indonesia, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Uzbekistan, Yemen and West Africa in the past several months.

Prices of wheat and rice in particular have skyrocketed recently. Rice prices have increased 50 percent in the past year, while wheat prices went up 115 percent in the same time period. The high prices have been attributed to increased fuel and shipping costs, plus a worldwide grain shortage.

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