Global Food Crisis 2010-2011 and Its Causes - Essay Example

Download file to see previous pages The world population is going to be 9 billion by 2050. Already a high number of people starving to death is mounting climbing that can turn out to be rampant starvation due to continuously tighter supplies. Key food-producing countries, such as China is experiencing the worst drought in the last 200 years; Russia is struggling to recover from drought. Floods have devastated Australia and Brazil’s agricultural production. Global weather trends in last year are exerting immense pressure on the global food system which was already struggling to avoid a major breakdown (Micheal, n.d.).

According to World Bank (2011) facts and figures, before the emergence of fuel and financial crisis, 1.1 billion people were living on less than one dollar a day. Another 923 million people were undernourished. Food prices continuously remain volatile. Despite falling prices on the international level, local food prices have not come down. According to Wiggin (2010), the fact is that the 2008 food crisis was never actually left the world. It is true that we didn’t see food riots during 2009 and warehouse stores, such as Costco didn’t ration 20-pound packet of rice, however, the supplies continued to stay tight. Price for food items, such as corn and wheat remained lower than that of 2008’s point; however, they never went at the point of pre-2008 food crisis. Primary farm commodities’ prices went higher in 2010 with corn 63 per cent up, wheat 84 per cent, sugar 55 per cent, and soybean 24 per cent up.

Global food shortages are ringing alarming bells for world leaders as it forced emergency meetings at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization who stressed the need for immediate action (cited in Activist,2011). There are many reasons to this global food crisis, most cited are extreme weather conditions (Activist,2011) increasing population in particular in developing countries (Alexakha,2011) supply/demand imbalance (Brown,2011), and food (or oil) commodity speculation (Activist,2011). ...Download file to see next pagesRead More