http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1208...=googlenews_ws
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Food Inflation, Riots Spark Worries for World Leaders, IMF, World Bank
Push for Solutions

By BOB DAVIS and DOUGLAS BELKIN
April 14, 2008; Page A1

WASHINGTON -- Finance ministers gathered this weekend to grapple with
the global financial crisis also struggled with a problem that has
plagued the world periodically since before the time of the Pharaohs:
food shortages.

Surging commodity prices have pushed up global food prices 83% in the
past three years, according to the World Bank -- putting huge stress on
some of the world's poorest nations. Even as the ministers met, Haiti's
Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis was resigning after a week in
which that tiny country's capital was racked by rioting over higher
prices for staples like rice and beans.
[photo]
As food prices soar, protests are breaking out around the world,
including this riot Saturday in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

Rioting in response to soaring food prices recently has broken out in
Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Ethiopia. In Pakistan and
Thailand, army troops have been deployed to deter food theft from fields
and warehouses. World Bank President Robert Zoellick warned in a recent
speech that 33 countries are at risk of social upheaval because of
rising food prices. Those could include Indonesia, Yemen, Ghana,
Uzbekistan and the Philippines. In countries where buying food requires
half to three-quarters of a poor person's income, "there is no margin
for survival," he said.

Many policy makers at the weekend meetings of the International Monetary
Fund and World Bank agreed that the problem is severe. Among other
targets, they singled out U.S. policies pushing corn-based ethanol and
other biofuels as deepening the woes. . . (continued)
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Billy

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