Bad News All Around

IMF Alert On Food Price Crisis

Fuel prices are surging. This has led to people wanting to try Bio-Diesel. The problem is that the Bio-Diesel firms are making their diesel fuel from staple food crops such as corn and wheat which in turn is driving up these staple crop prices. Naturally, this is creating a food price crisis.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation says 37 countries face food crises. The president of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, urged members on Sunday to provide $US500 million ($540 million) by May 1 to help alleviate the problem.

There have been serious disturbances in more than a dozen developing countries, including Haiti, where a Nigerian peacekeeper serving with the United Nations police force was dragged from his car and shot dead as he was taking food to his colleagues on Saturday.

Violence had flared in Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, following the dismissal of the prime minister, Jacques Edouard Alexis, earlier in the day and the announcement of a plan to slash the price of rice. A week of hunger-provoked protests and looting has left six people dead, and aid workers say volatile protests are likely to continue because of sustained high food prices. Haiti imports almost all its food, and global food prices have risen 40 per cent since the middle of last year.

Mamadou Mbaye, who heads the UN World Food Program's office in Haiti, said fixing Haiti's systemic problems, such as unemployment and dependence on imported food, could not be accomplished immediately, meaning unrest could continue.

"Some measures will generate results in the long term … but whether people will be willing to wait for that is another issue."

In the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, 20,000 workers rioted over high food prices and low wages on Saturday. There have also been protests in neighbouring India.

Some experts, including Mr Zoellick and the British Government's chief scientific adviser, Professor John Beddington, have identified the growth of biofuels as one of the main causes of higher food prices.

The UN says 232 kilograms of corn is needed to fill a 50-litre car tank with ethanol - enough to feed a child for a year. Last week the UN predicted massacres unless the biofuel policy was halted.

Jacques Diouf, of the Food and Agriculture Organisation, said: "The world food situation is very serious: we have seen riots in Egypt, Cameroon, Haiti and Burkina Faso. There is a risk that this unrest will spread in countries where 50 per cent to 60 per cent of income goes to food. The reality is that people are dying already. Naturally people won't be sitting dying of starvation, they will react."

And we still can't stop using carbon based fuels. Our civilisation is totally hooked on oil.
There are trials in Scandinavia to try and use a Hydrogen based model, but there is one fatal flaw in that system - energy is required to separate the H2 from the H2O in the first place. So a Hydrogen-based automobile fleet will only be feasible if there is an energy system to do the H2 de-coupling. i.e. there is no Hydrogen energy economy as such.
In Iceland, they use geothermal energy to accomplish this feat. However, if we use oil, it would be meaningless.

The bottom line is that if oil prices keep going up, food prices will go up with it, regardless. If people are serious about Bio-Diesel, they had better figure out a way of supplying the demand without resorting to food crops.

The other bad news in all of this is that the re-shuffling of the deck chairs in a world after the era of cheap crude oil is underway. A lot of lives are going to fall astray, and we can expect a lot more refugees and collapsed states in the years to come. If people have a bright idea about how to change our energy source for our civilisation, now would be a good time to step forwards with it.