Food Costs at Record High

Reuters – Feb 3, 2011 – World food prices hit a record high in January, the U.N. said, which is an issue that has already helped spark protests across the Middle East.

Up for the seventh month in a row, the closely watched U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization Food Price Index today touched its highest since records began in 1990, and topped the peak of 224.1 in June 2008, during the food crisis of 2007/08.

“The new figures clearly show that the upward pressure on world food prices is not abating. These high prices are likely to persist in the months to come,” FAO economist and grains expert, Abdolreza Abbassian, said.

Hammering home the point, the U.N. World Food Program’s Executive Director, Josette Sheeran, said “We are entering an era of food volatility and disruptions in supplies. This is a very serious business for the world,”

Surging food prices have come back into the spotlight after they helped fuel the discontent that toppled Tunisia’s president in January and have spilled over to Egypt and Jordan, raising expectations other countries in the region would secure grain stocks to reassure their populations.

World Bank President Robert Zoellick urged global leaders to “put food first” and wake up to the need to curb increased price volatility. “We are going to be facing a broader trend of increasing commodity prices, including food commodity prices,” he said.

In the run-up to the 2007/2008 food price crisis, the World Bank estimated that some 870 million people in developing countries were hungry or malnourished. The FAO estimates that number has increased to 925 million.

On a day of bloody confrontation in Egypt, where protesters are demanding an end to the 30-year rule of Hosni Mubarak, the WFP’s Sheeran said the world was now in an era where it had to be very serious about food supply.

“If people don’t have enough to eat they only have three options: they can revolt, they can migrate, or they can die. We need a better action plan,” she said.

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