Global Food Crisis

The world may be at the onset of the largest food shortage since the 1970's. The poorest people, including the one billion around the world earning less than $1 a day, will likely be the hardest hit in coming years. Some direct consequences of food shortages have already come about, including starvation-related rioting in Haiti and runs on grain supplies in the United States. (Some large chains, including Costco, are limiting customer purchases on staples such as rice.)

The United Nations has called the coming shortages a "silent tsunami" and believes they could affect as many as 100 million.

Major Causes

A recent Washington Post series about the crisis claims it stems from a "brutal convergence of trends," many of them interrelated. The largest single cause of increased hunger is a sharp rise in food prices, linked in several ways to energy policy around the world. Because fuel prices have skyrocketed, it costs more to transport food, which causes the price to rise.

Additionally, many reserves of food products like corn, which once would have been entered the world market, are now set aside for alternative fuel technology, including ethanol. Supply decreases while demand increases (because of basic population growth as well as increased demand from developing countries like India and China), and thus the price goes up.

Recent harvests have seen diminishing returns as well, which may or may not be a function of global climate change.

Worldwide Reactions

The United Nations has compared the crisis to the 2004 tsunami that hit Sri Lanka and has asked for the same kind of generous outpouring of support from wealthy nations that it received then.

Starving citizens, many of them subsisting on a mixture of oil and dirt known as "mud biscuits," rioted in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in early April of 2008, causing five deaths and hundreds of injuries. Similar, if more contained, riots have also occurred in India, Mexico and Yemen. Some analysts have suggested that these incidents may be a preview of more widespread unrest around the world in coming years if solutions to massive hunger are not devised.

Some countries, such as China, have banned exports of any basic, precious commodity. Other nations, such as Egypt and The Philippines, are directly subsidizing the production and distribution of bread to their citizenry.