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Don’t blame China and India for rising food costs…
If you’re worried about the escalating cost of groceries - a bill the Department of Agriculture predicts could rise by 5 percent this year - don’t blame China and India, a columnist writing for the China Daily argued on Friday.
While Chinese and Indians, who together make up more than a third of the world’s 6.6 billion people, are eating more as they get richer, “surely we can’t be blamed for soaring grain prices,” Ravi S. Narasimhan wrote for the state-run newspaper, which is controlled by China’s government.
To make his case, Narasimhan pointed out that “China is largely self-sufficient in grain production” while India exports rice (although it also imports wheat). Quoting data from the United Nations, he said that the percentage of the world’s total grain output consumed in China and India has fallen since 2006.
Most analysts say that while larger appetites in Asia - and a growing ability to afford grain-fed meat - has contributed to rising food prices, spiking demand for biofuels and higher transportation costs have been larger factors.
Last weekend, President Bush sparked anger in India when he suggested that the country’s economic rise is partly to blame for food price inflation.
Speaking to employees at a high-tech firm in St. Louis, Bush said that as Indians become richer they “start demanding better nutrition and better food, and so demand is high, and that causes the price to go up.”
A cartoon published in the Times of India newspapers on Tuesday lampooned the idea that Indians are to blame for rising food prices. The drawing showed overweight American tourists watching thin Indian men rummage for food in a trash heap. “No wonder we’re having food shortages back home in the States — these guys in India have started eating way too much,” they say, according to the Washington Post.
Narasimhan suggested that instead of “worrying about rising prosperity in China and India driving up food prices,” the world should focus on how it can help the poor survive as costs spike.
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