Officials Warn of Worsening Food Crisis

WASHINGTON — The global food crisis has sparked riots in more than 30 countries and poses a threat to "peace and stability," the executive director of the United Nations World Food Program told a Senate committee Wednesday.

With more than 860 million people already going hungry worldwide, sharp price spikes threaten to put basic staples out of reach for another 100 million poor people this year alone, said UNWFP Director Josette Sheeran.

She likened the surging catastrophe to "a silent tsunami" washing over the world's poor and threatening to loose the moorings that hold poor nations together.

"Some say there are only seven meals between civilization and potential anarchy," Sheeran told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

"At the seventh meal lost, people are reduced to fending for their survival and the survival of their children," she said. "We are facing a challenge that is humanitarian as well as strategic."

Committee Chairman Joseph Biden, D-Del., echoed those concerns.

"People are worried, they're angry," said Biden. "From Haiti to Egypt to Bangladesh, riots have broken out as people demand the right for affordable food."

World food prices jumped 43 percent last year and are on track to eclipse that in 2008. It's even worse for many staples of the developing world diet: wheat prices are up 146 percent over just the past year. A ton of rice fetched $400 on the world market last winter; by April the cost had risen nearly threefold.

Economists blame soaring prices for oil and fertilizer; drought, cyclones and other weather disasters that have destroyed millions of acres of agricultural land in countries like Bangladesh, Myanmar and China; and the growing diversion of traditional food sources, especially corn, to make alcohol-based fuels.

Against that backdrop, food consumption is on the rise in emerging powerhouses like India and China, where hundreds of millions of people have risen to middle class status in a single generation.

"We've got the double whammy of increased demand and decreased supply hitting at the same time," said committee member Johnny Isakson, R-Ga.

Skyrocketing food prices have hit U.S. consumers as well, though prices overall rose just 4.5 percent last year.

"This whole food thing is ricocheting all over the United States," said Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio. "People in this country today, many of them are running out of their food stamps and are hungry."

For most Americans, however, the issue isn't life-threatening, as it can be for the estimated 1 billion people worldwide living on the equivalent of $2 a day or less.

"For some it is a painful pinch," said Sheeran. "For those living on less than a dollar, or even just 50 cents a day, it is a catastrophe."

President Bush has asked Congress for $770 million in emergency food aid to help poor people overseas. If approved, it would bring U.S. food assistance abroad to $2.3 billion this year — about as much as will be contributed for this purpose by all other countries combined.

The money is being used to provide emergency food aid, as well as assistance to local farmers, distributors and marketers, said Henrietta Fore, director of U.S. foreign assistance and administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

"We will have to move on all fronts," Fore testified. "We will have to use all possible tools at hand."