Surging food prices bite across Asia

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A billion people in Asia are seriously affected by the surging costs of daily staples such as rice and bread, the director general of the Asian Development Bank, Rajat Nag, has said. "This includes roughly about 600 million people who live on just under a dollar a day, which is the definition of poverty, and another 400 million who are just above that borderline," he said.

Globally, the World Bank last month estimated that 33 countries were threatened with political and social unrest because of the skyrocketing costs of food and energy. Across Asia, workers made a campaign against high food prices their May Day battle cry last Thursday in marches through cities including the capitals of Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand. While the demonstrations were mainly peaceful, concern is growing over the potential for political instability and unrest if high prices persist.

"Once people get hungry they start also getting quite desperate and take desperate measures," Damien Kingsbury of Australia's Deakin University told AFP. India's top farm scientist and architect of the 1960s "Green Revolution," Monkombu Sambasivan Swaminathan, has said India needs a second agricultural revolution to boost food supplies or face huge social turmoil.

Experts blame the high food prices on a confluence of factors, including increased demand from a changing diet in Asia, droughts, the rising use of crops for biofuels, and growing energy and fertiliser costs. In Australia, which usually ranks second after the United States as a global wheat exporter, several years of drought cut harvests to just 13 million tonnes last year from an average of 22 million tonnes.

So while consumers are struggling, Australian farmers are not getting rich on the backs of the poor, said National Farmers Federation chief executive Ben Fargher. "It's been the worst drought in our history and many, many farming families are under significant financial and emotional stress and it will take our communities a long time to recover," he said.

And even in a relatively prosperous country like Australia, people are feeling the squeeze in the supermarkets, prompting the government to launch an inquiry into how to stem rising grocery prices. Around the rest of the region, the impact varies from traumatic to minimal.

AFGHANISTAN

Millions of Afghans are finding it "problematic" to meet their basic food needs with prices of the staple, wheat, doubling in some areas over recent months, the World Food Programme has said. About 400 people demonstrated in eastern Afghanistan last month, blocking a key road linking the eastern town of Jalalabad to the capital Kabul and demanding the government step in to control prices at food markets.

BANGLADESH

One of the world's poorest nations, Bangladesh has been hit by a doubling in the price of the main staple, rice, in the past year and many low paid workers say they have been forced to make do on only one meal a day. Last month about 20,000 garment workers rioted near the capital Dhaka for higher wages to cover food prices.

CAMBODIA

Soaring rice prices have forced the World Food Programme to indefinitely suspend a programme supplying free breakfasts to 450,000 poor Cambodian schoolchildren.

CHINA

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao told a meeting of the State Council last month that high prices were the biggest problem in the domestic economy. "The inflation is led by food price rises, which especialy hurt the poor," said Ma Qing, a Beijing-based analyst with the CEB monitor group. "So the pressure (on maintaining social stability) is certainly quite large."

The finance ministry announced a special 100 percent duty on exports of fertilisers and the raw materials used to make them in order to ensure domestic supply over the ploughing season and "guarantee this year's grain harvest".

INDIA

A general strike against spiralling food prices paralysed Kolkata on April 21 as thousands of police were deployed across West Bengal state to stop protests turning violent. New Delhi has already slashed food duties and banned exports of lentils and other staples, and will not hesitate to further "sacrifice revenues to control prices," Finance Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram said.

INDONESIA

Anger over rising food prices was a focus for some 10,000 Indonesians who took to the streets of the capital Jakarta for Labour Day rallies. High prices for rice, cooking oil and soybeans helped drive Indonesia's annual inflation rate to 8.17 percent in March.

JAPAN

In resource-poor Japan, which relies on imports for 60 percent of its food, companies have hiked prices on everything from beer to beef, mayonnaise and "miso" paste made from fermented soy beans in recent months. Although Asia's largest economy has been struggling for years to end deflation, rising food and commodity prices have not been welcomed because of the pain they inflict on small businesses and low-income households in particular.

MALAYSIA

Anger over rising prices was a major factor in March elections which saw the ruling coalition lose a third of parliamentary seats and five states in its worst results in half a century.

NEPAL

Nepal last week banned the export of grains as prices soared. "There is a high possibility of food crisis in a poor country like ours where domestic production is not enough," said Hari Dahal, a spokesman at the ministry of agriculture.

NORTH KOREA

North Korea's food crisis has already seen some people starve to death in remote rural towns, according to an aid group which works in the impoverished communist nation, South Korea's Good Friends organisation. Prices of staple foods have almost tripled over the past year.

PAKISTAN

Analysts say public anger over food shortages, particularly wheat flour for the staple roti bread, was a factor in the defeat of President Pervez Musharraf's allies in elections in February.

SOUTH KOREA

Rising rice prices abroad have almost no impact on South Korea, which imports less than five percent of its annual consumption and heavily subsidises its rice farmers.

SINGAPORE

Singapore is the wealthiest economy in Southeast Asia but charities say inflation is driving more people to join queues for free meals. Consumer price inflation reached 6.6 percent in January-February, officials said.

TAIWAN

Taiwan is self-sufficient in rice so international prices have no impact. However, domestic rice prices hit a 26-year high earlier this year due to typhoons affecting the harvest.

THAILAND

In Thailand, export and domestic rice prices have risen about 50 percent in a month. Some farmers have taken to arming themselves and staking out their fields at night to protect their precious crop from rice thieves. In a phrase particularly chilling for Asia, the World Food Programme has described rising food prices as a "silent tsunami".

 

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