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Farmers fall prey to rice rustlers as price of staple crop rockets
Ian MacKinnon, Guardian
… [The rocketing price of rice has] spawned a new phenomenon: rice rustling. One night, one of Samniang’s neighbour’s fields was stripped as it was about to be harvested. Local police have now banned harvesting machines from the roads at night while on the northern plains farmers are camping in their fields, shotguns at the ready.
“I’ve never heard of it happening before, that people have stolen rice,” said Lung Choop, 68, who grows rice on his smallholding. “But it’s happening now because rice is so expensive. I guess I’ll have to guard my own distant fields when they’re ready.”
Across Asia the suddenly stratospheric rice prices have prompted countries to ban exports amid fears that shortages could provoke food riots.
(31 March 2008)
Hungry crowds spell trouble for world leaders
Tansa Musa, Reuters
“Is it not said ‘A hungry man is an angry man’?” commented Simon Nkwenti, head of a teachers’ union in Cameroon, after riots that killed dozens of people in the central African country.
It is a proverb world leaders might do well to bear in mind as their impoverished populations struggle with food costs driven ever higher by record oil prices, weather and speculators trading in local market places and on global futures exchanges.
Anger over high food and fuel costs has spawned a rash of violent unrest across the globe in the past six months.
(1 April 2008)
Long article.
Contributor DB writes:
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Tensions rise as world faces short rations
Russell Blinch and Brian Love, Reuters
Food prices are soaring, a wealthier Asia is demanding better food and farmers can’t keep up. In short, the world faces a food crisis and in some places it’s already boiling over.
Around the globe, people are protesting and governments are responding with often counterproductive controls on prices and exports — a new politics of scarcity in which ensuring food supplies is becoming a major challenge for the 21st century.
Plundered by severe weather in producing countries and by a boom in demand from fast-developing nations, the world’s wheat stocks are at 30-year lows. Grain prices have been on the rise for five years, ending decades of cheap food.
(30 March 2008)
Could high grain prices devastate prairie?
Sue Kirchhoff and Bruce Martin,
To the west of this town, which helped inspire Laura Ingalls Wilder’s classic book series that included “Little House on the Prairie,” the view opens to a vast, unbroken landscape that seems to roll on forever.
But this untamed vista is shrinking.
The United States’ open plains and prairies are threatened by soaring grain prices that have increased their value as cropland. Grain prices have been driven up by a seemingly insatiable worldwide appetite for food and by federal energy policies promoting corn-based ethanol that are working at cross-purposes with government programs designed to conserve open spaces.
As a result, landowners in South Dakota and across the Farm Belt are converting to cropland marginally productive acres that for decades – in some cases, centuries – have remained uncultivated because farming them wouldn’t have been profitable or because of their environmental value.
(1 April 2008)
