Politics and Hunger

(Commentary and Analysis of the editorial Politics and Hunger)

According with this editorial, the sky-high prices on food are a threat to 100 million more people who are falling into poverty. Over the past year, the prices of grains, vegetable oil have nearly doubled and rice has jumped by about half. The causes of this are the high energy costs, drought in big agricultural producers and big demand by the rising middle class in China and India.

But, the main point of the person who wrote this editorial is the “misguided mandates and subsidies in the United States and Europe to produce energy from crops. This is playing a very important role in the soaring prices of crops.

I believe that this is the main reason of the prices that we now have for corn and other crops. The International Monetary Fund estimated that biofuels (mainly corn ethanol) accounted for almost half the growth in the demand for major food crops last year, about a third of this country’s corn crop will go to ethanol this year. At a summit meeting held in Rome last week, the Bush administration said that the ethanol is playing a very small role in rising food prices. The U.S. was not the only country in denying that biofuels have something to do with the high prices of food. Of course the wealthy nations will not speak about this issue, and they are not going to tell the truth about what is really happening.

The world’s economy is in crisis, the good times of surpluses are gone, and the economy is suffering. We are running out of oil and we don’t have any idea of what is going to happen. Our government along with other wealthy nations such as the European countries and Brazil are looking for alternative fuels.

A good candidate is ethanol, but if the world uses ethanol in the future as fuel. The price of corn and other grains are going to go sky-high and this is going create more poverty in the world. The government should worry about the food prices and the poverty of the world that we are going to have in the future more than the fuels that we are going to use.