There was a brief window last week when every self-respecting news outlet in Australia was talking about an issue that concerns my wife and I greatly: food prices. For a short time it seemed that Australia was beginning to feel the impact of a crisis that has been knocking the poor parts of the world around for the last few years. In
a typical story we learned:
AUSTRALIANS have among the fastest-rising food prices of major developed nations, with OECD data showing costs have shot up 40 per cent in a decade.
The price rises have come a quarter faster than in Britain, twice as fast as in France and nearly three times the speed of German grocery price rises.
Similar stories emerged from
New Zealand.
Of course, in an inequitable world what constitutes a food crisis in Australia - a 40% increase in grocery prices in a decade - would barely register a blip in a less developed country. In some countries, the price of staple foods like rice has doubled in price in less than a year. I often wonder how this can happen while the price of rice on the Woolworths shelf stays more or less the same.
News stories don't last long, though, and talk of food prices - be they local or global - has again faded from our front pages and scrolling news bars. Fortunately we Aussies have
teh interwebs to keep us informed.
Because of food price hikes, displacement, drought, and myriad other factors, estimates say there are a billion hungry people in the world today. Meanwhile, the poor old World Food Program (WFP) is fighting an uphill battle to secure funding for its food aid programs. In some cases it has no option but to cut rations. It truly is a crisis.
This is a result of another crisis - how do we get so many of these bloody things at once? The global financial crisis has meant that, although they can bail out banks, many nations are finding that they cannot meet their funding commitments to bodies like the WFP. And so the WFP is reduced to making an
unprecedented appeal for public donations: it's asking a billion internet users to chip in and
help feed a billion people.
The WFP is essentially begging for alms on behalf of the poor - via Twitter hash tags and YouTube publicity videos. It's a tragedy. And here in Australia the best we can muster is some short-lived concern about how big our supermarket chains' profits are. Sometimes I despair. Do you?
