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PORT-AU-PRINCE - Haiti's Prime Minister has become the first political victim of rising food prices, being ousted yesterday in a no confidence vote after more than a week of violent demonstrations.
Just as President Rene Preval unveiled a plan to cut the price of rice by 15 per cent, 16 senators in the Upper House of Parliament voted unanimously to censure Prime Minister Jacques-Edouard Alexis over the crisis, costing him his job.
With the 10 senators in Alexis' own party absent, the legislators reproached the Prime Minister for failing to respond to the needs of Haiti's 8.5 million people, 80 per cent of whom live on less than two dollars a day.
Protests and riots left at least five people dead and 200 injured.
He said the plan would cut the cost of a 50kg bag of rice, which had doubled to US$70 ($88) within a week, by US$8.
The Haitian crisis is the most spectacular example of a worldwide disaster unfolding with frightening speed.
Millions have found rocketing prices of wheat, rice and cooking oil have left them facing the prospect of starvation.
In less than a year, the price of wheat has risen 130 per cent, soya by 87 per cent and rice by 74 per cent. According to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, there are only eight to 12 weeks of cereal stocks in the world, while grain supplies are at their lowest since the 1980s. For millions of families, the impact has been calamitous, as Robert Zoellick, the World Bank President, warned at this weekend's G7 meeting in Washington. Brandishing a bag of rice, he told startled delegates from the world's richest nations that the world was perched on the edge of catastrophe.
Swiftly rising prices have unleashed serious political unrest in many places, aside from Haiti.
In Dhaka at the weekend, 10,000 Bangladeshi textile workers clashed with police in a protest triggered by food costs that was quelled by baton charges and teargas. In Egypt, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Mozambique, Senegal and Cameroon there have been demonstrations, sometimes involving fatalities, as starving, desperate people have taken to the streets.
Economists and financiers point to a number of factors that have combined to create the current crisis.
One key issue highlighted at the G7 meeting was the decision by the US Government, made several years ago, to give domestic subsidies to its farmers so that they could grow corn that can then be fermented and distilled into ethanol, a biofuel which can be mixed with petrol. This policy helps limit US dependence on oil imports and also gives support to the nation's farmers. However, by taking over land - about eight million ha so far in the US - that would otherwise have been used to grow wheat and other food crops, US food production has dropped dramatically.
Prices of wheat, soya and other crops have been pushed up significantly as a result.
Other nations, including Argentina, Canada and some European countries, have adopted similar, but more restrained, biofuel policies.
The chief of staff in the United Nations trade and development division, Taffere Tesfachew, said decades of aid has been skewed to ambitious industrialisation programmes and the World Bank and others have failed to invest in the agricultural sector.
Zoellick said: "In the US and Europe over the last year we have been focusing on the prices of gasoline at the pumps. While many worry about filling their tanks, many others around the world are struggling to fill their stomachs."
Experts also point to climate change. As the levels of carbon dioxide rise in the atmosphere, meteorologists have warned that weather patterns are becoming increasingly disturbed. For several consecutive years, Australia - once a prime grower of wheat - has found its production ruined by drought, for example. Scarcity, particularly on Asia's grain markets, has then driven up prices even further.
There is also the growing wealth of China and its billion inhabitants. China has become increasingly industrialised and its middle classes have swelled in numbers.
One impact has been to trigger a doubling in meat consumption, particularly pork. As farmers have sought to feed more and more pigs, more and more grain has been bought by them. China has only 7 per cent of the world's arable land and that figure is shrinking as farmland has been ravaged by pollution and water shortages.
The net result has been to decrease domestic supplies of grain just as demand has started to boom. The impact has struck worst in the Third World, with grain prices soaring.
And finally there is the issue of vegetable oils. Soya and palm oils are a major source of calories in Asia. But flooding in Malaysia and a drought in Indonesia have limited supplies. These oils are now being sought as bio-diesel, which is used as a direct substitute for diesel in many countries. The impact has been all too familiar - a drop in supplies for the people of the Third World as prices have soared.
- OBSERVER, AFP
