World Food Day is celebrated on October 16

Posted by Craig Clarke

on Oct 16, 2011

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations celebrates World Food Day each year

on 16 October, the day on which the Organization was founded in 1945.

Between 2005 and 2008, the world’s staple food prices soared to their highest levels in

30 years. During the last 18 months of that period, maize price increased by 74 percent while

that of rice almost tripled, climbing a whole 166 percent.

Food riots broke out in more than 20 countries. Editorialists decreed the end of cheap food.

But then, after peaking in June 2008, prices slumped again – falling 33 percent in six months –

largely as a vast financial and banking crisis threw the global economy into recession.

The downturn was short-lived, however. In 2010 grain prices shot up 50 percent and

continued to soar into 2011 before starting to dip somewhat in the second quarter of

2011. And at that point what would happen next was very much an open question.

Economists believed, however, that the kind of price roller-coasters experienced

since 2006 are likely to recur in the coming years. In other words food price

volatility – the technical term for the phenomenon – has probably come to stay.

That is not good news. Price swings, upswings in particular, represent a major threat

to food security in developing countries. Hardest-hit are the poor. According to the World

Bank, in 2010-2011 rising food costs pushed nearly 70 million people into extreme poverty.

FOOD PRICES – FROM CRISIS TO STABILITY” has been chosen as

this year’s World Food Day theme to shed some light on this trend and

what can be done to mitigate its impact on the most vulnerable.

At the level of net food importing countries, price spikes can hurt poor countries

by making it much more expensive for them to import food for their people.

In 2010 the world’s Low Income Food Deficit Countries (LIFDCs) spent a record

US$164 billion on food imports, representing a rise of 20 percent on the year before.