Food prices reach record high, By Caroline Henshaw, March 3, 2011, Wall Street Journal: “World food prices rose 2.2% in February from the previous month to a record peak, the United Nations’ food body said Thursday, as it warned that volatility in oil markets could push prices even higher. The Food and Agriculture Organization price index rose by 2.2%-the eighth consecutive rise since June-to an average of 236 points last month, the highest record in real and nominal terms since the agency started monitoring prices in 1990. Global cereal supplies are also expected to tighten sharply this year due low stock levels, the FAO said. The body raised its estimate for world cereal production in 2010 by eight million metric tons from its December estimate to 2.2 billion tons but said it expects that to be outpaced by an 18 million-ton increase in world consumption. But while the world isn’t yet facing a food crisis, the secretary of the FAO’s Intergovernmental Group on Grains, Abdolreza Abbassian, said the recent rise in Brent oil prices to above $120 a barrel could create the same potent mix of factors that pushed grain prices to record highs three years ago…”
Tag: Poor nations
UNICEF Report: State of the World’s Children 2011
- One billion people forgotten in fight against poverty, By Annie Kelly, February 25, 2011, The Guardian: “This year Unicef’s annual flagship State of the World’s Children report, released on Friday, focuses exclusively on adolescents. A recognition, says Unicef, of the increasingly urgent need to invest in the world’s 1.2 billion 10-19 year olds, an invisible generation who are nevertheless pivotal in global efforts to reach the UN millenium development goals targets by 2015. The report argues that adolescents are often marginalised in development budgets and programming, and that if this is not corrected then investment in global poverty, health, education and employment goals will be compromised. Many of the world’s teenagers were babies or young children when the MDGs were established in 2000. Since then, many of them will have been the direct beneficiaries of the significant global gains in child survival, primary education, access to safe water and sanitation…”
- Indian teen girls most ill-fed: UN, By Chetan Chauhan, February 25, 2011, Hindustan Times: “Indian adolescents girls are worse than even those in world’s poorest region — Sub-Saharan Africa – in terms of nutrition and empowerment whereas a majority of boys are at high risk because of their sexual activity, a new United Nations report on adolescents on Friday said. The report, ‘Adolescence an Age of Opportunity’, released three days before the union budget had found that 63 per cent of the Indian boys in the age group of 15-19 were engaged in high-risk sex with non-marital, non-cohabitating partner as compared to just one percent girls in the same age group. Still it was lowest in the developing world with the highest being in South Africa with 95 % boys and 99 % girls reporting high risk sex. The report found sexual activity among Asian children below the age of 15, including India, to be lowest in the world…”
UN Food Price Index
Rising global food prices squeeze the world’s poor, By Ben Arnoldy, February 10, 2011, Christian Science Monitor: “Amid the stalls of neatly stacked vegetables at this city’s Sarojini Market, Manju shops with her young granddaughter. Her bags have become lighter in recent months, as she’s cutting back on the basics. Food prices have risen sharply over the past year and Manju is even going with fewer onions, the ubiquitous ingredient that fills just about every Indian gravy dish. ‘The kids have stopped eating properly,’ she says. ‘They have lost the taste for food and are complaining.’ Families in many parts of the world – especially India, China, Mexico, Haiti, and Egypt, where food costs spiked in the past year – are making sacrifices and seeking alternatives. The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) food price index hit an all-time high in December. This sparked concern that high prices just prior to the global recession could reflect longer-term structural changes in supply and demand that will imperil the poor’s ability to eat…”