Rising food prices are a reality you've likely seen for yourself on supermarket shelves. But in the US, we're sheltered from many of the wildly swinging food prices and food shortages. More than political fodder for reelection campaigns, NPR suggests that food issues run much deeper and influence seemingly unrelated problems around the world.
NPR's Terry Gross interviewed environmentalist Lester Brown who wrote an article on the impact of food on global politics. He explained,
"If you're in Pakistan, and you go to the local market to buy wheat to hand-grind into flour to make chapati, and the price of wheat doubles, the price of your chapati basically doubles," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "They're not insulated from the doubling or tripling of world grain prices the way that we [in the United States] are. ... And this is one of the factors feeding the unrest in the Arab world, North Africa and the Middle East."
• Read more: Food: The Hidden Driver of Global Politics at NPR
Related: USDA Expects Food Prices to Rise
(Images: Flickr user Frapestaartje licensed for use under Creative Commons)
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Yet so many in this country (and others) are hell-bent on policies which will result in less food production rather than more.
@ACharmer - we already produce enough food to feed the world - it's just unevenly distributed. Grain rots in storage in India while people in the outer provinces starve because there's no good way to transport it to them. And Americans throw away literal tons of perfectly good food every year while people in other nations go without.
What I think is unfair is that the US gives its farmers subsidies to produce "staple" crops like corn and wheat, but then prevents other nations from doing the same. So American food is artificially cheap (except vegetables and fruits, which are generally not subsidized) compared to other nations. So our four cent increase on breakfast cereal is nothing compared to doubling the cost of your daily bread.