The price of rice has more than doubled in the last year causing great hardship to many of the world’s poorest people.
In the West, the cost of food is a very small part of our weekly outgoings and most of that cost is for processing, transport, packaging etc. When the price of the basic food ingredients such as wheat and barley goes up the effect is not usually too damaging.
By contrast, a large proportion of the world’s people were already spending up to 70% of their income on food so that a doubling of price makes their situation perilous to say the least.
The very worrying point is that these food shortages have not been caused by a sudden drop in production due to bad harvests, but by demand slowly overtaking supply. Last year consumption incresed by 0.9% to 424 million tonnes but production only increased by about 0.7%. The slow reduction in world stocks has now put the world’s poorest people in a very dangerous position because if we now had a series of poor harvests there would be widespread starvation. Unfortunatly, climate change increases the chance of this happening.
There have already been food riots in many countries and the people at most risk are those in countries that import much of their grain. When supplies are short, exporting countries quickly restrict exports to protect their own people and keep domestic prices down. There is already panic buying and hording but a bad harvest would make things much, much worse.
For immediate release For Further Information contact:
Leanne
Phone: 01430 410521
email: admin@peakfood.co.uk
Farmer grows LESS Food to stop Grandchildren starving to death!
Yorkshire farmer, John Gossop, is so concerned about his
grandchildren and their generation starving to death that he
has slashed the amount of vegetables grown on his farm so that
he has time to raise awareness that ¾ of the world’s
population could starve to death by 2025.
Mr Gossop, grandad to Anthony (14), Gemma (12), Sam (6) and
Abbie (2), set up the web site www.peakfood.co.uk and wrote
the book, Famine in the West, which has earned praise from
writer and broadcaster Jonathon Porritt and Farmers Weekly
legend, David Richardson. His homemade Youtube video is top
of the rankings when searching ‘food security.’
“It’s a start, but I’m still desperately concerned that most
people have no idea of the danger we face. We have allowed our
food production system to become totally dependent on oil and
gas which are not only finite, but their use is causing
climatic change so that yield sapping droughts and floods are
on the increase.
“By 2025, the world will have 8 billion people, but with
diminishing resources of energy, water, fertiliser and
farmland plus the negative effect of climate change, famine
looks inevitable unless action is taken, and we in the West
are more vulnerable then the people of Africa, Asia and South
America.
“The truly frightening thing is that severe food shortages
could be just around the corner. World food carry-over stocks
are already dangerously low, causing present price increases,
so that a series of poor harvests would cause panic buying,
hoarding and speculation which would quickly empty supermarket
shelves, adding to the sense of shortage.”
John believes that we need a massive carbon tax to replace all
other taxes in order to drive innovation quickly enough to
reduce greenhouse gas emissions and conserve oil supplies.
Further information on John, his book and his “Tax Carbon, not
Income” campaign is available at www.peakfood.co.uk
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