World Bank and International Monetary Fund leaders spoke out yesterday on rising food prices.
World Bank president Robert Zoellick:
The president of the World Bank on Sunday urged immediate action to deal with mounting food prices that have caused hunger and deadly violence in several countries. Robert Zoellick said the international community has "to put our money where our mouth is" and act now to help hungry people. "It is as stark as that."
International Monetary Fund head Dominique Strauss-Kahn:
Dominique Strauss-Kahn said progress in recent years on development can be destroyed by rising food prices, which can lead to starvation and shake the stability of governments, even if they have nothing to do with the increase in food cost. "We are facing a huge problem," he said.
Strauss-Kahn had said Saturday that the problem could also create trade imbalances that would impact major advanced economies, "so it is not only a humanitarian question."
In remarks made over the weekend, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund heads said that the global crisis in food prices cause problems on three fronts.
On the humanitarian front, it increases problems with global hunger and malnutrition. "Thousands or hundreds of thousands" will starve, according to Strauss-Kahn, if the international community does not act to alleviate the problems.
On the security front, food crises threaten the stability of governments, especially in the developing world. The price of bread -- or other staples -- as I have remarked before, is something that brings down governments. In the Third World, where civil authority is already under stresses due to poverty and other factors, this is especially the case.
On the economic front in the developed world, the food crises threatens to strain an already tense situation where a credit crisis, problems with trade, inflation and other factors have unsteadied the globe's advanced economies.
Let's hope we can put some energy into this effort.
This is something that I have a really bad feeling about. Barack Obama's "bitterness" and Hillary Clinton's "lies" seem terribly insignificant when compared to this problem. We seem to have sustainability, climate change, peak oil and energy, and crises in global security and international finance all conspiring against a solution.
There isn't room for all of us to buy a rancho in Paraguay or a condo tower in Dubai and attempt to "ride out the storm" of 21st century problems in our own Noah's Ark.
We really are all in this one together.