Title:
High Food Prices, Revolutions, and the Future
Description: This is
a VOA Special English Agriculture Report.
See text below
Text:
Food prices are down from their record highs in
February of twenty-eleven. But prices are still
higher than they were a year ago. In a year of Arab
protests, high food prices helped fuel the anger
against oppression, corruption and poverty. Many
experts think the political fires in Egypt and other
countries started in the summer of twenty-ten in
Russia. Heat, drought and wildfires destroyed
one-third of Russia's winter wheat crop. World food
prices rose after Russia halted wheat exports. The
last time food prices jumped was in two thousand
eight. At that time, Egypt was also was among the
countries where food riots and demonstrations took
place.Ghiyath Nakshbendi is a professor in the
Department of International Business at American
University in Washington. He agrees that food prices
played a part in the Arab revolutions. "At the end
of the day, the most crucial reason for the Arab
Spring is basically economic. And so consequently
when a citizen cannot have enough money to purchase
food and feed his family, definitely that will
create a kind of upset with the system." Professor
Nakshbendi says an event like climate change can
affect food production in many countries. But in a
globally connected economy, even an event in one
country can be felt worldwide. Cornell University
economist Chris Barrett says another problem is that
gains in farm production have slowed. He says, "What
we are seeing right now is the bitter harvest of
very poor investments in agriculture research over
really the last twenty years." Shenggen Fan is head
of the International Food Policy Research Institute
in Washington. He says the return of high prices in
twenty-eleven offers some important lessons. If
investment in food production does not increase, he
says, then the world will continue to see high
prices, and price hikes will come more often. He
says food supplies are not growing enough to meet
the demand of seven billion people. The world is
expected to add two billion more by the middle of
the century. And people in emerging economies like
China are eating more meat, which requires more
animal feed. But in twenty-eleven, for the first
time, the United States used more maize, or corn,
for biofuels than for animal feed.The good news is
that high prices always encourage farmers to grow
more. A record harvest in twenty-eleven is helping
to ease food prices in many parts of the world, but
not all. For VOA Special English, I'm Alex
Villarreal.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
