Title:
West Africans, Free Markets and the '08 Food Crisis
Description: This is
a VOA Special English Agriculture Report.
See text below
Text:
Suppose you eat rice every day.
But one day you go to the store and discover that
the price is more than you can pay. That happened to
millions of people two years ago at the height of
the world food crisis. Between April of two thousand
seven and March of two thousand eight
the price of rice doubled in
many places. Economists blamed the crisis on
different causes, including high energy costs,
bad weather and the use of food-crop lands for
biofuel production.
High food prices pushed more people in developing
countries into poverty and hunger. Some researchers
say people living in cities in
West Africa may have suffered most of
all.Geographers from three American colleges did a
study published in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences. William Moseley of Macalester
College in Minnesota led the study.
The team looked at thirty years' worth of
information on food security and agricultural policy
in Gambia, Ivory Coast and Mali. Most of the
research centered on rice, an important crop in
those three West African countries.
The researchers say Gambia and Ivory Coast suffered
more during the food crisis than Mali did. They say
this was because people in Gambia and Ivory Coast
had come to depend on imported rice. Local rice
production fell after the countries reduced farm
supports and import taxes under free market reforms.
That meant rice farmers were not only earning less
but facing greater competition
from imports. Then, when the food crisis hit, the
cost of foreign rice shot up. The researchers say
Mali suffered less because it depended less on
imported rice, in part because of geography. Mali is
not a coastal country with ports like Ivory Coast
and Gambia.
Laurence Becker from Oregon State University says
after gaining independence, African nations
tried to help farmers.
Governments provided low-cost seeds and fertilizers.
They built processing mills and roads
to market. And they protected
their markets with high tariffs on imported food.
But by the late nineteen seventies and the nineteen
eighties, those countries no longer had much money
to help farmers.
So they changed policies and tried another way to
improve agriculture. Governments and major lenders
like the World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund turned to free market policies. We will talk
more next week about how the researchers link that
change to the effects of the recent food crisis.
And that's the VOA Special English Agriculture
Report.
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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.
