According to the FAO index, the basic commodities increased by more than 30% in one year. Combined with the economic effects of the health crisis, this inflation particularly threatens a third of the world’s population, already in food insecurity.
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World food prices have not been so up for ten years. The announcement, in early November, by the World Organization for Agriculture and Food (FAO), that its Monthly food price measurement index had reached its highest level since July 2011, has made the effect of a bomb. In twelve months, this indicator, which aggregates prices on international markets of several basic commodities (cereals, sugar, meat, dairy products …), climbed by more than 30%. What to be afraid of a prolonged economic and food crisis, while the world has still not finished with the Pandemic of Covid-19 and that several countries are putting in place restrictions.
This increase in prices is part of an already worrying panorama where nearly one in ten suffers from hunger, and a third of the world’s population is in food insecurity, that is to say. Does not regularly access an adequate diet.
In addition to the loss of jobs and revenue related to COVID-19, food inflation is thus added an ingredient to the explosive cocktail of hunger. “The LEDs are red, we are in a critical situation because the rise in hunger is very clear, food insecurity is present at both north and south, and we have a very fragile and unfunded rural population By the CVIV-19 response plans. This is likely to have a crisis in the crisis, “worries Valentin Brochard, an advocacy officer at CCFD-Earth Solidaire.
Several factors explain the current outbreak of prices: it is first of all the reflection of the continued increase in the price of energy since 2020, which confirms a FAO analysis which shows that this increase follows the same trend as the fertilizer costs, pesticides and energy. It also marries two long-term heavy trends: the multiplication of climatic hazards due to warming (droughts, floods …) and the development of agrofuels, which entails a competition between agri-food and energy products in the use of arable land.
“A crisis of agri-food sectors”
For each raw material, independent factors also contribute to the evolutions: wheat (whose ton has traded from mid-November to a historically high level of nearly 300 euros) has suffered in 2021, of bad Harvest in North America. World production of palm oil is particularly low, particularly because of a labor shortage in Malaysia; The course of vegetable oils has thus taken 9.6% between September and October. The production of sugar cane, for its part, makes the costs of important frozen in July in Brazil, the world’s largest exporter. But the conjunction of all these factors makes the situation particularly critical. “Each of these crops sees its prices climb for clean reasons, but it is very worrying that they are all up at the same time,” says Abdolza Abbassian, economist at FAO.
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