It is a pernicious gear that has been in motion for several weeks. While food prices have increased by 30 % in one year, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), export restrictions are multiplying everywhere in the world. About twenty countries have blocked around thirty basic products, which represents one fifth of the calories exchanged worldwide.
Latest initiative to date, that of India, which has just declared an embargo on its sales of wheat, causing strong tensions on a market already heckled since the start of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia , two countries which represented before the conflict nearly a third of world exports.
At the end of April, Indonesia had already significantly reduced its exports of palm oil, following the disturbances caused by the war in Ukraine on the sunflower market. Hungary and Serbia have imposed cereal restrictions, as is Kyrgyzistan and Kazakhstan. Argentina limits its exports of beef, Iran those of potatoes. This everyone is threatening the global food balance. Let it prosper is taking the risk of seeing the famines multiply.
The governments of these countries thus think they are securing their supplies, while protecting their population from the increase in world prices. In the short term, the solution has the merit of costing nothing on a budgetary level, unlike more expensive subsidy mechanisms.
an inflationary spiral
But this short -sighted strategy only brings together speculation. World exchanges are an essential component of food security. Restricping them exacerbates tensions, maintains an inflationary spiral, without solving the problems of these countries.
First, blocking exports on a product does not protect prices increases on other foodstuffs that are not produced in the country and which will have to be imported. In the logic of the sprinkler sprinkled, India, a month before making its decision on wheat, was the first to protest against the Indonesian initiative to limit its exports of palm oil. The reciprocity of exchanges is a fragile balance that does not support sprains.
Then it is not because a country blocks food at home that it will automatically be distributed to its poorest population. Protectionism does not make the logistics, storage and conservation obstacles that these countries already have difficult to overcome.
You have 56.36% of this article to read. The continuation is reserved for subscribers.