Source: WORLD FOOD DAY: Eating Less, Paying More
Despite wall-to-wall media coverage of the financial crisis rocking the U.S. and, increasingly, other financial systems around the world, a crisis with a larger scope is brewing with little attention.
Many people around the globe are feeling the burden of higher food and energy prices, found a new international poll of 26 countries released ahead of World Food Day Thursday.
The rising food prices, said the poll from the BBC World Service conducted by University of Maryland’s Programme on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) and the polling firm Globescan, were sometimes so acute as to affect people’s eating habits, especially in developing countries.
“The financial crisis is taking up a tremendous amount of coverage in the media right now, but what is going to affect a larger number of people around the world [are the crises of rising energy and food costs],” Clay Ramsay, the research director at PIPA, told IPS. “It’s important to see all these dimensions at once and not regard the financial crisis as the be-all and end-all of our problems.”
Ramsay told IPS that the first of these crises involved energy costs, which subsequently affected food costs because of the fuel and electricity needed for production, transportation, and storage.
“The financial crisis is the newest one — it’s the icing on a very bad-tasting cake,” Ramsay said. “All of these factors are going to interact, but the one that was the underlying one for many parts of the world was the increased energy costs. That has exacerbated the food crisis.”
With energy and food costs soaring of late, many perceive the increases as having a large effect on them, even leading some to cut down the amount of food they eat.
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