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E-mail a friendYOUNG VOICES
Surfing the Silent Tsunami
Have you noticed how much more you've been paying for food at the grocery store lately? Last week the Prime Minister of England , Gordon Brown, hosted a “Food Summit” with the World Food Program. He is worried about the newest international disaster: pandemic world hunger. Luckily most of us have enough to eat, even if we're paying a lot more than we used to. But for many around the world, price increases have made the daily food staples too expensive to survive.
Josette Sheeran of the World Food Program calls this new and deadly trend the “silent tsunami,” connecting the recent starvation with the Asian starvation problem that arose from the tsunamis in 2004.
Unfortunately, mother nature is not to blame this time, rather it is well intentioned Westerners. According to Gordon Brown, biofuel is the number one cause of the food shortage. Western governments have been subsidizing biofuel programs at the same time as investments in this industry have rocketed. As a result, more farmers throughout the world are selling their corn, wheat, and other grains to ethanol companies instead of to the food markets in order to make more money.
The irony is that there is more corn being grown in the world today than before the push to produce biofuels. But fewer people are able to put food on the table.
Do you think it is worth it to produce biofuel if it means that we pay more for groceries and fewer people in third world and developing countries have access to food?