A Full Plate Today, Uncertainty Tomorrow (WaPo)

[jpak]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/25/AR2008042503096.html

Our translator Sami al-Sayani took us through the crowded, narrow streets of old Sanaa this month, to the Bab al-Yemen market area, leading the way among stalls piled high with apples, bananas and stacks of egg crates. He was unflappable until we asked about the prices of flour and other foods. "The prices are too, too high for flour," he said, demonstrably upset. The retail price of bulk, milled flour in Yemen has skyrocketed 120 percent in less than a year.

It may surprise you that a 26-year-old guy knows the price of flour at all -- let alone that he can quote its rise from memory. But Sayani has a stake in the prices that his family pays for food. He and his brothers and sisters regularly pay into the family coffers to keep the extended family unit afloat. This sort of pooled purchasing power may be all that's keeping bread on the plate these days in many corners of the world. People in the developing world are rioting over food prices, leaving dozens dead in some cities, because there's simply little or no cushion in a poor family's finances to afford even a minor increase in the cost of its food.

The world is used to hearing about hunger in the context of Darfurian refugees or crop failures and famine in sub-Saharan Africa. But now we're facing something different. Large swaths of humanity can no longer be assured that the foods they're eating today will be available tomorrow at prices they can afford -- or available at all. This is not, in fact, as silent a tsunami as a World Food Program official suggested last week.

Sit down, as we do, with just about any family in the developing world, for whom eating traditional foods is still the norm, and get ready for a surprise: The family's shopper (usually a woman) can tell you within an ounce or two exactly how much of each foodstuff she needs to buy to feed her family. And she could, at least until recently, tell you within a few cents what each item should cost and the expected total bill. We've experienced this in dozens of places -- the third floor of a five-floor walkup in Cairo, a subdivided shack in the Philippines, rural China and Guatemala, a Papuan jungle, the Ecuadorian Andes and sub-Saharan Africa. Susana Mendoza, of Todos Santos de Cuchamaton in Guatemala, tallied up her large family's week's worth of food in a matter of minutes.

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[grasswire]

1. very interesting read, thanks (eom)