In the past year the price of food has risen sharply. Wheat has gone up by 130%, rice by 217%, corn by 125%, soybeans by 107%. Vegetables, fruits, meat, and dairy have become too expensive for most of the population of the world to buy. This has led to food riots in Haiti, followed by riots in Egypt, Mexico, Zimbabwe Bangladesh, Kenya as well as throughout Africa. The armed forces of the state were mobilized in many countries to shut down demonstrations and to guard food.

While it’s hard to isolate a singular cause that led to the food crisis, research shows that the problem is systematic and not a mere fluke, as the Bush administration and other policy makers would have us believe. Although droughts, and the rising demand of the new middle class in China and India contribute to the shortage, they do not explain the exponential rise in food prices that hurts primarily the global poor.

The problem is more fundamental: stemming from three decades of neoliberalism and free trade agreements, government subsidized agribusiness and low price dumping, the World Bank with its structural adjustment policies, economic speculations on food and oil prices, and the diversion of arable land to biofuel production.

Mainly the so-called "food crisis" | How Far is the US From Food Shortages and Food Riots? | The Global Food Crisis: How the Market Has Driven up Prices and Hunger | Stuffed and Starved, Democracy Now | Making a killing from hunger | Financial speculators reap profits from global hunger | Food Crisis: "The greatest demonstration of the historical failure of the capitalist model" | Manufacturing a Food Crisis, The Nation |