By Charlie Gillis, Macleans Magazine, February 27, 2008

"Šfood policy is shaping up to be one of the 21st century's political battlegroundsŠ"

After five years of watching the cycle of feast and famine in West Africa, Margie Morard had some clearly formed ideas about what drives food prices in her part of the world. War, floods, droughts — these are the things that used to drive the cost of bread in Freetown or Timbuktu, says the representative for British Oxfam, who monitors food security in 10 countries lying southwest of the Sahara Desert. That and myopia. In sub-Saharan Africa, boom harvests tend to result in cash-hungry farmers flooding street markets with cheap corn and rice, while lean years so brokers ruthlessly hoard grain in anticipation of a big payday. The extremes can produce heartbreaking scenes of deprivation, says Morard; widespread begging, gaunt children with distended stomachs, families on the move in search of food. But at least they tend to be predictable.

Then last summer, a dynamic took hold that neither fickle weather nor the greed of cynical middlemen could adequately explain. In the dust-blown streets of Mauritania, the cost of a bag of wheat flour doubled within a few short weeks. In Niger, a country already riven by poverty and rebellion, the price of staples like corn and soya sailed into the stratosphere, as they did in neighbouring Mali and Burkina Faso. Odd, because it hadn't been a particularly poor harvest year. And hunger quickly fermented into anger. By November, food riots were breaking out in Nouakchott, the Mauritanian capital, as residents found themselves priced out of basic supplies. "This is putting people in a very tight bind," said Morard from her office in Dakar, another city that saw street protests, also over food, in November. "It's affecting all of West Africa."

West Africa, it turns out, and the rest of the world. With the global supply of cereal grains falling to 40-year lows, and with consumption trending ever upward, the earth's supply of food is suddenly under pressures unknown in half a century. Two weeks ago, wheat prices hit an all-time high of US$18.53 a bushel, while corn, driven in part by demand from the biofuel industry, climbed to $5.34 a bushel, more than double the average price before 2007. The political repercussions have been swift, and in some cases violent. In Mexico, about 70,000 people hit the streets to protest the doubling and tripling price of tortillas. Chinese officials are warning that rising rice and corn prices could lead to civil unrest in rural areas. Even the food-rich West is starting to feel the pinch. In September, rising past prices, a direct function of the soaring value of wheat, sent Italians flooding city squares in Rome, Milan and Palermo to demonstrate. In the United States, the skyrocketing cost of chicken and cattle feed is hitting the pocketbooks of consumers at all points of the economic spectrum. Milk, eggs and filet mignon are all going up. So is Kraft DinnerŠŠ.

To read the complete article, go to Macleans Magazine website: http://www.macleans.ca/canada/national/article.jsp?content=20080227_59852_59852.

Charlie Gillis is a native of the Shuswap area of Interior British Columbia, Canada, and a Ryerson graduate. He writes for some of Canada's top news publications, and was the winner of several gold and silver awards at the 2007 National Magazine Awards.