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Freer Trade Could Fill the World's Rice Bowl TWITTER LINKEDIN SIGN IN TO E-MAIL OR SAVE THIS PRINT REPRINTS SHARE By TYLER COWEN Published: April 27, 2008 RISING food prices mean hunger for millions and also political unrest, as has already been seen in Haiti, Egypt and Ivory Coast. Yes, more expensive energy and bad weather are partly at fault, but the real question is why adjustment hasn't been easier. A big problem is that the world doesn't have enough trade in foodstuffs. Enlarge This Image Alanah Torralba/European Pressphoto Agency Filipino port workers unload sacks of rice imported from Vietnam to be distributed by the National Food Authority. Related Times Topics: Rice Blogrunner: Reactions From Around the Web Managing Globalization: Can rice Farming Be Laissez-Faire? The damage that trade restrictions cause is probably most evident in the case of rice. Although rice is the major foodstuff for about half of the world, it is highly protected and regulated. Only about 5 to 7 percent of the world's rice production is traded across borders; that's unusually low for an agricultural commodity. So when the price goes up - indeed, many varieties of rice have roughly doubled in price since 2007 - this highly segmented market means that the trade in rice doesn't flow to the places of highest demand. Poor rice yields are not the major problem. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that global rice production increased by 1 percent last year and says that it is expected to increase 1.8 percent this year. That's not impressive, but it shouldn't cause starvation. The more telling figure is that over the next year, international trade in rice is expected to decline more than 3 percent, when it should be expanding. The decline is attributable mainly to recent restrictions on rice exports in rice-producing countries like India, Indonesia, Vietnam, China, Cambodia and Egypt. At first glance, this seems understandable, bec

"THEY live in stilted shacks built on a mud flat above piles of oyster shells, broken glass and rubbish, their nomadic days on the seas of South-east Asia gone forever. Liya Pramongkit, an elder and midwife of Thailand's largest group of Moken-speaking sea gypsies, saw her people on the small island of Koh Lao dying at the rate of one a week, many of them starving mothers and babies. "We have lost our traditional way of life as our children no longer hear the stories that have been handed down by our ancestors," Liya says, her deeply lined face showing the hardship the Moken have suffered since they were forced to leave their seafaring lives, where the only things that mattered were the tides, the fish, the storms, the moon and the sea spirits. "Before, when we lived and died on the sea, life was much better," she says. Advertisement More than three decades working in Bangkok's slums did not prepare Catholic priest Joe Maier for what he saw on Koh Lao when he made his first 30-minute boat ride here from the Thai fishing port of Ranong, in south-west Thailand, four years ago. "The people were literally starving to death, trapped between the modern world and the Moken world," Father Maier says. "I have never seen people as poor. "The women did not have milk in their breasts to feed their babies and everyone had [intestinal] worms ... there were no traditional values ... it was a matter of basic survival." For centuries, home for the Moken were hand-built boats called kabang which they plied through the Mergui Archipelago, where 800 islands are scattered along 400 kilometres of the coasts of Burma and Thailand, in the Andaman Sea. They lived on fish, molluscs, sandworms and oysters, accumulating little and living on land only during the monsoons. But massively depleted fishing stocks, the declaration of marine reserves and crackdowns on itinerant fishers in Burma forced them off their boats into an uncertain future where they are struggling to survive in a Th

"Most of Kenya's runners grow up dirt-poor. They see prize-winning runners buying farms, hotels and matatus, the omnipresent Kenyan jitneys. For these young men and women, running is the only means to escape poverty, Kipsang says."

"Savings accounts disappear as Bank of England prepares to cut rates"

"Floods and drought highlight summer of climate truth Published: 31/07/2012 at 01:46 AMNewspaper section: News For years, climate scientists have been warning the world that the heavy use of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas) threatens the world with human-induced climate change. The rising atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, a byproduct of burning fossil fuels, would warm the planet and change rainfall and storm patterns and raise sea levels. Now those changes are hitting in every direction, even as powerful corporate lobbies and media propagandists like Rupert Murdoch try to deny the truth. In recent weeks, the United States has entered its worst drought in modern times. The Midwest and the Plains states, the country's breadbasket, are baking under a massive heat wave, with more than half of the country under a drought emergency and little relief in sight. Halfway around the world, Beijing has been hit by the worst rains on record, with floods killing many people. Japan is similarly facing record-breaking torrential rains. Two of Africa's impoverished drylands _ the Horn of Africa in the East and the Sahel in the West _ have experienced devastating droughts and famines in the past two years: the rains never came, causing many thousands to perish, while millions face life-threatening hunger. Scientists have given a name to our era, the Anthropocene, a term built on ancient Greek roots to mean "the Human-dominated epoch" _ a new period of earth's history in which humanity has become the cause of global-scale environmental change. Humanity affects not only the earth's climate, but also ocean chemistry, the land and marine habitats of millions of species, the quality of air and water, and the cycles of water, nitrogen, phosphorus, and other essential components that underpin life on the planet. For many years, the risk of climate change was widely regarded as something far in the future, a risk perhaps facing our children or their children. That