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How much should people in Britain worry about food security?  Here’s a starter for ten, taken from a recent Guardian article by Harriet Green:
For three years, my husband has talked about taking to the hills. About buying a smallholding on Exmoor where, with our four-year-old daughter, we can safely survive the coming storm - famine, pestilence [...]

Just back from ten gorgeous days on holiday in Cornwall - hence radio silence on the blogging front, and a much-needed break from frenetic activity on the food prices research front. 
(As I found, Cornwall is actually about the best place you could go to get some fresh perspective on food.  The Lost Gardens of Heligan have the [...]

Is the global economic situation having an impact on poppy eradication in Afghanistan? Afghan farmers are capitalising on soaring food costs by growing wheat instead of poppy crops, with the fall in heroin prices further fuelling the switch. This comes at a time when the price of a tonne of wheat in Afghanistan has almost [...]

I’m in Ukraine, land of black soil. Ukraine is already an important player in the global food crisis - it’s a big exporter of wheat, and one of the reasons wheat prices have spiked this year is because Ukraine had a particularly bad harvest last year. This year, it’s been a rainy March and April, [...]

I’m over in Geneva, where I’ve just been presenting to the IASC, which is composed of the heads of the world’s largest humanitarian agencies (including UN agencies like WFP, UNICEF, UNHCR, UNDP and the WHO; NGOs like Oxfam; and the Red Cross / Red Crescent movement).  Here’s my presentation, which uses food prices as a springboard from which [...]

Here’s a CNN interview I did at an unholy hour this morning on rising food prices.  Some of the cutaway footage they’ve spliced in is truly random.  One shot shows someone (in Africa, as far as we can tell) looking with concern at a crack in the wall of his hut.  Er…

On the front of yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, via John Robb - a sign of things to come, perhaps:

BOULDER, Colo. — When suburbanites look out their front doors, a lot of them want to see a lush green lawn. Kipp Nash wants to see vegetables, and not all of his neighbors are thrilled. “I’d rather see [...]

I’ve just published a new Chatham House paper on why food prices are rising and what it means for development: download it here.
One of the paper’s main arguments is that we need to make sure that the urgent doesn’t crowd out the essential in discussions of global food strategies: immediate action on humanitarian assistance needs to [...]

So far, most of the consensus on what to do about food prices is (as you might expect) strongly focused on the short term: measures like spending more cash on humanitarian aid, or building up social protection systems for the poorest and most at risk.  But one medium term measure also seems to command widespread [...]

Today, I gave the closing address at the RUSI conference, Protecting the Critical Infrastructure, in a session introduced by RUSI’s head of risk and resilience, Anthony McGee. From the introduction to the conference by RUSI’s head, Professor Michael Clarke:
Protecting the Critical National Infrastructure and ensuring the continuation of political, social and economic activity is vital [...]

A propos of David’s post, here’s what’s scaring me witless this weekend:
The Ug99 strain of the killer wheat fungus (stem rust), which recently infected wheat farms in western Iran, is a serious threat to global food security, agricultural scientists have warned. They have said the fungus may affect additional wheat-producing countries.
Mahmoud Solh, director-general of the [...]

A couple of weeks ago, Martin Wolf penned an FT op-ed proclaiming that the rescue of Bear Stearns “marked liberalisation’s limit”.  We should remember Friday March 14th 2008, he said, for it was “the day the dream of global free- market capitalism died”: 
For three decades we have moved towards market-driven financial systems. By its decision [...]

I’m a big fan of Foreign Policy editor Moises Naim - he was the first person to spot the potential for China’s Olympics to become a debacle, for instance - but I was left a bit cold by his LA Times article yesterday on the pressures that accompany the emergence of a truly global middle [...]

I normally leave  scarcity issues to the other, better-informed contributors to this blog, but this week’s food riots in Haiti have brought UN peacekeepers face-to-face with the effects of rising prices, so I can’t keep my head that deep in the sand.  UN officials can talk about little except food prices at the moment.  John Holmes, [...]

Alex and I have recently posted on the WFP’s appeal for more funds as the price of food continues to rise. Last week the price of rice began to shoot upwards sparking fears of a major rice shortage in Asia. According to experts global rice stocks are at their lowest since 1976. However some commentators [...]

As Charlie noted earlier this week, the World Food Programme has again called for half a billion extra dollars to cope with higher food and transport costs.  (The FT just doesn’t seem to tire of running this story: it first appeared on July 16 last year, and made the front page then as well.)
While no-one’s [...]

As the dollar, together with US equity and bond markets, continue an apparently inexorable slide downards, everyone’s been piling into safety - and especially into commodities.  But as David Roche comments, “With global equity market capitalisation almost 10 times the notional value of commodity derivatives, the rush to commodities by investors has been like squeezing [...]

Our friends at Avaaz have a new campaign on biofuels (full text below the fold).  Biofuels are already absorbing 20 per cent of the US corn crop, and that figure’s expected to rise to 32 per cent by 2016.  As Avaaz’s email puts it,
Each day, 820 million people in the developing world do not have [...]

As if to prove the point I made back in January about Ban being the ’scarcity SG’, given his interest in climate change and water scarcity, here’s a piece of his on food prices from the Washington Post today.  What he thinks needs to be done:
First, we must meet urgent humanitarian needs. This year, the [...]

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