OF fish, chicken and vegetables are up,” our cook told the wife.
“Does that confirm this report?” I butted in, flagging the Asian Development Bank paper: “Global Food Price Inflation and Developing Asia.”v
“Wait until I add our grocery bill,” the wife replied.
“Hunger knows no friend but its feeder,” Aristophanes warned. Thus, Radyo Inquirer came on line to discuss ADB’s findings. “Food prices have become highly volatile,” the report asserts. “Asia’s food systems’ vulnerability to price shocks increased significantly.”
Interlinked causes include: bolting oil prices, low national priority for food security, natural calamities. (Think typhoon “Ondoy.”)
Food price spikes press-ganged over 44 million people into poverty in developing countries, the World Bank notes. “The stress is … on the most vulnerable,” WB Group president Robert Zoellick warns. “(They) spend more than half of their income on food.”
More will be affected. “About a third of the increase in global food prices gets transmitted to domestic food prices” here, ADB adds. “A 10-percent rise in domestic prices, in developing Asia, risks creating an additional 64.4 million poor people.”
Rep. Manny Pacquiao flays the Reproductive Health bill while Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago backs it. Whoever wins, the slow decline in fertility rates ensures the headcount around Filipino dinner tables will remain high.
Population this year will exceed 91.3 million, up from 48 million in 1980. Youngsters will predominate. Almost 57 percent are below the age of 20. In this “youth bulge,” many are jobless. The country must double the number of homes, schools, clinics and food just to stay put in this demographic treadmill.
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