Food crisis shakes every country & region

Tag: air dried cabbage

In the lakeside capital of the central African country of Burundi, 40-year-old Lucie Nahimana on Thursday fed her family of six "black flour," a low-quality cassava root that many here have resorted to eating because they can't afford anything else.

Thousands of miles away, in the port city of Tianjin, China, physician Ning Aimin scanned the shelves of her supermarket for yogurt, a food that was practically unheard-of here a decade ago but has become a favorite of many of China's newly affluent.

On a chilly highway outside Gualeguaychu, Argentina, 10 trucks carrying enough rice to feed 3 million people in one day sat stranded on the side of the road, casualties of a 100-day-long farm strike that's paralyzed that country's giant grain industry.

These three episodes, all on Thursday, are interconnecting pieces of what's emerged as one of the biggest challenges facing the planet: how to feed humanity in this age of skyrocketing food and energy prices.

The problem is a global one, in which a breakdown anywhere in the food chain sets dire consequences in motion and in which the root causes range from rising consumption in Asia to growing biofuel production in the United States and Europe to dwindling supplies of water in the Middle East.

"The world is running to keep up with demand," said Abdolreza Abbassian, a grain analyst with the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization. "Any interruption in the global picture affects supplies."