MidnightWatcher's Blogspot

“When you can’t eat, nothing else matters.

And it is this side of the ‘Arab Spring’, the sweeping rise in food prices, which the international media appear to have underreported in their Middle East coverage this year. With the media’s focus on religion and politics, it is now almost forgotten that fear of hunger, perhaps more than unemployment and political oppression, brought people on to the streets in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Syria, to topple rulers. More importantly, the crippling cost of food is continuing to increase the inability of the Middle East’s substantial number of poor to feed themselves and their families.

Rising food prices, a chief source of the Middle East’s spreading misery, are reaching record levels. According to one report, grain prices alone were 71 percent higher worldwide in April than they were for the same month last year. In the United States, corn and wheat have “roughly doubled” the past 12 months. This food inflation has had serious consequences for the Middle East’s poor and for the destitute in other developing countries as well. Besides threatening the well-being of those already leading marginal existences, the price hikes have increased the number of poverty-stricken by millions.”  Read more.