The world is going into a period of food volatility and supply disruptions due in part to weather related problems and a backdrop of rising prices, the UN World Food Programme's (WFP) executive director said on Thursday. World food prices hit their highest in January since records began in 1990, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation said earlier.
Recent catastrophic weather around the globe could put yet more pressure on the cost of food, an issue that has already helped spark protests across the Middle East. "We are entering an era of food volatility and disruptions in supplies. This is a very serious business for the world," Josette Sheeran, executive director of the World Food Programme, told Reuters Insider TV.
Surging food prices have come back into the spotlight after they helped fuel the discontent that toppled Tunisia's president in January and have spilled over to Egypt and Jordan, raising expectations other countries in the region would secure grain stocks to reassure their populations.
"If people don't have enough to eat they only have three options: they can revolt, they can migrate or they can die. We need a better action plan," Sheeran said on the sidelines of a UN conference in London. "We think that we are in an era where we have to be very serious about food supply."
The WFP, brings food assistance to over 90 million people and sources most of its food from local countries in which it operates. "Right now there is a sense in the world that supply might be short," Sheeran said. "Our top priorities are exempting humanitarian food from export controls and ensuring that we could run a series of emergency stocks to help the most vulnerable people in the world."
Sheeran said parts of Africa and the developing world had seen good food harvests. "How deep are those supply gluts? how quickly will they go? and how deep will this rise in food prices be? These are things the world does not actually have a very good handle on although the predictions are we are in for an extremely tough year," she told Reuters separately.
Sheeran said drought in Somalia was worsening with livestock dying and people on the move looking for food. "We know that the food security situation is deteriorating. We know it is getting worse and we are alarmed by the situation." She said the WFP was short of $39 million in funding for Somalia and food supplies to the country would stop at the end of March unless the programme received more money. "We are already dealing with a population in deep humanitarian crisis," she said. "It can be quite destabilising for the region if that situation is not properly dealt with."
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