with all these rising prices and people starving world wide over the next few years, will governments reduce there taxes to help people pay for food. Something will have to be done if they cut taxes on fuel, prices could come down. If there is no food then people will starve and there will be no one to pay the tax.
In a bid to stem panic, grain exports halted
KEVIN CARMICHAEL Tuesday, April 15, 2008
OTTAWA — Some of the world's biggest grain exporters barred their farmers from selling in global markets yesterday, exacerbating the food price crisis for poorer nations that import their food and highlighting the failure of governments to nurture stronger rules for agricultural trade.
Rice and corn prices soared to records on U.S. markets and wheat jumped to its highest in a week after Kazakhstan, the world's fifth-largest wheat exporter, and Indonesia, a major rice producer, became the latest nations to impose export bans. The price increases further inflated global food costs that already had surged 48 per cent since the end of 2006.
Business as usual is no longer an option,” Paris-based UNESCO says in a sweeping report on the world agriculture system that was three years in the making and released yesterday. “There is a recognition that the mounting crisis in food security is of a different complexity and potentially different magnitude than the one of the 1960s.”
U.S. President George W. Bush on Monday offered $200-million (U.S.) in emergency food aid, following a challenge by World Bank president Robert Zoellick on the weekend for donor nations to put “our money where our mouth is.”
Canada, too, plans to meet the call to help alleviate the pain of higher food prices on the world's poor, Beverly Oda, Minister of International Co-operation, said yesterday.
The complexity of the issue is slowing Canada's response.
Ms. Oda said her Conservative government is still unsure how much it will commit to the UN's call for food aid. Canada came through on emergency calls for food assistance in Afghanistan and Haiti earlier this year, Ms. Oda said.
