As simple as that?
There was an interesting article by Leo Lewis in this weekend’s Times in which Lewis outlines how he reckons that a very simple agreement between the USA and Japan could be a massive step towards world food price stabilisation.
Lewis says that current World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules “[oblige] Tokyo to buy rice it does not need and that eventually rots in storage. The WTO rule, its many critics say, effectively turns millions of tonnes of high-grade American produce into feed for Japanese hogs and chickens.”
If Japan doesn’t want or need the US rice, you may ask, why then doesn’t it simply sell it to some of its neighbours?
Standing in the way of that, however, has been a rule that prevents Japan from re-exporting its reserves of US rice without permission from Washington, which has not been forthcoming until now because of the fear of domestic political repercussions from the US rice industry.
Washington’s Centre for Global Development (CGD) said an agreement “would prick the speculative bubble and the hoarding mentality that has sent rice prices into the stratosphere. [...] A sudden surge of unexpected supplies [would] reassure anxious countries and poor people around the world that there is indeed enough rice for everybody.”
The amount of rice being spoken of is said to be in the region of 1.5 million tonnes, the release of which, according to the CGD, could mean that “rice prices could halve by the end of the month.”
The present world rice crisis is mainly a ‘man made problem’ and not one created by nature or weather patterns although at the moment these are affecting world prices with a drought in Australia and the recent cyclone disaster in Burma which was set to export 600,000 tons of rice this coming season, which is now unlikely to happen.
May 20th, 2008 at 1:41 amThe two influencing factors in the world price and supply of grains is the WTO and people who invest in the ‘Futures Market’. Neither of these organizations care about people getting food to eat. A third factor is beginning to affect the world market which is rice hoarding by producing countries or individuals.
The major players who are hoarding rice are the same people who recently hoarded wheat driving up the world price. The panic leads to individuals buying more rice than is required for their immediate needs, which in turn leads to less money available for other foodstuffs.
The world needs a massive shake-up in its foods policies. The WTO should be taken out of the food equation which has done more damage than any other organization.
Investing in ‘Food Futures’ should be outlawed and done away with, and grain hoarders should be dealt with severely.
Under World Trade Organization requirements, under the Uruguay Round Agreement, Japan imports at least 770,000 tons of rice a year.
This is an example of an insane WTO policy which forces Japan to import rice when there is already an over production of its domestic rice.
Japan imports a substantial amount of medium-grain rice from the U.S. and long-grain rice from Thailand and Vietnam. Under WTO rules, the government cannot re-export the rice, except in relatively limited quantities as grant aid.
Food and agriculture are fundamental to all peoples, in terms of both production and availability of sufficient quantities of safe and healthy food, and as foundations of healthy communities, cultures and environments. All of these are being undermined by the increasing emphasis on neo-liberal economic policies promoted by leading political and economic powers, such as the United States (US) and the European Union (EU), and realized through global institutions, such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB).
Instead of securing food for the peoples of the world, these institutions have presided over a system that has prioritized export-oriented production, increased global hunger and malnutrition, and alienated millions from productive assets and resources such as land, water, fish, seeds, technology and know-how. Fundamental change to this global regime is urgently required.
The WTO should be confined to industrial products.
I remember when there was a shortage of Japanese rice. There was a regulation that a certain percentage of each bag of rice had to be imported. To comply, companies would place a small bag of foreign rice inside the bag of Japanese rice, and most people I knew just took them out and threw them away.
May 22nd, 2008 at 4:57 am