Will global food riots come to American shores?

The Associated Press

Rice rationing at Costco in California.

Featured Topic | Posted 19 weeks 2 days ago

Will global food riots come to American shores?

Recent months have seen "food riots" around the world as short supplies and high prices have turned hunger into anger. Now Americans are getting to experience the shortages firsthand: Costco and Sam's Club this week announced they were rationing sales of rice to prevent some customers from hoarding the grain from others.

"There is no rice shortage in the US," David Coia, a spokesman for the industry's USA Rice Federation, told AFP. "What happened is because of perception of problems in the world market, a few people try to buy more rice than they usually do, and these two companies have decided they want all their customers to be able to purchase rice."

But with food shortages creating havoc internationally, can the United States avoid problems of its own?

Ben likes: Free markets are rare in starving nations

Steven Malanga/ Real Clear Markets

Political turmoil and the retreat of freedom have managed to make people hungry even in places where many previously were not. Heading the U.N.’s list of countries where people are most undernourished, for instance, is Zimbabwe. When the country became independent in 1980 it had, according to the Index of Economic Freedom, “extensive natural resources, a diversified economy, a well developed infrastructure, and an advanced financial sector,” as well as networks of productive farms. But the increasingly repressive regime of strongman Robert Mugabe has destroyed property rights, allowed favored government officials to seize control of farm lands, and been hostile to Western investment, in the process transforming the country “from the breadbasket of Africa into a starving, destitute tyranny,” according to the Index of Economic Freedom.

In many places, hunger is prevalent even though natural resources are plentiful. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where two-thirds of the country’s 62 million people are undernourished, citizens lived amid constant chaos after war broke out in the mid-1990s and the country became a battle ground for troops from eight nations in the so-called African World War, in which more than 5 million people died mostly from starvation and disease. Tragically but perhaps not surprisingly, despite abundant resources including copper, cobalt and diamonds, as well as “enormous agricultural potential” according to the United Nations, the DRC is one of the world’s poorest countries, where production of food has declined some 40 percent since war broke out.

Joel likes:The Saudi Arabia of food

The Washington Independent

The United States may have been a significant part of the problem -- with its annual $6 billion in subsidies to produce ethanol from corn. But the United States is also almost certain to be part of the solution because it is to food what Saudi Arabia is to oil: the swing producer that can most easily and swiftly increase the world’s food supply.

The United States remains the world’s breadbasket. It produces slightly more than 30 percent of the world’s wheat exports, about 70 percent of the world’s corn exports and close to 40 percent of its soybean exports. Food exports, at nearly $70 billion, are one of the biggest earners from foreign trade, well ahead of chemicals or general machinery or aircraft.

The flexibility of U.S. farmers to switch crops in response to market signals is the reason not to panic, despite grim news pictures of food riots in Haiti and Egypt and signs of panic in the Philippines.