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Food and Energy Crisis

Global food prices are skyrocketing along with soaring fuel costs - but are cartels, export curbs, science and subsidies offering a way out?

Is there a solution as the silent tsunami sweeps across the world?

Join Melissa Hyak and her guests as they explore the link between rising food and fuel costs, and their implications.

Panel members:

Dr Asanga Gunawansa
Assistant Professor, Department of Building, School of Design and Environment, National University of Singapore

The Problem
The recent skyrocketing cost of world food prices is stoked by rising fuel prices, unpredictable weather  and the ever growing demand for food from  countries such as India and China.

According to the World Bank price of rice has more than doubled during  the period March - April 2008. Further, the World Bank estimates that food prices have risen by 83 percent in the last three years alone.

Unrest over the food crisis has led to deaths in Cameroon and Haiti, and caused hungry textile workers to clash with police in Bangladesh.

According to Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary General, rising food costs threaten to cancel strides made toward the goal of cutting world poverty in half by 2015.

Joergen Oerstroem Moeller
Visiting Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Southeast Asian Studies

Over the last 200 years the world has lived in an era of plenty. There has been enough of food, raw materials, energy with low prices stimulating industrialization and energy intensive societies. Water has not been scarce except in a few places and clean environment was not included in economic calculations. All this turns around right now. We move into an era of scarcity. Food prices will go up with more people and more people having money to pay for better food, the growing economies need more raw materials, demand for energy is on a steep upward curve, water is beginning to be scarce in many areas including some traditional food export regions and clean environment is on the agenda under the name of global warming/climate change. Put on top of this that if we try to solve one of these problems others will aggravate. We can for example move for desalination, but that requires energy. What will it mean for solidarity inside our countries? The only way to manage the threat of environmental degradation is to devise new forms of international governance, how do we do that?

Assistant Professor Davin Chor
School of Economics, Singapore Management University

The current rise in world food and commodity prices has raised fears that the world may be facing an impending food and energy crisis, in which the poor in many developing countries will likely take the largest hit. A confluence of several forces has been driving this upward trend, namely the strong demand from fast-growing developing countries, coupled with tight supply conditions in world markets. Neither of these fundamental forces is likely to let up in the short term, which means that we cannot expect prices to recede anytime soon. For the longer-term outlook, technological advances are likely to hold the key to reversing these recent trends. It is crucial that the OECD countries take the lead now to channel R&D efforts towards improving agricultural productivity and inventing more fuel-efficient technologies, as well as to ensure the swift diffusion of any new best-practices that are developed.

Viewers' Comments

The sharp rise in oil and food prices is to me a harbinger of what life will be if and when climate change starts to impact us more.

The arable land and available water, the unpredictable rains and seasons: all these conditions and inputs for food are under pressure 
from climate change. Asia will feel this strongly given the low ratio of good land to the number of people in the region.

The high prices are not entirely negative. They can be a driving factor for us to look for efficiency and innovation, and to find ways to provide sufficient access to all, both rich and poor in our societies.

Assoc Prof Simon Tay
Chairman, Singapore Institute of International Affairs

Who is going to put a stop to OPEC's tyranny on the rest of the world? Saudi Arabia and its neighbours are extorting from the poorest and the most needy to build their mega cities and hubs for all sorts of reasons.  Non-OPEC governments are not doing enough to protect the interests of their people.  It's a global war and our ammunitions for survival are to become even more efficient with the generation and consumption of energy.

Gina Kong
South Korea

Karen Lee
Singapore

Indeed, the rising costs of fuel and food supply has hit many, and probably brings struggles to families which are already having difficulties coping.

Are governments doing enough to help the people? 

- If food supplies increase in cost and decrease in quantity, people will struggle to make ends meet. 

Do you think the governments (at least the neighbouring countries) should work together to devise a strategy in helping its people battling this food crisis?

If the impact of the food and energy crisis would be reflected on, it would be on the third world countries.  What will happen to the people in those countries, which are already depending on others?  What if the helping countries or organization decide to stop because of the unbearable costs?  

Anais Lee
Singapore

The environmental problem with food scarcity is that there are a lot of countries that have been growing cash crops for years now, and the lands are weak. Also in countries with not much financial advantage, they are unable to use GM foods to multiply their growing and the outcome of it. The environment is being damaged physically, but also due to global warming, there have been changes in the weather climate. Finally, the increase in temperature of the world is affecting food chains and reproduction cycles, which affects the productivity of foods. For example, there was a recent article about how there has been such a change in our planet due to the human footprint, that flowers no longer have a strong scent. This might seem unrelated but that means that bees have a much harder time to finding flowers and therefore cannot pollinate them, which creates a problem in the food cycle. This also affects the productivity and utility of our nature around us in contrast to what we do to it.

Maelle Meurzec
Singapore

Unfortunately global hunger has not received the same amount of celebrity campaigning and funding unlike Al Gore with “An Inconvenient Truth”, Leonardo Dicaprio’s “The 11 th Hour”, and to a certain extent, Bono with his Africa Aids concerts. Perhaps we need celebrities with funding clout to create grassroots demand for political willpower to tackle this most basic of human rights, the right to stay alive…

Lance Ng
Publisher, Renaissance Publishing

I would like to ask the panel, if the international community could take any legal action against OPEC, for its CARTEL like behavior in manipulating world oil prices.

Thank you

Dr Malitha N Wijesundara
Head - Department of Computer Systems & Networking
IT Services Division Senior Lecturer (Higher Grade)
Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology