Food security
Food security and food security (including food security or food security ) relate to the availability of food and access to food , especially staple foods . A household is considered to be “food secure” if its members do not starve or fear malnutrition . According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2013), around 842 million people worldwide suffer from chronic hunger due to extreme poverty , and for up to two billion people the diet is at least temporarily insecure.
Extreme price swings in food prices (as in 2008 and 2011) also endanger the food security of people in developing countries . In a study for the Hamburg GIGA Institute , Hans-Heinrich Bass came to the conclusion that the causes of the rising food prices are to be seen in structural changes in supply and demand on the world markets as well as in changes in the financial markets . The growth potential of the Green Revolution has largely been exhausted. The increasing competition for land with other crops also leads to lower growth rates in global grain production. The use of grain as fodder and as a raw material for agro-fuel, as well as the rise in oil prices until 2014, would also have contributed to a trend in food prices. On the basis of the trend towards rising raw material prices , more and more capital investors with index-oriented investment behavior appear on the commodity futures exchanges . With the deregulation of the financial markets, relevant financial market instruments were provided. The flood of liquidity and savings in high-income and emerging countries is motivating investors to use these instruments. They thus reinforced the upward trend in food prices and encouraged the emergence of price bubbles . The effects of global inflation on national and local food security in developing and emerging countries would be exacerbated by a falling external value of the domestic currency in relation to the US dollar, insufficient competition on the national grain market, low self- sufficiency and a high proportion of food expenditure consumer spending.
Since 2014/15, however, agricultural prices have also fallen significantly in the wake of the crisis in various emerging countries. The price of coffee fell by 34 percent within a year (January 2015 to January 2016), that for wheat by 14 percent, for soybeans by 10 percent, for corn by 6 percent, but also for other animal feed, futures contracts for cattle, etc. This is due, on the one hand, to increasing export efforts by the oil-exporting countries, which want to compensate for the losses from the drop in oil prices through agricultural exports, and, on the other hand, to falling demand from the new middle classes in many emerging countries and, finally, to falling freight rates .
See also
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Hans-Heinrich Bass : World food in crisis. In: GIGA Focus. No. 5, 2012 (PDF; 398 kB).
- ↑ coffee price. In: finanzen.net .