High Food Prices, Revolutions, and the Future

26 December 2011

A vendor exchanges money with a customer at a shop selling garlic, onions and potatoes at a wholesale market in Mumbai. India's food price index rose 8.76 percent in the year to April 16, government data showed.

This is the VOA Special English Agriculture Report.

Food prices are down from their record highs in February. But prices are still higher than they were a year ago. In a year of Arab protests, high food prices helped fuel the anger against oppression, corruption and poverty.

Many experts think the political fires that burned across North Africa and the Middle East started last year in the wheat fields of Russia. A combination of heat, drought and wildfires during the summer of twenty-ten destroyed one-third of Russia's winter wheat crop. World food prices rose after Russia halted wheat exports.

Shenggen Fan is head of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington. He links higher food prices to the uprisings in Egypt and other Arab countries.

SHENGGEN FAN: "Definitely, it is one of the factors that really caused the Arab Spring."

The last time food prices jumped was in two thousand eight. At that time, Egypt was also was among the countries where food riots and demonstrations took place.

Ghiyath Nakshbendi is a professor in the Department of International Business at American University in Washington. He agrees that food prices played a part in the Arab revolutions.