WASHINGTON (AFP)
The World Bank meets in Washington Sunday as rising food prices spark deadly unrest in developing countries, underscoring the urgency of getting food aid to desperate people.
Policymakers of the anti-poverty bank are due to discuss a massive, coordinated international plan to reduce hunger announced less than two weeks ago by the head of the bank, Robert Zoellick.
In recent months, rising food costs have lead to violent protests in Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Ethiopia, Madagascar, the Philippines, Indonesia and other countries in the past month.
The World Bank meeting comes against a backdrop of a mounting global financial crisis, a U.S. economy teetering on recession, high energy prices and currency market imbalances. Escalating inflation is complicating policymakers' efforts to revive stuttering economic growth.
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IMF warning The 185-nation bank's sister institution, the International Monetary Fund, issued a dire warning Saturday about the food crisis at their spring meetings in Washington.
"Food prices, if they go on like they are doing today ... the consequences will be terrible," IMF managing director Dominque Strauss-Kahn said.
"As we know, learning from the past, those kind of questions sometimes end in war," Strauss-Kahn told a news conference at the close of the IMF meeting.
If the world wanted to avoid "these terrible consequences," then rising prices had to be tackled. |
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Unrest Thirty-seven countries currently face food crises, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization.
Egypt has been rocked by a wave of protests against skyrocketing prices in recent weeks, particularly in the Nile Delta industrial centre of Mahalla el-Kobra, which saw two days of deadly riots.
Haiti's prime minister was ousted Saturday in a no-confidence vote after more than a week of violent demonstrations over rocketing food and fuel prices.
In Pakistan and Thailand, army troops have been deployed to avoid the seizure of food from fields and warehouses.
Skyrocketing prices on rice, wheat, corn and other staple foods like milk particularly hurt developing nations, where the bulk of income is spent on the bare necessities for survival.
Higher energy prices, too, are driving up the cost of food, as well as stoking broader inflation. |
