4um: Food riots rock Yemen

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Title: Food riots rock Yemen
Source: [None]
URL Source: http://www.inteldaily.com/?c=148&a=5876
Published: Apr 4, 2008
Author: By Bill Weinberg
Post Date: 2008-04-04 20:53:33 by DeaconBenjamin
Keywords: None
Views: 485
Comments: 17

Tanks have been deployed in parts of southern Yemen after a fifth day of angry protests by thousands of mostly young people. Youth are blocking roads and burning tires, and up to 100 have been arrested. In al-Dalea, two police station were torched, and military vehicles burned, while riot police fired into the air and used tanks against street barricades. In response, armed protesters threw up roadblocks on the main road between the capital, Sanaa, and the port of Aden, halting traffic.
The unrest started in the Radfan region of al-Dalea province March 30 and spread the next day to the province of Lahj. President Ali Abdullah Saleh called an emergency meeting of the National Defense Council on April 3. Al-Dalea residents report that one of at least 14 people wounded had died. The official Saba news agency said April 2 there were no fatalities.
Rising food prices helped trigger the protests. The price of wheat has doubled since February, while rice and vegetable oil have gone up 20%. Disaffection in southern Yemen has been long-standing following the civil war of 1994, in which the south lost its independence. Southerners say a government amnesty granting former southern soldiers re-admission to the army has not been fulfilled, and that they are kept out of government jobs
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#1. To: All (#0)
Riots prompt Ivory Coast tax cuts
ABIDJAN, April 03 -- Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo has cancelled custom duties after a second day of violent protests against rising food costs.
Mr Gbagbo also cut taxes on basic household products, saying he was sensitive to people`s concerns.
But he added that increases in food prices were a world-wide problem.
One person was killed and at least 10 others injured on Tuesday as security forces dispersed demonstrations across the economic capital, Abidjan.
Anti-riot police fired in the air and used tear gas in an attempt to disperse predominantly female demonstrators who had set up barricades, burned tyres and closed major roads.
The protests were the latest in a series of similar demonstrations throughout the world against rising food prices, says a journalist working there.
Violent demonstrations against the rising cost of living have been staged in several West African countries, including Cameroon, Burkina Faso and Senegal.
The protests are linked to the high price of oil, the growing demand for bio-fuels and the expanding economies of Asia and Latin America, our correspondent says.
They come as the head of the World Food Programme warned rising food prices had helped create a "perfect storm", leaving more people hungry than ever before.
"The cost of our food has doubled in just the last nine months," said WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran. "We`re very concerned about our operations."
Speaking to the joint African Union and Economic Commission for Africa conference in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, Ms Sheeran said the world was also confronting "a new face of hunger".
"We are seeing more urban hunger than ever before," she said.
"Often we are seeing food on the shelves but people being unable to afford it."

DeaconBenjamin posted on 2008-04-04 22:48:45 ET Reply Untrace Trace Private Reply
#2. To: All (#1)
Three Haitians killed in protests as U.N. peacekeepers quell riot over food prices
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP): At least three Haitians were killed and 25 others injured amid food riots and clashes with U.N. peacekeepers in southern Haiti on Friday, a mission spokeswoman and Haitian radio said.
A young man was shot in the head and killed Friday morning. It was not immediately clear who shot him, although protesters blamed U.N. troops for the death.
U.N. soldiers fired back because they were fired upon, said U.N. spokeswoman Sophie Boutaud de la Combe. She said the mission has opened an investigation into the death but declined to provide any other details, citing a lack of information.
At least two other people were found dead in other parts of Les Cayes where rioting occurred on Friday, Radio Kiskeya reported. It was not clear how they died. Boutaud said the U.N. mission was not aware of those deaths.
Nine people were treated for bullet wounds and four others were arrested, Boutaud said. A U.N. soldier was slightly injured.
Thousands of Haitians blocked roads and looted stores in the southern town of Les Cayes on a second day of protest against high food prices. They also burned cars and tore down the front gate of a U.N. base. Additional troops have been sent for reinforcement, Boutaud said.
Several demonstrators have chanted in support of Guy Philippe, a fugitive rebel leader with a pending U.S. federal drug trafficking charge. Agents recently raided his home about 18 miles (30 kilometers) north of Les Cayes.
Food prices are rising worldwide but the problem hits hard in Haiti, where 80 percent of the population lives on less than US$2 (euro1.30) a day. Rice, beans, fruit and condensed milk have gone up 50 percent from last year, while the cost of pasta has doubled.
The food crisis threatens the country's fragile security, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a report this week.

DeaconBenjamin posted on 2008-04-04 22:50:58 ET Reply Untrace Trace Private Reply
#3. To: All (#2)
Desperate NKorea stops food rations to capital
Thu Apr 3, 12:27 AM ET
SEOUL (AFP) - North Korea's food shortage is so severe that even elite citizens in the capital have had state rations cut off, an aid group said Thursday.
South Korea's Good Friends, which works in the North, said Pyongyang announced a six-month moratorium on rations in the entire city from April.
Only favoured citizens are allowed to reside in the showpiece capital of the communist state, and they normally have better access to food than other areas.
Good Friends said in its newsletter that Pyongyang residents are having to survive by purchasing food with their own money or eking out any stockpiles.
It said the situation is even worse elsewhere, with rice prices soaring and farmers yet to prepare for the spring planting season due to a lack of rice seeds and fertiliser.
"Word is going around that people in Pyongyang and other cities may begin dying of hunger in April, which may lead to massive deaths by starvation in May," the group said.
Officials at South Korea's unification ministry, which handles North Korean affairs, could not immediately confirm the claims by the aid group.
North Korea's food shortage is so severe that even elite citizens in the capital have had state rations cut off, an aid group said Thursday. The UN's World Food Programme (WFP) had no information on whether rations had been suspended in the capital but said the overall situation is bad.
"We are very concerned about food security overall in North Korea this year because of floods last year," regional spokesman Paul Risley told AFP.
More food would have to be imported or greater help would be needed from the WFP, he said.
South Korea has yet to ship its annual humanitarian aid of rice and fertiliser to North Korea. No official request has come from Pyongyang amid worsening ties with the new conservative government in Seoul.
The Good Friends aid group quoted a resident in the eastern coastal city of Hamhung as saying farmers were desperate.
"Most needed is something to eat and fertiliser, and we should have got fertiliser and plastic material for greenhouses," he told the group.
"If we are not ready to plant seeds right now, we will not be able to farm this year. We don't know what bad things will happen if we don't farm."
Good Friends said last month that the North had suspended food rations in its main grain-producing area and reduced them significantly in most of the capital.
Seoul's Hyundai Economic Research Institute warned last month that soaring international grain prices would aggravate the acute food shortage and encourage more people to flee.
The North was hit by famine in the 1990s which killed hundreds of thousands. It has since heavily depended on international food aid to help feed its population.
Severe floods last August badly damaged farmland.
The WFP said in February that almost a quarter of the North's 23 million people suffer from a severe lack of food, with children, nursing and expectant mothers and the poor most at risk.

DeaconBenjamin posted on 2008-04-04 23:03:06 ET Reply Untrace Trace Private Reply
#4. To: All (#3)
Is India facing a food crisis?
Is India, the world's second most populous nation, facing a food crisis?
This question is vexing policy makers and analysts alike even as creeping inflation - around 7% now - is sending jitters through the Congress party-led ruling coalition.
To be sure, India has not yet experienced riots over rising food prices that have hit other countries like Zimbabwe or Argentina.
But what is worrying everybody is that the current rise in inflation is driven by high food prices.
In the capital, Delhi, milk costs 11% more than last year. Edible oil prices have climbed by a whopping 40% over the same period.
More crucially, rice prices have risen by 20% and prices of certain lentils by 18%. Rice and lentils comprise the staple diet for many Indians.
Tax on the poor
Inflation, economists say, is akin to a tax on the poor since food accounts for a relatively high proportion of their expenses.
All of which is bad news for ruling politicians because the poor in India vote in much larger numbers than the affluent.
Roughly one out of four Indians lives on less than $1 a day and three out of four earn $2 or less.
The rise in food prices, the government says, is an international phenomenon.
But this argument is unlikely to cut much ice with the people.
At the crux of the crisis is the tardy pace at which farm output has been growing in recent years.
The Indian economy has been growing rapidly at an average of 8.5% over the last five years.
This growth has been mainly confined to manufacturing industry and the burgeoning services sector.
Agriculture, on the other hand, has grown by barely 2.5% over the last five years and the trend rate of growth is even lower if the past decade and a half is considered.
Consequently, per capita output of cereals (wheat and rice) at present is more or less at the level that prevailed in the 1970s.
The problem acquires a serious dimension since farming provides livelihood to around 60% of India's 1.1 billion people even though farm produce comprises only 18% of the country's current gross domestic product (GDP).
On the other hand, the services sector - that includes the fast-growing computer software and business process outsourcing industries - constitutes over 55% of GDP with the remainder being taken up by industry.
The crisis in farms is exemplified by the state of the country's cereal stocks.
Vulnerable farmers
Six years ago, the stocks were at record levels.
Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen had said if all the bags of wheat and rice with the state-owned Food Corporation of India were placed end to end, they would go all the way to the moon and back.
Stocks have come down over the past three years because of low production and exports.
The problem has been compounded by the fact that whenever India has imported wheat in recent months, world prices of wheat have shot up.
There is also considerable resentment over the fact that the price of wheat that the government imports is often twice as high as the minimum price the government pay its own farmers for domestically grown wheat.
Indian farmers are particularly vulnerable since 60% per cent of the country's total cropped area is not irrigated.
They are also dependent on the four-month-long monsoon during which period 80% of the year's total rainfall takes place.
The crisis in agriculture has been manifest in the growing incidence of farmers taking their own lives.
At least 10,000 farmers have committed suicide each year over the last decade because of their inability of repay loans taken at usurious rates of interest from local moneylenders.
Populist moves
There has never been an acute shortage of food in India, not even during the infamous famine in Bengal in 1943 in which more than 1.5 million people are estimated to have died of starvation.
The problem then - and now - is entitlement or access to food at affordable prices.
Given the low purchasing power of India's poor, even a small increase in food prices contributes to a sharp fall in real incomes.
The current crisis in Indian agriculture is a consequence of many factors - low rise in farm productivity, unremunerative prices for cultivators, poor food storage facilities resulting in high levels of wastage.
Fragmentation of land holdings and a fall in public investments in rural areas, especially in irrigation facilities, are also to blame.
The government has announced a $15bn waiver of farmer loans and extended a jobs scheme - ensuring 100 days of work in a year entailing manual labour to every family demanding such work at the official minimum wage - to all over the country.
None of these populist initiatives will really work until India's rulers begin giving its ignored farms the importance they deserve.

DeaconBenjamin posted on 2008-04-04 23:10:56 ET Reply Untrace Trace Private Reply
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#5. To: All (#4)
Shikishima to raise bread prices again in May
Saturday 05th April, 06:19 AM JST
TOKYO —
Shikishima Baking Co, Japan’s second largest bread producer, said Friday that it will raise prices in May on 210 of its key 530 bread products. Following a price hike in December, the company will increase recommended retail prices by 7-11% for shipment starting May 16.
For another 140 items, Shikishima will leave prices unchanged but reduce the number of contents. The decision came as the government raised the prices of imported wheat sold to the private sector by 30% Tuesday.
The top Japanese producer, Yamazaki Baking Co, announced price hikes earlier this week and third-ranking Fuji Baking Group Co is considering following suit.

DeaconBenjamin posted on 2008-04-04 23:29:09 ET Reply Untrace Trace Private Reply
#17. To: All (#4)
CPI to hold protest rally in Orissa against price rise
5 Apr 2008
BHUBANESWAR: Hitting out at the Centre for sky-rocketing prices of essential commodities, CPI [Communist Party India] on Saturday announced its plans to hold demonstrations across Orissa on April 17 and 18 as part of its countrywide agitation demanding quick steps to contain inflation.
"Prices of essential commodities have been sharply rising during the last two years due to the Centre's economic policy. After the union budget for 2008-09, prices have increased by 20 per cent," CPI state Secretary Dibakar Nayak and Assistant Secretary Asish Kanungo said.
The public distribution system had collapsed and big traders and businessmen were indulging in rampant hoarding and black-marketing, they said.
The mechanism for food security was jeopardised as food grains production had recorded considerable slide due to faulty policies adopted by the UPA government, which was resorting to imports at high rates instead of paying remunerative prices to the farmers, Kanungo said.
CPI activists will hold demonstrations to demand immediate steps to control prices, fix prices of essential commodities, initiate action against hoarders and strengthen PDS, he said.
The CPI leaders also accused the BJD-BJP government in Orissa of being responsible for collapse of PDS network in the state.
Opposing the new National Mineral Policy, Nayak said it would promote multinational companies and allow them to plunder the country's rich mineral resources.
What is PDS?
Only BPL families to benefit from PDS shops
Only families below poverty line (BPL) having red cards would get essential commodities like levy sugar, kerosene oil, wheat and rice from public distribution system (PDS) shops.

DeaconBenjamin posted on 2008-04-05 10:39:03 ET Reply Untrace Trace Private Reply
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