MUSIC: "Our World" theme
This week on "Our World" ... Why it's costing more to feed your family ... another benefit of breastfeeding ... and the challenge of recycling electronic products
SMITH: "They burn the plastics in order to get to the metals, which have value. And when they burn the plastics it's creating dioxin clouds, which are affecting the children in the communities. This is happening in China. It's happening in Asia. It's happening in Africa."
Those stories, a visit to the Body Farm (we'll explain), and more. I'm Art Chimes. Welcome to VOA's science and technology magazine, "Our World."
If you've been shopping for food lately, I don't have to tell you that prices are going through the roof. In some cases world prices have more than tripled in recent months.
ZIEGLER: "Going from, in December, a price of $300 a ton to just this week over $1,000 a ton.
Robert Zeigler of the International Rice Research Institute is talking about rice, a basic staple food across Asia, of course. Prices surged dramatically after China, Vietnam, and India curbed exports to ensure they had enough supplies for their own people.
Other food products have also seen alarming increases.
The U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization, the FAO, says wheat prices have doubled in Senegal. Bread prices doubled in Tajikistan. The cost of maize in Uganda rose 65 percent in just six months.
One reason: farmers are passing on their higher costs, particularly the rising cost of energy. Joachim von Braun heads the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington.
VON BRAUN: "Fertilizers become more and more unaffordable for the small farmers, who are at the center of a response to the world food crisis. And transport costs have become higher and higher, so the cost side of agriculture will keep food prices high, even if we make major efforts to increase production."
Other reasons for the runup in prices include natural causes like drought and pest outbreaks and speculation in the commodities market.
And as world oil prices hover around $120 a barrel, more food crops are ending up in fuel tanks. In the United States about one-quarter of the corn crop is now being used to make ethanol, which is blended with gasoline to make a motor fuel. Soybean farms are switching to corn, which drives up soy prices, and so on.
Analysts like Robert Zeigler of the Rice Research Institute are starting to assess the damage.
ZIEGLER: "Now what are the consequences of this? Well, there are some estimates that say that if present trends continue for very long, we can expect 100 million people to be pushed back into poverty."
And Joachim von Braun of the Food Policy Research Institute says that higher food prices today can cause long-term damage as people change their eating habits.
VON BRAUN: "The high food prices lead poor people to limit their food consumption and shift to even less balanced diets with harmful effects on health in the short and long run. The child [who] is not appropriately nourished under the age of three for a couple of months will be harmed for the rest of its life."
The three experts spoke in a telephone briefing organized by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, whose member research centers have some 8,000 scientists working on food issues.
Drought, as we mentioned, is one cause of the food crisis. According to the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, the amount of land affected by severe drought has doubled over the past 30 years alone. Many climate scientists say drought could be an effect of global warming, which means it could be getting worse. So plant scientists are trying to find ways to develop crops that will thrive with less water. VOA's Adam Phillips reports.
PHILLIPS: Over millennia, plants have evolved strategies to cope with the stress of prolonged dryness. For example, some lose their large, moisture-hungry lower leaves. This allows more water to go to the smaller, younger shoots, ensuring the survival of the plants, and the production of at least some seeds. But evolution is too slow for farmers who need to bring in a harvest. So Eduardo Blumwald, an Argentine cell biologist at the University of California at Davis, is helping to speed up the process.
BLUMWALD: "We have two objectives. One is to produce and create plants that are able to sustain adverse conditions like drought. But the second one is to have plants that can grow with less water. And we are doing both."