The World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF)  have  warned that  poor regions that have so far not been hit by rising food prices, like sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean, to get ready to face them.
Food price volatility is here to stay, the World Bank cautioned, amid growing worries there could be another full-blown food crisis only three years after the last one. The last food price crisis quickly dissipated in 2008 as the world entered an economic recession and demand fell sharply. Now demand is picking up again alongside the global economic recovery driven by large emerging economies.
Chris Delgado, strategy and policy advisor in the World Bank’s agriculture and rural development department, emphasised that a rising middle class in emerging economies was more of a factor this time. “I don’t think there is any way to really ignore the role of rapid increase for consumer goods in the emerging and developing nations,” he said, noting that the poor spend more than 80 per cent of their total disposable income on basic foods. If prices rise, poor families have no alternative but to eat less.”
The growing market liquidity also plays a role in pushing up food prices, Chen Fengying, director of the Institute of World Economic Studies at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, noted. But Chen said the risk of a jump in speculative demand for grains has fallen significantly, in contrast with the situation in 2008, “because the international community has had early warnings and have instituted price controls to counter commodity speculation.”