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Agricultural Markets and Food Riots: The European Union and Asia Compared

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Abstract

The current economic crisis is one of the most severe crises that the world has faced since at least the 1930s. The crisis started with financial sector and, then, affected the commodity sector. In 2008, the world’s attention was focused on the global food security. By mid-2009, commodity prices had dropped substantially, but, in late 2010, for the second time in 3 years, food prices (wheat, corn, sugar) began to soar and still remain at or above past trend levels. The consequences of this food crisis go far beyond economics. Achieving food security means not only ensuring that sufficient food is produced but that everyone has access to it. Experts were worried about food riots and now they are happening. High food prices and volatility have been among the main reasons for protests in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world. This chapter explores the pressures on food prices, identifies the decision that policy makers adopted in some selected Asian countries as consequence, with a specific focus on food aid, and tries to suggest some sustainable key actions for policy makers.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    According to Engel, as income rises, the proportion of income spent on food falls. Lower-income householders spent a greater proportion of their available income on food than middle-/higher-income households. As food prices increase, the percentage spent by lower-income households is expected to increase.

  2. 2.

    Patterns of food in the European Union (EU) and in Japan reflect the fact that a large part of the population is seniors.

  3. 3.

    Other restrictions are referring to water utilization.

  4. 4.

    Food insecurity is more pervasive than hunger. A person can be food insecure but not hungry. Undernutrition overlaps with food security because there are nonfood factors such as deficiency of or polluted water and poor health services. The food price rise had shown the incapacity of the world food system to support the most vulnerable, even if the increase and volatility of food prices appear less marked than those of the mid-1970s (Government Office for Science 2011).

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Correspondence to M. Bruna Zolin .

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Zolin, M.B. (2013). Agricultural Markets and Food Riots: The European Union and Asia Compared. In: Andreosso-O'Callaghan, B., Royall, F. (eds) Economic and Political Change in Asia and Europe. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4653-4_6

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