This has been a bad year for food prices in the world's poorest countries. Whether their citizens eat wheat or rice, three calamities have caused grain supplies to dry up: Russia's invasion of Ukraine and its decision to abandon the Black Sea grain initiative; the El Niño weather phenomenon, which has traditionally caused poor harvests across the world; and Indian domestic politics.
Spooked by volatile foodgrain prices ahead of a general election next year, India's government has banned or taxed exports of most kinds of rice and wheat. While India is a large producer of wheat, it really dominates the rice market: its exports represent about 40% of the global rice trade.
Step by step, New Delhi has tightened a noose around the global rice market. Some varieties now face a 20% export duty, others are subject to a minimum export price, and still others cannot be exported at all.
Every rice eater in the wider world has felt the pinch. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates that rice prices were 28% higher in September this year than they were in 2022. Prices hit a 15-year high early that month.
The last time prices reached those levels, in the first quarter of 2008, it was also because of competitive export restrictions across the world, kicked off again by India. Then, too, an Indian government was worried about inflation ahead of a competitive general election.
India likes to present itself as a leader of the Global South, capable of an empathy for developing nations that stands in stark contrast to the West or China, which show little concern for the impact of their policies on poorer countries.
But, as the International Food Policy Research Institute has pointed out, it is not the West that will suffer as a result of, for example, the ban on the export of non-basmati rice. Of the 15 countries that imported more than 100,000 metric tons of such rice from India in 2022, nine are in sub-Saharan Africa: Kenya, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Guinea, Madagascar, Benin, Angola, Mozambique, and Togo. Food prices are driving up inflation across the region: In Nigeria, inflation now tops 25%, and in Ghana it's been over 40% for months.
If you keep food within your borders, you export insecurity and instability instead. During the last food grain crisis, in 2007-08, 14 countries in Africa saw food riots. Poverty rates may have increased by 3% to 5% in major food importers, setting back these countries' development by seven years, according to World Bank economists. Many claim persistently high prices sparked the Arab Spring a few years later.
India isn't the only country imposing ill-advised bans, restrictions, or export taxes. Vietnam, also a major exporter, has as well. Bloomberg News has noted similar measures in countries from Argentina to Pakistan to Turkey to China.
But India, given its dominance of the rice market, has a larger responsibility than others. Nevertheless, its government, terrified of voters punishing them for food inflation, has consistently chosen controls over transparent support for domestic consumers. That's what it did to the wheat market last year as well; it's also restricted exports of sugar, where it is the second-largest market player after Brazil. Sugar prices are the highest they have been in 12 years.
India’s economy will become carbon neutral by the year 2070, the country’s prime minster has announced at the COP26 climate crisis summit in Glasgow. The target date is two decades beyond what scientists say is needed to avert catastrophic climate impacts. India is the last of the world’s major carbon polluters to announce a net-zero target, with China saying it would reach that goal in 2060, and the United States and the European Union aiming for 2050.
China's carbon emissions are vast and growing, dwarfing those of other countries. Experts agree that without big reductions in China's emissions, the world cannot win the fight against climate change. In 2020, China's President Xi Jinping said his country would aim for its emissions to reach their highest point before 2030 and for carbon neutrality before 2060. His statement has now been confirmed as China's official position ahead of the COP26 global climate summit in Glasgow. But China has not said exactly how these goals will be achieved.
China's carbon emissions are vast and growing, dwarfing those of other countries. Experts agree that without big reductions in China's emissions, the world cannot win the fight against climate change. In 2020, China's President Xi Jinping said his country would aim for its emissions to reach their highest point before 2030 and for carbon neutrality before 2060. His statement has now been confirmed as China's official position ahead of the COP26 global climate summit in Glasgow. But China has not said exactly how these goals will be achieved.
A crucial U.N. conference heard calls on its first day for the world's major economies to keep their promises of financial help to address the climate crisis, while big polluters India and Brazil made new commitments to cut emissions. World leaders, environmental experts and activists all pleaded for decisive action to halt the global warming which threatens the future of the planet at the start of the two-week COP26 summit in the Scottish city of Glasgow on Monday. The task facing negotiators was made even more daunting by the failure of the Group of 20 major industrial nations to agree ambitious new commitments at the weekend.