What connects a farmer in North Dakota and a school girl in Lagos, Nigeria? It's not necessarily a $12.50 monthly donation to a child sponsorship organization. It's wheat - crossing continents as part of our globalized food system.Check out this NY Times.com article and accompanying slideshow about the global wheat trade. Food prices have been increasing rapidly in recent months. While this is good news for North Dakotan farmers who need to send their children to college, it's not so good news for the Nigerian families who purchase bread made from imported US grains to feed their families.
The article makes the link between global trends towards changing dietary patterns- the "Westernization of diets" to include more wheat products such as bread and pasta - and the price changes. What the article doesn't make as explicit is the implication of these rising food prices for human health - especially child nutrition.
Rising food prices and changing dietary patterns have very real implications for the mothers and children we are working with in urban Port-au-Prince. Three of the most popular infant foods prepared by Haitian moms today are "bread soup", "spaghetti soup" and "cracker soup" all made with imported wheat products rather than the more "traditional" black bean sauce or manioc flour porridge.As I work on my proposal, I am thinking about how to add an indicator of local food prices to my data collection to see if these global changes in food prices are affecting local prices and in turn the nutritional status of the babies in our clinic. Of course I will just be skimming the surface of this question - one of my friend's entire thesis is about food prices and child nutrition status in India.
UPDATE: The FAO and the World Bank have a good sites about rising global food prices. The graph on Wheat prices is from the WB.
2 comments:
Over 200 years of imperialism has allowed the europeans and the USA to get ahead by stepping on the backs of colonized nations. Now that they have their lead, they declare a new start and assert that everyone is equal while using their imperialist gained advantage to dump cheap goods and keep former colonies perpetually behind while robbing them of their resources by proxy through corrupt dictators.
Very true that colonialization continues through global economic structures that allow the powerful to play by their own rules at the expense of the powerless. Most of us walk around unaware of just how much our cheap food in the USA actually costs others half a world away.
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