The grocery bill

World food prices hit a record in January. Up for the seventh month in a row, the Food and Agriculture Oganisation Food Price Index on Thursday touched its highest since records began in 1990, and topped the peak of 2008. Forecasts show no easing in grains prices in 2011.

The sugar and coffee exporting countries of Central America are dependent on corn and wheat imports, and poverty levels are among the highest in the Americas. In Honduras, 70 percent of the population is poor, and 40 percent of people in rural areas of Guatemala and Nicaragua live in abject poverty, according to the United Nations. Guatemala is Central America's largest economy but deep inequalities have left around 45 percent of the population chronically malnourished. It is the only country in Latin America where the proportion of undernourished people increased between 1990 and 2007, even before the 2008 price spikes.

Honduran farmers lost nearly half their red bean crop in 2010 after bouts of extreme weather. Prices of beans, a staple of the Honduran diet, nearly tripled in the second half of 2010 until price controls were imposed. Even now they are up 75 percent, and more in some areas of the country.
"Before I would buy five pounds of beans every 10 days. Now I can only afford half that," Amada Lopez said at a central market in Tegucigalpa. "If this situation lasts much longer, we will have to eat one less meal a day."

"We have created an environment that allows pure speculation," FAO Director General Jacques Diouf told Reuters "Buying on the future markets ... buying only the contract and reselling it at higher prices without even seeing the commodities, that is what is not right."
He said the global market for agricultural commodities was "neither free nor fair."

The U.N. World Food Programme's executive director Josette Sheeran said the world was now in an era where it had to be very serious about food supply. "If people don't have enough to eat they only have three options: they can revolt, they can migrate or they can die."