Brazil saves world from deeper food crisis, hunger
By Story Agencies, July 14, 2023In April and May of last year, the world faced one of the worst situations in global food supply.
The food price index of FAO that measures the price of most important food commodities reached the highest level ever.
Every time this event happens, food inflation hits mostly the poor populations, forcing changes in diets toward cheaper alternatives and moving part of population to a hunger situation.
Several factors explain the elevation of global prices, ranging from disruptions in food supply chains due to the pandemic, climate issues affecting yields, conflicts between important agricultural nations that interfered in global production, trade issues, transport availability, lack of containers, lower availability of chemicals, lack of fertilizers and others. Food demand also increased due to measures taken during the pandemic.
Looking at historical global supply and demand data from FAO/UN, it is important to highlight that the balance between supply and demand needs the supply side to bring every year around 30-40 million additional tons of grains, requiring better yields but also a new production area of around 6.5 million hectares, according to a recent study by the University of Illinois.
More grains (food) are needed since every year we have: a) more stomachs in the planet, b) stomachs get larger (eating more, unfortunately), c) stomachs move from rural areas to cities (urbanisation) changing what they want (consumption habits) and d) stomachs get richer and enter the consumption market.
The international market for bioenergy is also very demanding since several countries are approving regulations for higher blending of renewables in fossil fuels.
The most important examples are ethanol (growing in India, Thailand, France, South Africa and several other countries), biodiesel (new targets coming in Indonesia, Europe and others), renewable diesel from soybeans and other sources (strongly in demand in the US now), jet fuel represents a new and large market, renewable fuel for maritime transport and other demands needing further investments. – China Daily