Lugar: Food shortages can recur frequently without trade and investment in ag productivity in the developing world

Senator Lugar, the Republican leader on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, made the following statement at the May 14 hearing on global food supply shortages:

The current crisis has developed from a complex web of factors. Expanding affluence in emerging economies like China and India has improved diets for hundreds of millions of people and led to increased global demand for food. Simultaneously, the highest oil prices on record have driven up food costs all along the farm-to-market chain.   The surge in oil prices has increased transportation, packaging, and fertilizer costs; and provided the impetus for developing alternative fuels, such as ethanol. We have also experienced droughts in some food exporting countries, expanded trade barriers, a weakening of the U.S. dollar, increased commodities speculation, and market-distorting subsidies.

These factors have come together to make the current food problem particularly acute. But we should be clear that food shortages are likely to recur frequently if the United States and the global community fail to open agricultural trade and invest in agricultural productivity in the developing world.

Read the full statement

Recent Energy Speeches:

• Jan. 4, 2008 Speech: Lugar's Answer to $100 per barrel Oil
• Dec. 18, 2007 Speech: U.S. Energy Security and the 2008 Presidential Election