Food Price Surge
April 4, 2008 in Asia/Pacific, Life
Remembered that last year when I worked as a businsess journalist, everytime I looked at the price of various commodities(including food), they never failed to surprise me. The price has been soaring like a rocket! But still, at that time they were more or less some of the figures to which I had to pay attention.
Until recently a vivid experience taught me how much the surge of food price could affect us. My mother just told me yesterday that rice (which Chinese could not ‘live’ without it!) has been out of stock in the supermarkets in Hong Kong! What!?
My mother explained to me that there was a recent rumor that ‘rice unrest’ in Thailand (a major rice exporter) may cut rice exports to Hong Kong. It possibly would double the price of rice at my home. That’s why the shopping rush for rice occured.
Meanwhile, the rice price in the Phililppines has already soared by 50% during the past 2 months. No wonder why people believe the rumor that the same may soon happen in Hong Kong. The time when I back to Hong Kong, I could not imagine how much more should I pay for the food than before my coming to Geneva.
But, the question is, where could you escape from the surge of food price? It seems that Geneva faces its own problems too. Just read a news report from Bloomberg, ‘Swiss Inflation accelerated more than expected in March to the fastest pace in more than 14 years as prices for energy and food climbed to records’.
How has the surge of food price affected you? You are most welcomed to share your stories with me.
The “shortage of rice” is indeed not only felt in HongKong but also here in our country – Philippines. It is so sad to think that we are growing our own rice yet there is still a rice shortage. The government even resulted to buying rice from Thailand.
It has been on the news for a while now that there is a panic buying of rice called NFA (which is cheaper compared to the other rice varieties) in some provinces in our country. We are still lucky here in the uplands because there are still sufficient rice supply in the market. But will this last? That I don’t know.
I totally agree with you that we never know exactly what would happen in the rice market when panic shopping sparked.
It seems that the fears of rice shortage has contiuned to grow when African countries joined Asian importers to secure supplies of rice in the market.
Some news reports said that unscruplous traders tried to stock up the rice in order to let the price continue to skyrocket. If that ‘s true. It’s really a great shame.
One funny thing I want to tell you though.
During the weekend, I have been to a supermarket in Geneva. Oh, It’s the first time I saw that different types of rice were on sale! I picked two packs into my shopping cart right away.