Storm clouds with a silver lining
During 2008, a major global food crisis erupted, driving up the prices of staple cereals—maize, rice, and wheat-by several orders of magnitude over their 2005 levels. The prices of grain legumes, like beans, and livestock products rose steeply as well, though roots and tubers, including cassava, were somewhat less affected.

The crisis has imposed enormous hardship on the world’s poor, who spend nearly half of their income on food. In dozens of cities across the developing world, desperate consumers expressed their outrage through mass protests, providing leaders everywhere with a sobering lesson about the relationship between food security and social stability.

While seeming to come out of nowhere, the food crisis was in fact the predictable outcome of a perverse combination of long—term trends and recent developments. The key longer term trend pushing prices higher is burgeoning demand for agricultural products to serve competing purposes—food, feed, and fuel-driven to a great extent by population increase and rapid economic growth in developing countries.

By late 2008, food prices had retreated substantially as a result of good harvests and sharp declines in grain consumption, triggered by the global financial crisis. Even so, international prices remained, on average, about 17 % higher than 2 years before, while domestic prices in many developing countries declined more slowly, if at all.

If there is a silver lining to the food crisis, it is the quick reaction of leaders and governments, who were shaken from complacency after years of neglecting agricultural development. What remains to be seen is whether repeated calls for renewed commitment, such as the L’Aquila Joint Statement made in July 2009 by leaders of the world’s largest economies, translate into concerted action, including much stronger investment in research on tropical agriculture.

Among the most urgent challenges are to boost rates of growth in crop yields, halt the destruction of soil and other natural resources and confront the grim implications of climate change for agriculture.