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    Food Prices Approach Record Highs, Threatening the World’s Poorest

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    The prices have climbed to their highest level since 2011, according to a U.N. index. It could cause social unrest “on a widespread scale,” one expert said.WASHINGTON — Food prices have skyrocketed globally because of disruptions in the global supply chain, adverse weather and rising energy prices, increases that are imposing a heavy burden on poorer people around the world and threatening to stoke social unrest.The increases have affected items as varied as grains, vegetable oils, butter, pasta, beef and coffee. They come as farmers around the globe face an array of challenges, including drought and ice storms that have ruined crops, rising prices for fertilizer and fuel, and pandemic-related labor shortages and supply chain disruptions that make it difficult to get products to market.A global index released on Thursday by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization showed food prices in January climbed to their highest level since 2011, when skyrocketing costs contributed to political uprisings in Egypt and Libya. The price of meat, dairy and cereals trended upward from December, while the price of oils reached the highest level since the index’s tracking began in 1990.Maurice Obstfeld, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics who was formerly chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, said that food price increases would strain incomes in poorer countries, especially in some parts of Latin America and Africa, where some people may spend up to 50 or 60 percent of their income on food.He said that it wasn’t “much of an exaggeration” to say the world was approaching a global food crisis, and that slower growth, high unemployment and stressed budgets from governments that have spent heavily to combat the pandemic had created “a perfect storm of adverse circumstances.”“There’s a lot of cause for worry about social unrest on a widespread scale,” he added.Even before the pandemic, global food prices had been trending upward as disease wiped out much of China’s pig herd and the U.S.-China trade war resulted in Chinese tariffs on American agricultural goods.But as the pandemic began in early 2020, the world experienced seismic shifts in demand for food. Restaurants, cafeterias and slaughterhouses shuttered, and more people switched to cooking and eating at home. Some American farmers who could not get their products into the hands of consumers were forced to dump milk in their fields and cull their herds.Two years later, global demand for food remains strong, but higher fuel prices and shipping costs, along with other supply chain bottlenecks like a shortage of truck drivers and shipping containers, continue to push up prices, said Christian Bogmans, an economist at the International Monetary Fund.Drought and bad weather in major agricultural producing countries like Brazil, Argentina, the United States, Russia and Ukraine have worsened the situation.The I.M.F.’s data shows that average food inflation across the world reached 6.85 percent on an annualized basis in December, the highest level since their series started in 2014. Between April 2020 and December 2021, the price of soybeans soared 52 percent, and corn and wheat both grew 80 percent, the fund’s data showed, while the price of coffee rose 70 percent, due largely to droughts and frost in Brazil.Understand Inflation in the U.S.Inflation 101: What is inflation, why is it up and whom does it hurt? Our guide explains it all.Your Questions, Answered: We asked readers to send questions about inflation. Top experts and economists weighed in.What’s to Blame: Did the stimulus cause prices to rise? Or did pandemic lockdowns and shortages lead to inflation? A debate is heating up in Washington.Supply Chain’s Role: A key factor in rising inflation is the continuing turmoil in the global supply chain. Here’s how the crisis unfolded.While food prices appear set to stabilize, events like a conflict in Ukraine, a major producer of wheat and corn, or further adverse weather could change that calculation, Mr. Bogmans said.The effects of rising food prices have been felt unevenly around the world. Asia has been largely spared because of a plentiful rice crop. But parts of Africa, the Middle East and Latin America that are more dependent on imported food are struggling.Countries like Russia, Brazil, Turkey and Argentina have also suffered as their currencies lost value against the dollar, which is used internationally to pay for most food commodities, Mr. Bogmans said.In Africa, bad weather, pandemic restrictions and conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Nigeria, South Sudan and Sudan have disrupted transportation routes and driven up food prices.Joseph Siegle, the director of research at National Defense University’s Africa Center for Strategic Studies, estimated that 106 million people on the continent are facing food insecurity, double the number since 2018.“Africa is facing record levels of insecurity,” he said.While shopping at a market in Mexico City’s Juarez neighborhood on Thursday, Gabriela Ramírez Ramírez, a 43-year-old domestic worker, said the increase in prices had strained her monthly budget, about half of which goes to food. Inflation in Mexico reached its highest rate in more than 20 years in November, before easing slightly in December.“It affects me a lot because you don’t earn enough, and the raises they give you are very small,” she said. “Sometimes we barely have enough to eat.”The impact has been less severe in the United States, where food accounts for less than one-seventh of household spending on average, and inflation has become broad-based, spilling into energy, used cars, dishwashers, services and rents as price increases reach a 40-year high.Yet American food prices have still risen sharply, putting a burden on the poorest households who spend more of their overall budget on food. Food prices rose 6.3 percent in December compared with a year ago, while the price of meat, poultry, fish and eggs jumped 12.5 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.The Biden administration has tried to restrain some of these increases, including with an effort to combat consolidation in the meat packing business, which it says is a source of higher prices.Inflation F.A.Q.Card 1 of 6What is inflation? More

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    As Western Oil Giants Cut Production, State-Owned Companies Step Up

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    In the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, government-owned energy companies are increasing oil and natural gas production as U.S. and European companies pare supply because of climate concerns.HOUSTON — After years of pumping more oil and gas, Western energy giants like BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil and Chevron are slowing down production as they switch to renewable energy or cut costs after being bruised by the pandemic.But that doesn’t mean the world will have less oil. That’s because state-owned oil companies in the Middle East, North Africa and Latin America are taking advantage of the cutbacks by investor-owned oil companies by cranking up their production.This massive shift could reverse a decade-long trend of rising domestic oil and gas production that turned the United States into a net exporter of oil, gasoline, natural gas and other petroleum products, and make America more dependent on the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, authoritarian leaders and politically unstable countries.The push by governments to increase oil and gas production means it could take decades for global fossil fuel supplies to decline unless there is a sharp drop in demand for such fuels. President Biden has effectively accepted the idea that the United States will rely more on foreign oil, at least for the next few years. His administration has been calling on OPEC and its allies to boost production to help bring down rising oil and gasoline prices, even as it seeks to limit the growth of oil and gas production on federal lands and waters.The administration’s approach is a function of two conflicting priorities: Mr. Biden wants to get the world to move away from fossil fuels while protecting Americans from a spike in energy prices. In the short run, it is hard to achieve both goals because most people cannot easily replace internal-combustion engine cars, gas furnaces and other fossil fuel-based products with versions that run on electricity generated from wind turbines, solar panels and other renewable sources of energy.Western oil companies are also under pressure from investors and environmental activists who are demanding a rapid transition to clean energy. Some U.S. producers have said they are reluctant to invest more because they fear oil prices will fall again or because banks and investors are less willing to finance their operations. As a result, some are selling off parts of their fossil fuel empires or are simply spending less on new oil and gas fields.That has created a big opportunity for state-owned oil companies that are not under as much pressure to reduce emissions, though some are also investing in renewable energy. In fact, their political masters often want these oil companies to increase production to help pay down debt, finance government programs and create jobs.Saudi Aramco, the world’s leading oil producer, has announced that it plans to increase oil production capacity by at least a million barrels a day, to 13 million, by the 2030s. Aramco increased its exploration and production investments by $8 billion this year, to $35 billion.“We are capitalizing on the opportunity,” Aramco’s chief executive, Amin H. Nasser, recently told financial analysts. “Of course we are trying to benefit from the lack of investments by major players in the market.”Aramco not only has vast reserves but it can also produce oil much more cheaply than Western companies because its crude is relatively easy to pump out of the ground. So even if demand declines because of a rapid shift to electric cars and trucks, Aramco will most likely be able to pump oil for years or decades longer than many Western energy companies.“The state companies are going their own way,” said René Ortiz, a former OPEC secretary general and a former energy minister in Ecuador. “They don’t care about the political pressure worldwide to control emissions.”State-owned oil companies in Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Libya, Argentina, Colombia and Brazil are also planning to increase production. Should oil and natural gas prices stay high or rise further, energy experts say, more oil-producing nations will be tempted to crank up supply.The global oil market share of the 23 nations that belong to OPEC Plus, a group dominated by state oil companies in OPEC and allied countries like Russia and Mexico, will grow to 75 percent from 55 percent in 2040, according to Michael C. Lynch, president of Strategic Energy and Economic Research in Amherst, Mass., who is an occasional adviser to OPEC.If that forecast comes to pass, the United States and Europe could become more vulnerable to the political turmoil in those countries and to the whims of their rulers. Some European leaders and analysts have long argued that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia uses his country’s vast natural gas reserves as a cudgel — a complaint that has been voiced again recently as European gas prices have surged to record highs.A pump jack in Stanton, Texas. American companies have been cautiously holding back exploration and production.Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York TimesOther oil and gas producers like Iraq, Libya and Nigeria are unstable, and their production can rise or fall rapidly depending on who is in power and who is trying to seize power.“By adopting a strategy of producing less oil, Western oil companies will be turning control of supply over to national oil companies in countries that could be less reliable trading partners and have weaker environmental regulations,” Mr. Lynch said.An overreliance on foreign oil can be problematic because it can limit the options American policymakers have when energy prices spike, forcing presidents to effectively beg OPEC to produce more oil. And it gives oil-producing countries greater leverage over the United States.“Today when U.S. shale companies are not going to respond to higher prices with investment for financial reasons, we are depending on OPEC, whether it is willing to release spare production or not,” said David Goldwyn, a senior energy official in the State Department in the Obama administration. He compared the current moment to one in 2000 when the energy secretary, Bill Richardson, “went around the world asking OPEC countries to release spare capacity to relieve price pressure.”This time, state-owned energy companies are not merely looking to produce more oil in their home countries. Many are expanding overseas.In recent months, Qatar Energy invested in several African offshore fields while the Romanian national gas company bought an offshore production block from Exxon Mobil. As Western companies divest polluting reserves such as Canadian oil sands, energy experts say state companies can be expected to step in.“There is a lot of low-hanging fruit state companies can pick up,” said Raoul LeBlanc, an oil analyst at IHS Markit, a consulting and research firm. “It is a huge opportunity for them to become international players.”Kuwait announced last month that it planned to invest more than $6 billion in exploration over the next five years to increase production to four million barrels a day, from 2.4 million now.This month, the United Arab Emirates, a major OPEC member that produces four million barrels of oil a day, became the first Persian Gulf state to pledge to a net zero carbon emissions target by 2050. But just last year ADNOC, the U.A.E.’s national oil company, announced it was investing $122 billion in new oil and gas projects.Iraq, OPEC’s second-largest producer after Saudi Arabia, has invested heavily in recent years to boost oil output, aiming to raise production to eight million barrels a day by 2027, from five million now. The country is suffering from political turmoil, power shortages and inadequate ports, but the government has made several major deals with foreign oil companies to help the state-owned energy company develop new fields and improve production from old ones.Even in Libya, where warring factions have hamstrung the oil industry for years, production is rising. In recent months, it has been churning out 1.3 million barrels a day, a nine-year high. The government aims to increase that total to 2.5 million within six years.National oil companies in Brazil, Colombia and Argentina are also working to produce more oil and gas to raise revenue for their governments before demand for oil falls as richer countries cut fossil fuel use.After years of frustrating disappointments, production in the Vaca Muerta, or Dead Cow, oil and gas field in Argentina has jumped this year. The field had never supplied more than 120,000 barrels of oil in a day but is now expected to end the year at 200,000 a day, according to Rystad Energy, a research and consulting firm. The government, which is considered a climate leader in Latin America, has proposed legislation that would encourage even more production.“Argentina is concerned about climate change, but they don’t see it primarily as their responsibility,” said Lisa Viscidi, an energy expert at the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington research organization. Describing the Argentine view, she added, “The rest of the world globally needs to reduce oil production, but that doesn’t mean that we in particular need to change our behavior.” More

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    Margaret C. Snyder, the U.N.’s ‘First Feminist,’ Dies at 91

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    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyMargaret C. Snyder, the U.N.’s ‘First Feminist,’ Dies at 91Inspired by her liberal Roman Catholic upbringing, she refocused the organization’s development efforts to include women’s empowerment.Margaret C. Snyder in 2016 at the exhibition “HERstory: A Celebration of Leading Women in the United Nations” at U.N. headquarters in Manhattan. Dr. Snyder created and ran a series of programs that brought training, loans and equipment to women around the world.Credit…Megan SnyderFeb. 5, 2021, 12:52 p.m. ETMargaret C. Snyder, whose liberal Roman Catholic upbringing inspired a pioneering career at the United Nations, where she refocused the mechanisms of global development aid to include millions of women in Africa, Asia and Latin America, died on Jan. 26 in Syracuse, N.Y. She was 91.The cause was cardiac arrest, her nephew James Snyder said.Dr. Snyder, who went by Peg, had already spent years working on women’s development issues in Tanzania when she joined the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa in 1971. At the time, the overwhelming male staff directed most of its resources to helping men become better farmers and entrepreneurs, even while women were doing much of the growing and selling.“There was a failure to realize,” she wrote last year for a U.N. publication, “that the most serious problems of development defy solution without the involvement of women.”During her nearly 20 years at the U.N. and more than 30 years afterward as an informal adviser to the organization, she created and ran a series of programs that brought millions of dollars in training, loans and equipment to women around the world — for instance, supplying mills to women in Burkina Faso to process shea butter and helping Kenyan women counter soil erosion by planting trees.Known widely as the U.N.’s “first feminist,” Dr. Snyder promoted women within the organization as well. When she began working at the U.N., in the early 1970s, most women there did secretarial work. Under her influence, that began to change: She put young women on her staff and later helped them advance, both at the U.N. and in their home countries, through her considerable network of contacts, which eventually included presidents like Joyce Banda of Malawi and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia.“Peg was a trailblazer,” Comfort Lamptey, the U.N. women’s country representative in Nigeria, said in an interview. “She believed that if you put money in the hands of women, they can do magic.”Dr. Snyder in the 1950s, when she was the women’s dean at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, N.Y.Credit…via Snyder familyMargaret Cecilia Snyder was born on Jan. 30, 1929, in East Syracuse, N.Y. Her father, Matthias, was a doctor, and her mother, Cecilia (Gorman) Snyder, taught Latin and German in a local high school.She is survived by her brother, Thomas Snyder. Another brother, Robert, died in December.Syracuse in the first half of the 20th century was a hotbed of liberal Catholic thought, producing leading thinkers and activists like Theodore Hesburgh, the longtime president of the University of Notre Dame, and the peace advocates Daniel J. and Philip Berrigan.The Snyders were friendly with both families, though Dr. Snyder said her biggest influence was her parents. During the Great Depression, her father put New Deal posters in the window of their home and took in patients on welfare. Her mother brought in extra money by playing the piano for silent movies — earning 30 percent less than a man who did the same job on other nights, an instance of gender segregation that Dr. Snyder said inspired her interest in women’s rights.In high school, Peg worked summers at a settlement house in Syracuse, helping Black migrants as they arrived from the South. She attended the College of New Rochelle in Westchester County, N.Y., graduating in 1950; two years later she received a master’s degree in sociology from the Catholic University of America in Washington.While working as the women’s dean at Le Moyne College, a liberal Jesuit institution in Syracuse, she became enthralled by John F. Kennedy’s call for young Americans to volunteer overseas. In 1961 she took a yearlong sabbatical to work with volunteer organizations in Tanganyika (which merged with Zanzibar to become Tanzania in 1964) and Uganda. Among other tasks, she arranged for African students to attend college in the United States — part of an effort known as “Kennedy airlifts.”When her year ended, she quit her job at Le Moyne and stayed in Africa, but she moved home in 1965 to help run the East African Studies program at Syracuse University. She advised students from the region on their graduate work, many of whom went on to hold leadership positions in their countries — the first threads of her continentwide network. Five years later she went back to Tanzania, where she completed a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Dar es Salaam in 1971.Dr. Snyder, seen her with an unidentified African woman, began her career helping women in Africa and later built the U.N. Development Fund for Women into a global powerhouse.Credit…via Snyder familyThat same year she joined the U.N. as a co-founder of what would become the African Training and Research Center for Women, the organization’s first major program directed specifically at improving economic opportunities for women. In 1978 she moved to New York City, where she was put in charge of a development fund focused on women that was paid for by voluntary contributions from member states.She built the organization, later renamed the U.N. Development Fund for Women (and even later U.N. Women), from operating on a shoestring budget to a global powerhouse that served women not just in Africa but also across the developing world. By the end of the 1980s, it had created women’s development commissions in 30 countries, through which the U.N. funneled millions of dollars to grass-roots women’s projects.“We were trying to make a paradigm shift from looking at women as mothers to looking at women and their economic activities,” said Thelma Awori, a former assistant secretary general of the United Nations who worked closely with Dr. Snyder. “Peg picked that up and enlarged it.”One of her first grants went to Kenya’s Green Belt Movement, an anti-deforestation initiative led by Wangari Maathai, who went on to win the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize in part for that work. Dr. Snyder and Ms. Maathai remained close friends — whenever Ms. Maathai came to New York she would stay at Dr. Snyder’s spacious, light-filled apartment on Mitchell Place in Manhattan, just north of the U.N., and Dr. Snyder hosted a wedding party for her daughter Wanjira.After she retired from the United Nations in 1989, Dr. Snyder was a Fulbright scholar in Uganda and a visiting fellow at the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton. She also wrote or co-wrote three books on women’s economic development in Africa.But perhaps her most important post-retirement work was as an adviser and advocate for a long list of women activists and organizations, many of whom she hosted at her apartment. It was there, in 2006, that she helped organize the Sirleaf Market Women’s Fund, a program to rebuild markets across war-torn Liberia, named for Ms. Sirleaf, the country’s first female president.For all her career success, Dr. Snyder was in constant conflict with entrenched interests within the U.N., both because she was a woman and because her approach to development challenged the ways many of her colleagues were used to doing things. The risk of bureaucratic sabotage was ever-present: Once, Dr. Snyder and her team returned from a trip to find that their office had been moved to a different building, in a room without a single phone line.But she could take some comfort in the long view: By 2021, women would make up a significant portion of the U.N. professional staff, and women’s issues, including development, remain one of the organization’s focal points.“Through all of the administrative issues, we were reminded that working to empower the poorest women was threatening to some high level and powerful people,” she wrote in 2020. “They could move us, but they couldn’t stop us.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Fishing by Lantern on an Island in Kenya

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    As night settles, a fisherman of silver cyprinid readies a lantern to be cast into the waters of Lake Victoria, in Kenya. The fish, locally known as omena, are attracted to the lights in the night.The World Through a LensFishing by Lantern on an Island in KenyaOn Lake Victoria, attracting baitfish with lanterns extends as far back as anyone can remember. But overfishing may jeopardize the tradition.As night settles, a fisherman of silver cyprinid readies a lantern to be cast into the waters of Lake Victoria, in Kenya. The fish, locally known as omena, are attracted to the lights in the night.Credit…Supported byContinue reading the main storyPhotographs and Text by More