Food security concerns in East Asia

The gathering crisis across the world of rising prices of food, of rice and other staple items in particular, has not as yet messed up the political and social landscape in any country in Greater East Asia. However, the region, home to some leading rice exporters and also big consumers, is not immune to the crisis. India has, in this context, expressed its support for Thailand’s leadership in organising a Rice Summit.
In a fundamental sense, the ongoing ‘globalisation’ process has had a dramatic negative impact on the prices of food, including rice, across this region, which comprises all 16 member-states of the East Asia Summit. There are several reasons for this, but a political reality stands out. The United States continues to deploy its space-age war-machine in Iraq for the so-called “war on terror.” A major spin-off, actually a worldwide economic consequence, is the space-age velocity with which the price of oil has been driven up. Such a negative spin-off can be traced to three factors: the politics of external intervention in Iraq, the confrontational attitude of the U.S. towards the oil-rich governments considered to be hostile to its global interests, and the inevitable backlash to such “neo-hegemonic” tendencies.
In these circumstances, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) has, without of course making a compelling political reference to the U.S., declared that “the era of cheap food is over, if the era of cheap oil [for fuel] is over.”
Surely, the linkage between crude oil, on the one side, and food and curry, on the other, is not nullified by different perceptions about the meaning of low prices on either side of the worldwide development divide. Moreover, it requires no special insight to recognise the cascading effect of fuel prices on costs of production in the farm sector and, therefore, on the retail prices of rice and other commodities.