Grain

Some nights we stay in people's homes, and others in church halls. Tuesday morning we had a mixture of both; a church hall to sleep in and breakfast and a shower in a home.

I went with Stuart, our second Scottish marcher, to the home of Dave and Sheena. Dave works as a grain merchant in East Lothian, one of the main cereal growing areas in Scotland. Dave told me that the price of grain has increased 50 per cent over the last couple of years, initially due to drought in Australia, heavily linked with climate change, but also because the price is beginning to be increased by the worldwide shift to using land to grow biofuels rather than food.

Over the last year, Dave said EU countries had been releasing their stockpiles of grain to stop the price from increasing too drastically.

Grain stockpiles have been attacked by free market economists as an unwarranted intervention in the market, but Dave said their existence has been justified over the past year. Unfortuantely some impoverished countries have been forced not to have such stockpiles. In Malawi, drought has been increasing over recent decades; southern Africa is and will get drier with climate change. But drought in 2002/2003 was exacerbated because the International Monetary Fund had told Malawi to sell off its grain reserves, another 'unwarranted intervention' in the market.

Government intervention in agricultural markets will become more important in the future to ensure food security. Climate change will hit crop yields worldwide. But unfortunately the EU and US's rush to grow more crops for fuel will also affect food supply and increase the world price of grains even more. It is the poor who will suffer most from the higher cost of food.