Food price take-off • In 2008 total world stocks of all grains
were at their lowest for 30 years. • The share price of two of
the world’s biggest agribusinesses – Monsanto and Syngenta AG –
almost doubled between June 2007 and June 2008.1 • 2.6 billion
people around the world live on $2 a day or less and spend 60 to
80 per cent of their income on food.8 • Today, 70 per cent of
poor countries are food importers and 80 per cent of the
estimated 845 million hungry people are small farmers.2 • The
Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that the increase in
food prices in 2007/08 meant 100 million more people could not
afford food. A hundred million additional people were pushed
into a situation of ‘food peril’.3 • Small farmers have seen few
benefits from runaway food prices. In Spain the farmers’ union
estimates that consumer prices are 600 per cent higher than the
prices farmers receive. 9 • Slightly over a billion people in
the world are overweight while slightly under a billion suffer
from malnutrition.7