Global Voices is well positioned to follow the nuances of this complex issue with authors tracking citizen media in nearly every country of the planet. This article is an attempt to place an overall narrative on the global food crisis with observations from our authors from around the world. Clicking on the links will take you to all the posts that have been referenced.

Let’s begin in the Caribbean. In Barbados, locals learn to deal with a 30% increase in flour prices, along with gasoline and diesel price jumps. Trinidad and Tobago’s Minister of Agriculture, denies there is a food crisis on the two islands, but locals notice an increase in chicken and flour prices. Cuba is trying a new agriculture policy of providing more land to private farmers.

Prices and shortages of food can be seen across Latin America, as many people are becoming desperate. Blame is being placed on both farmers and governments for their failure to act. Arab bloggers in Lebanon, Syria, Kuwait and Egypt are also feeling the pinch, and writing about it too.

Worries continue to circulate in Cambodia that nearly 500,000 children could start missing meals due to a 20% increase in the price of rice. However, a dramatic increase in rice production may not be beyond hope in this country. Farmers here can cultivate two or three harvests per year on the same piece of land.

The latest riots

Protesters in Cairo lighting fires and throwing rocks at a barricade, April 7, 2008 - Photo by James Buck

Two days of riots broke out on April 6 and 7 in Egypt, where prices of staples have doubled since 2004 (and in some cases quadrupled). At least two people were killed and 111 people – including police – were injured (See our special coverage on Egypt's General Strike).

In Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, protesters blocked roads and burned tires, demanding the government cut taxes on key imports.

Just days later, four people were killed and 25 injured in riots in Haiti, where the prices of rice, beans, and fruit have increased 50% in the past 12 months. Less than a week after the violent demonstrations, Haiti's prime minister was ousted in a vote of no confidence.

For Natifnatal, a Haitian currently in Abu Dhabi, the food crisis offers simple math:

For those who don't even know the basics can present the equation: hunger + poverty + rising prices = demonstrations + the Prime Minister's resignation + violence, and argue that an increase in food aid would suffice to reduce hunger.

Even as a cargo plane crashed in Kinshasa on April 15 killing 75 people, Congolese blogger Du Cabiau à Kinshasa, ruminated on a more silent, less telegenic disaster facing the country: the doubling of food prices in the same week.

The effects on trade

So many countries of the developing world import a large percentage of the foodstuffs necessary to feed their populations. Rising prices means problems grow quickly. Even for food exporters, rising prices has touched a nerve. In Korea, one of the world’s most prolific rice producers, a Netizen argues that rice should be withheld from free trade talks, allowing the country to do as it seems fit with its strategic commodity.

Sometimes protectionism won’t be enough, however. As the price of rice has increased throughout Southeast Asia’s rice growing nations, governments were forced to plea for calm and pray that domestic prices would soon begin to fall. The situation is doubly bad for rice importers like the Philippines, where the poor have felt the brunt of the price increase. Indonesia, another importer, has canceled its imports due to high prices. Cambodia and Vietnam have abandoned exports. Bloggers in Malaysia report rumors of rice shortages. The Government of Brunei could move to subsidize food staples like cooking oil, flour, milk, eggs and chicken.

Milk in Japanese supermarket

For decades food prices in Japan have been in stasis, which is strange for a country that imports almost every staple other than rice. Not any longer. Price increased for the first time in more than two decades. The same goes for milk products, which consumers been paying for at the same rate for three decades. Beer, cooking oil, and soy sauce also experienced increases.

A silent killer

In Bangladesh, where people spend as much as 80% of their salaries on food, high prices for rice have hit the middle class. It’s much worse for the poor, as media reports confirm several hunger deaths. The country’s military chief raised the ire of many when he suggested people replace rice by eating potatoes.

In Tajikistan, where people already faced a winter-long energy shortage, it looks like more than 260,000 people are in need of immediate food assistance. Worries persist that this number could grow to 2 million by winter.

Talk about globalization. In Yemen, the prices of staples have risen while the cost of certain electronic goods have dropped. Kuwait has also seen price increases, no thanks to the falling U.S. dollar.

In Burkina Faso, where people felt the government sat on its hands as prices in some sectors increased more than 40% since the beginning of the year, riots sparked in several cities throughout the country in late February, resulting in plenty of property damage and more than 300 arrests.

At about the same time in Cameroon, anger over rising prices and falling wages sparked three days of violent confrontation with the military. Anger was also fed by President Paul Biya's attempt to change the constitution so he could sit for a third term.

The story is far from over. We’ll keep posting updates – so please check our Special Coverage page on the Global Food Crisis 2008 often.

The first that we shall look at is Emmanuel Oluwatosin. I first learnt about Emmanuel through the African Path. In his recent post, he urges readers to pay careful attention to the tenets of Mr. John D. Rockerfeller.

Emmanuel Oluwatosin of Nigeria writes:

…According to Nelson Rockerfeller, the one time Vice President of the United States, his father John D. Rockerfeller, Jr, gave each of his five sons an allowance “We got 25 cents a week, and had to earn the rest of the money we got.” To earn part of that extra money he raised vegetables and rabbits…” We always worked.

All the boys were required to keep personal daily account books. They were required to give 10 percent of their income to charity, to save 10 percent, and to account for all the rest.” They had to balance their account books every month and to be able to tell what happened to every penny they earned. The Rockerfeller kids were taught a specific pattern for dealing with their money. These are the Rockerfeller rules.

* Work for all you get
* Give away the first 10%.
* Pay yourself the next 10%.
* Live on the rest.
* Account for every penny…”

Africaincorp is a blog that I have been following for a few months now. This blog is written by an Ivorian blogger, Frederic Tape. He chronicles the story of an African entrepreneur who has recently launched an investment portal website:

…Africanselect was “Launched in 2006 with the goal to go beyond just creating an awareness of African Stock Markets but also offer a technologically advanced platform that allows African and international retail and corporate investors to take part in investment opportunities across the continent.”
This business could be added to the likes of LiquidAfrica,and Africanlion.com.
The one question that has been raised during our team meeting was the following: how can such company leverage the aggregating power of social networks such as Facebook, MyspaceAfrica, Afriville, Myafricasite, Edumela and Hi5 among others to reach out to the huge number of young African professionals and entice them to find interest in the Real estate, securities markets of Africa.
The reality is that many young individuals with disposal income, stay oblivious to the opportunities laying in the open in Africa. The incomes they generate in the western world is sufficient to make them potent players on these markets more so than in the American or European markets…

The Entrepreneur News Online is a group blog that is edited and published by a Cameroonian newspaper, The Entrepreneur. Snowsel Ano-Ebie discusses the style that many African managers find productive as it pertains to getting results in the corporate world:

…How can management be defined? Management is the process of administering and coordinating resources effectively and efficiently in an effort to achieve the goals of an organization. And a manager is anybody who plans an organization’s resources such as time, money and people in a bid to achieve the organization’s objectives, drawing from the contributions of Henri Fayol and those of Henry Mintzberg to management thinking. Thus any African who heads an organization or a part of it, and performs the four management functions of planning, organizing, leading and controlling can be called an African manager.

PROFILE OF THE AFRICAN MANAGER
What then are the distinguishing characteristics of the African manager? African managers for the most part represent the old view of managers. It should however be noted that the profile, which I am presenting of the typical African manager, could also be true of some managers in other parts of the world. But we can confidently draw a profile of African managers because we know them better than we know other managers. After all we live in the same community, we share the same public utilities and we can be contented with being only “ear-witnesses” of who they are, what they do, and what they stand for. The African manager thinks of himself as manager or boss. Others must relate to him only in that capacity. If you go to an organisation where the manager’s office is situated in a storey building, chances are that his office will be somewhere upstairs, maybe on the last floor so that he can seat on top of every other person and is physically seen to be doing so. Thus the African manager is happy to be referred to, as “Up”, not to say “God”…

Next we move on to Ghana to meet the Nigerian-born Global Voices Author, David Ajao, teaches us how to make money online:

…It is indeed very true that you can earn a steady income from working over the Internet. It is also true that there is no single magic wand to making money online. Some of the “offline” rules apply online too. Hardwork, entrepreneurship spirit, perseverance, and of course, Knowledge. You need to know what you are doing. Excellence they say, is never by accident.

In gathering useful knowledge, you need to consult experienced folks, who are already making money on the Internet. One of such folks is Emmanuel Oluwatosin. He is not only making money online, but also teaching people how to make it. Little wonder his blog’s tagline is: “Inspiring Excellence, Realising Ambitions”. His blog is rich with useful tips and ideas that can inspire and direct you. One such useful post is the one titled: “Carnival of Entrepreneurs: 12th edition Hits the Road Big Time.” Comes highly recommended…

The final business blogger from West Africa that we are going to take a look at is Mr. Omodudu. He is a fellow blogger after my own heart. He is a trained economist and a mortgage lender. Omodudu tackles the issue of foreign economists, “Onyibo economists,” attempting to dispatch policy advice to African countries that many of them have never even visited:

This article in WSJ caught my attention because the topic is close to my dissertation. Mr Wessel's ideas are cutting edge and definitely goes against the grain, he is essentially suggesting, though in a subtle way, that economists in developed countries do not get ‘it'. Which from my experience is absolutely true. A high school student from any developing economy can pick holes in the theories put forward by most of the best papers in developmental economics.
We are forced to live through these, day in day out, due to the imbalance of power. The stronger dude is right even when he is glaringly wrong. Academics of African descent ought to forge together in order to bring forth a formidable voice. A voice worth reckoning with. This guys do not know half of the things they claim to know. Developmental economics is unique as it can not be put in any neo-, post-, pre- box. It's case dependent.

Well, as you have seen the West African environment has spawned some wonderful business blogging talent. And guess what? This was only a few of them. Just start searching for business blogs about Africa and you will see for yourself. I will not finish this post without mentioning of of the key figures in African business blogs Emeka Okafor.

Please let us know what you think and we hope to see you again here very soon.

The clip shows the Guinean Army firing indiscriminately on a crowd of civilians who were demonstrating their growing discontent with the increasingly autocratic ways of President Lansana Conté. Such eye-witness video footage is especially valuable because voices from the Guinean grassroots are difficult to find in the blogosphere. Most of the online commentary about Guinea in crisis has come from international news agencies and bloggers from elsewhere in Africa.

GV author Jen Brea last month put together an excellent overview of the unrest in Guinea. The crisis reached its climax when President Conté declared martial law and deployed government troops with instructions to use armed force to restore order. The ensuing stand-off led to the deaths of more than 110 people, many of them youths and children killed by gunfire on the streets of Conakry.

Organisations like the International Crisis Group warned that unless real change took place in Guinea, chaos would spread quickly with disastrous consequences. On the ground, civil society refused to back down. Further bold resistance to martial law from the labour unions and the wider populace – backed by the Guinean Parliament – brought about a renewed end to the general strike on 25 February 2007 and the appointment of new Prime Minister Lansana Kouyate, who appears to be a product of consensus.

As GV Francophone editor Alice Backer picked up last week, the Senegalese blogger Alex Seck (Fr) is now talking about Guinea exiting out of its crisis. But the prevailing general tone is still cautious: national union leaders (Fr) and their international counterparts are stressing that it is vital to remain vigilant about this so-called return of peace to Guinea…

There are many warning signs to be drawn from the recent history of conflict in the West African sub-region. For several years attention has been drawn to the risk that Guinea could be the next country to slide into violent unrest.

Wars in the neighbouring countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Cote d’Ivoire had originally positioned Guinea as a haven for hundreds of thousands of refugees. However, the enormous numbers of people migrating across Guinea’s volatile borders also included former fighters from neighbouring wars who are vulnerable to being recruited into new hostilities. Some international analysts have spent years contemplating responses to possible conflict in Guinea and the wider humanitarian crisis, while significant concerns have developed around the precarious position of Guinea’s Forest Region as a source of instability in its own right. Yet in essence the central causes of conflict in the sub-region have always been traceable to bad governance and failures of leadership.

So who holds a leader like President Conté to account when his tyrannical tendencies spiral out of control?

Here on the Human Rights Video Hub we’ve been trying to make the point that accountability can stem from ordinary citizens equipped with the technology to capture abuses on film – as the video clip in this piece demonstrates. The problem is that local media in countries like Guinea are still weak, with little access to the tools required to document or disseminate evidence of such abuses of state power. Nor is there much of a Guinean blogosphere to speak of, leaving most people reliant on news websites like AllAfrica.com and Guineenews (Fr), or blogs like Friends of Guinea, to receive reports or analysis about the latest developments.

These sources were supplemented in recent weeks by bloggers from elsewhere who were moved to drive the online debate. For example, Senegal’s Alex Seck (Fr) declared that Guinea was on the brink of imploding (Fr) and that the failure of the international community to condemn or put pressure on President Conte was “shameful”. East African blog Charcoal Ink said the turmoil was a reflection of familiar political trends in Africa: “there is a power struggle going on and power is that delicious elixir that my African leaders can’t get enough of”.

Finally, one of the most interesting responses to the unrest in Guinea was the defiant posturing of the national youth music scene, represented most prominently by the Fonike collective (Fr), which produced a hip-hop video (Fr) in solidarity with the citizens who protested against Conté’s “dictatorial regime”, as well as the following reggae clip:

Unfortunately these voices of the musical youth seem to have little genuine impact, partly due to the fact that much of West African politics is oblivious to grassroots opinion and only really responsive to its “big men”.

So now the most immediate challenge is for one such big man, Prime Minister Kouyate, to seize the momentum (Fr) that the emergence from this violent period has afforded him. To make tangible progress and to prevent Guinea slipping into conflict, Kouyate will need robust assistance from his national and international allies. And most importantly he’ll have to stand strong against the whims and excesses of power-hungry President Conté, in order that the clashes witnessed last month do not become the forebears of yet another devastating West African conflict.

From soccer moves to a dancing sytle

Lets start with Teju Cole at Modal Minority who looks at drogbacité. This is a new dancing style coming out of Abidjan based on the football moves of Didier Drogba, an Ivorian soccer player who recently won Africa's Footballer of the Year award (that's soccer for those of your who may be in North America).

Teju writes:

The first real explosion of this was in the months leading up to the World Cup, when Drogba’s brilliance steered the Elephants to an unlikely first-ever berth in the tournament. Around that time, the dance style known as Drogbacité emerged in Abidjan, nominally based on Drogba’s moves, and it was soon followed by dance tracks specifically dedicated to it.

The post includes a track, Boucantier, that is representative of the new type of music emerging around the dancing style which is taking clubs in the Ivory Coast and West Africa by storm.

Remembering the Godfather of Soul

Matsuli has a video of James Brown's 1971 performance in Kinshasa to mark his passing in late December.

As a tribute to the recent death of James Brown, matsuli music brings you his legendary 1974 Kinshasa performance. This was part of the “African Woodstock” musical build up to the Rumble in the Jungle fight between Mohammed Ali and George Foreman.

The death of this music legend was also noted by Ray at AfroBeat Trainspotter with a link to James Brown's page on Myspace.

I go chop your dollar!

In the meantime, Dibusse Tande at Scribbles from the den examines 419 cyber scams. He writes about a popular song, I Go Chop Your Dollar, which ridicules wealthy Americans and Europeans who fall far these scams.

About a year ago, Nigerian artist, Nkem Owoh (aka Osuofia) released a song titled “I go chop your dollar” which ridicules Europeans and Americans who fall for these scams. Although the song is a satirical happy-go-lucky number, it immediately became the unofficial 419 anthem – and its provocative lyrics virtually started a race war on the Internet:

Oyinbo* man I go chop your dollar,
I go take your money disappear
419 is just a game,
you are the loser I am the winner.

(Onyibo* means a white person)

Musical journey

Finally, a (belated) link to some bloggers who posted end-of-year rounds-up covering music from some African perspective.

Soundroots.org, a site that never fails to educate and entertain has a fantastic world music mp3 collection to bid 2006 adieu. It includes some hiphop by X Plastaz, a group from Tanzania, which fuses Maasai traditional music and urban hip hop and Konono #1 of Congo whom I have blogged about in the past.

Matt also has an end of year recap post - 2006 Rewound podcast - that contains the African tracks that listeners liked best in 2006 on Matsuli. But hurry as it will disappear soon. I also carried an end-of-year round up reviewing the most popular tracks on ntwiga.net for 2006.

The 3rd Annual Kenya Music Week was this last December in Nairobi with the theme “Music Piracy = Poverty”. The event featured an exhibition, talent show and performances from some of Kenya' top musical artists and was a huge success. Kenya Music Week is an annual event organized by PHAT! Music & Entertainment Limited and Triple P Kenya Publicists who are working together with the aim of “developing the Kenya Music Industry into a professional, transparent and profitable business”.

Count Reeshard at no condition is permanent, has a post on Pamelo Mounk'a from Congo Brazaville, which focuses on his release “No.1 Africain”. Pamelo Mounk'a is an African musical legend who performed with such greats as TP OK Jazz and Les Bantous de la Capitale, a Congolese national institution before breaking out on his own.

Best Ambiance has a link to Jon Kertzer's January 1st Best Ambiance session at at KEXP radio featuring music from a host of African countries (including Zimbabwe, Madagascar, South Africa, Senegal, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Mali, Algeria, Kenya, Ivory Coast, and Congo in just this one session) for you to listen to online or download. The session includes some great highlife - a musical genre characterized by the use of multiple horns and guitars that came to popularity in Ghana in the 70s and 80s, which is experiencing a popularity revival around Africa.

Radio Palmwine

We are closing with Radio palmwine. Emeka Okafor's Timbuktu Chronicles links to Radio Palmwine, a new online radio station service that aims to to increase the establishment of Nigeria and African Diaspora music worldwide.

RadioPalmwine's vision “…is to increase the establishment of Nigeria and African Diaspora music worldwide, and also to provide financial support for talented struggling artists and industry professionals representing such countries. We are developing strategies to help emerging musicians from Africa, cross over the barriers of the conventional music, arts and entertainment industry and take advantage of the emerging digital marketplace for global entertainment…”

The RadioPalmWine website also carries 4 feature stations that are profiled on the front page and also allows users to download tracks.