By the summer of 2008, the price of rice had increased five times from the average price in 2005. Photo: Thatcher Cook for Mercy Corps

The following post is from One Table, a Mercy Corps campaign to fight world hunger by investing in the world's women.

Today almost a billion people worldwide are unable to buy or grow enough food to avoid malnutrition. That's 120 million more than were hungry in 2006.

What happened? Basically, the world saw dramatic spikes in food prices. But there were many underlying causes of what's known as the global food crisis:

• Drought and other climate-related problems that resulted in smaller harvests
• Changing diets — rise of the middle class in India and China and an increased demand for food, especially meat, which requires large amounts of grain to raise
• Diversion of crops from food production to the production of biofuels
• High fuel prices during 2008 — if it costs more to transport food, prices go up
• Declining investments in agricultural productivity — total agriculture development aid to poor countries plunged from $8 billion in 1984 to $3.4 billion in 2004. At the same time, the developing world's cities have been ballooning with people who do not grow any of their food
• Export bans and restrictions last year in several major grain-producing countries like China as governments sought to lower food prices for their own citizens, with the result of reducing the global supply on hand.

While food prices have come down from their highs of 2008, they remain substantially above historic levels. Many economists feel this trend, which most severely affects those who can least afford it, is likely to continue for some time.

The economic, health and societal costs of the global food crisis have been severe. One of the first things Mercy Corps did to figure out how and where to direct our efforts was to survey the communities where we work. We discovered that within communities Mercy Corps serves, roughly 70 percent of income is spent on food, and 80 percent of the population had been affected by rising food prices over the past year. The survey also confirmed something we already suspected: that families were coping with higher prices by eating fewer meals, selling off household belongings, going into debt and removing children from school so that they can work.

In addition to being a record year for food prices, it's also been a record year for our food security team, allowing Mercy Corps to aggressively respond to this crisis. We now have 17 programs in 13 countries designed specifically to respond to this on-going problem. Through support from donors including USAID, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Gap Foundation, the Hunger Site, and private individuals, our Food Crisis Response employs a strategy designed to ensure that the groundwork for increased prosperity in the future is laid — even while addressing the immediate problem of accessing sufficient food.

Food distributions, much of which are specifically targeted to improve child nutrition, are taking place in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Zimbabwe. Meanwhile, in the Central African Republic, India, Indonesia, Liberia, Nepal, Niger, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Uganda and again Zimbabwe, Mercy Corps is helping hungry households to access food by providing employment opportunities, agricultural training and inputs (such as seeds and tools), and helping people establish and grow small businesses.

Combined, these programs are reaching almost 1.5 million individuals who have been directly impacted by higher food prices. Overall, Mercy Corps’ Crisis Response will lead to a sustainable increase in income for these people, leading in turn to greater food security over the long-term.

"Petro-authoritarianism." Now that's a mouthful.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman used the term to refer to oil-rich regimes in the developing world that funnel profits into the pockets of the powerful — and turn a blind eye to the needs of the poor.

Friedman puts Venezuela, Kazakhstan, Sudan and others in this category — countries where large oil and natural gas reserves lead to corruption, wasteful spending, military adventurism and instability.

U.S. Senator Richard Lugar (R-Indiana) includes Nigeria, the world's eighth-largest oil exporter, on that list. "Despite half a trillion dollars in revenues since the 1960s, poverty has increased, corruption is rife, and violence roils the oil-rich Niger Delta," he writes in the Christian Science Monitor.

"The Petroleum and Poverty Paradox," a report from Lugar's U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, calls for improved financial transparency from governments and oil companies. It also requests international assistance to help resource-rich countries better manage their revenue.

Lugar argues it's up to the U.S. to set the standard by demonstrating its own accountability. The first step, he says, is to join the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), a voluntary program that audits each participating country's oil and gas royalties.

With oil prices guaranteed to eventually spike as rapidly as they've dropped, Lugar writes, "Reversing the [resource] curse is in everyone's interest."

Kyrgyzstan's Toktogul Reservoir is the country's largest source of hydroelectric power. Photo: Andrei Shevelov.com (flickr)

After months of forced power blackouts, Kyrgyzstan’s residents are bracing for the cold winter months ahead — and are turning the heat on their government to stop the cutoffs.

With its high-peaked mountain landscape, the former Soviet republic relies on glacial melt to generate hydroelectric power, its main energy source.

Kyrgyz officials have rationed electricity since April, blaming the region's semi-drought and an an unseasonably cold spring that did not melt enough mountaintop snow to refill the reservoirs. The latest UN appeal for humanitarian aid in Kyrgyzstan backs this claim.

Some residents hesitate to blame Mother Nature for the crisis, pointing instead to poor government management.

"We don't live like this, this is Bishkek," a young woman in the cosmopolitan capital told Eurasia.net during a period of blackouts. "We believe this is caused by corruption."

The World Bank's Raghuveer Sharma calls the situation a result "not only of a period of water shortage, but also of poor management of the sector, or rather of the water resources that Kyrgyz energy depends on."

The Kyrgyz government is responding to the criticism, making sure power was restored in Bishkek and firing the country's energy minister in late November. But blackouts are continuing in rural areas — sometimes up to eight or ten hours per day. And the energy sector of the government says it will continue to ration electricity through the peak winter heating season.

While the cold may not be as bad this year as last year, electricity stoppages will create much more suffering, especially in urban or semi-urban areas where residents have less access to natural fuel sources, says Kevin Grubb, former Kyrgyzstan deputy country director for Mercy Corps. Grubb, who lived in Kyrgyzstan in 2006 and 2007, says, "More people among the vulnerable populations will die from exposure — as we saw to some degree last year — especially among the elderly and poor, and newborns and infants."

Even before the coldest months arrive, local businesses say they've already been crippled by the outages. "All manufacturing depends on electricity, so everyone has suffered," political analyst Syrgak Abdyldaev told the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. "The rolling power cuts are increasing the level of discontent among all social strata, and there are more and more unhappy people."