The food crisis has well and truly hit, with riots springing up in Haiti, Egypt, Bangladesh and many more countries across the world feeling the pinch of a mass shortage in food.

World Bank gives a helping hand
This week, the World Bank and the UN have both stepped up with promises to help the worldwide farming community. The World Bank is offering a doubling of agricultural loans to African farmers and has pledged to give emergency aid - in the form of millions of dollars - to countries such as Haiti whose residents have descended deeper into poverty since the astronomical rises in staple food products such as rice and wheat.

Robert Zoellick, head of the World Bank said frankly, it's a time for action, "We have to put our money where our mouth is now so that we can put food into hungry mouths," Mr Zoellick said. "It's as stark as that."

It remains to be said, though, that the current world practices are what caused the food crisis in the first place, and while plying countries with cash may prove to ease the situation in the short term, it is clear that long-term strategies need to be attained in order to alleviate the pressure on agricultural land across the globe.

Contributing factors
This hike in food prices stems from numerous factors affecting the agricultural community. Rising oil prices, growing populations in China and India, poor weather and land conditions in Australia and Africa, and also the use of agricultural land for the cultivation of bio-fuel crops have all contributed to the current worrying climate.

UN Solutions
UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) released a report on Tuesday with guidelines to farmers of how to weather the storm that is the food crisis. Some of their advice for the long-term improvement of agriculture was to "localise" and reduce the distance between the produce and the consumer, cutting down the price of exportation; to bring back more natural farming practices such as crop rotation and swap chemical fertilisers for organic ones.
Seeing as this report has been 3 years in the making, it makes you wonder how far in advance the UN saw this coming and what could have been done sooner to prevent it.