Biggest grain
exporters halt foreign sales
The Financial Times ^ | 4/16/2008 | Javier Blas, Isabel Gorst
and Lindsay Whipp
Posted on Tuesday,
April 15, 2008
The global
food crisis intensified on Tuesday as
In another
sign of turmoil, a big food company in Japan, Nihon Shokuhin
Kako, said high corn prices had forced it to buy
cheaper genetically modified corn for the first time, breaking a social, though
not legal, taboo and signalling that opposition to GM
foods could weaken in the face of record food prices.
Meanwhile,
fresh wheat export curbs in Kazakhstan, the world’s fifth largest exporter, and
the rice bans in Indonesia, threaten to trigger bans in other food exporting
countries, which will now face much higher demand from importing countries.
Hussein Allidina, at Morgan Stanley in New York, said pressure for
export bans was likely to increase elsewhere as developing countries suffering
high inflation tried to combat rising local prices by cutting back on exports
of agriculture commodities.
Indonesia –
which joins Vietnam, Egypt, China,