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  3. This spring, disaster loomed in the global food market. Precipitous increases in the prices of staples like rice (up more than a

This spring, disaster loomed in the global food market. Precipitous increases in the prices of staples like rice (up more than a

admin2011-03-10  45
问题 This spring, disaster loomed in the global food market. Precipitous increases in the prices of staples like rice (up more than a hundred and fifty percent in a few months) and maize provoked food riots, toppled governments, and threatened the lives of tens of millions. But the bursting of the commodity bubble eased those pressures, and food prices, while still high, have come well off the astronomical levels they hit in April. For American, the drop in commodity prices has put a few more bucks in people’s pockets; in much of the developing world, it may have saved many from actually starving. So did the global financial crisis solve the global food crisis?
   Temporarily, perhaps. But the recent price drop doesn’t provide any long-term respite from the threat food shortages or future price spikes. Nor has it reassured anyone about the health of the global agricultural system, which the crisis revealed as dangerously unstable. Four decades after the Green Revolution, and after waves of market reforms intended to transform agricultural production, we’re still having a hard time insuring that people simply get enough to eat, and we seen to be vulnerable to supply shocks than ever.
   It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Over the past two decades, countries around the world have moved away from their focus on "food security" and handed market forces a greater rote in shaping agricultural policy. Before the nineteen-eighties, developing countries had so-called "agricultural marketing boards", which would buy commodities from farmers at fixed prices (prices high enough to keep farmers farming), and then store them in strategic reserves that could be used in the event of bad harvests or soaring import prices. But in the eighties and nineties, often as part of structural-adjustment programs imposed by the I.M.F. or the World Blank, many marketing boards were eliminated or cut back, and grain reserves, deemed inefficient and unnecessary, were sold off. In the same way, structural-adjustment programs often did away with government investment in and subsidies to agriculture--more notably, subsidies for things like fertilizers and high-yield seeds..
   The logic behind these reforms was simple: the market would allocate resources more efficiently than government, leading to greater productivity. Farmers, instead of growing subsidized maize and wheat at high cost, could concentrate on cash crops, like cashews and chocolate, and use the money they made to buy staple foods. If a country couldn’t compete in the global economy, production would migrate to countries that could. it was also assumed that, once governments stepped out of the way, private investment would flood into agriculture, boosting performance. And international aid seemed a more efficient way of relieving food crises than relying in countries to maintain surpluses and food-security programs, which are wasteful and costly.
   This "marketization" of agriculture has not, to be sure, been fully carried through. Subsidies are still endemic in rich countries and poor, while developing countries often place tariffs on imported food, which benefit their farmers but drive up prices for consumers. And in extreme circumstance countries restrict exports, hoarding food for their own citizens. Nonetheless, we clearly have a leaner, more market-friendly agriculture system than before. It looks, in fact, a bit like global manufacturing, with low inventories (wheat stocks are at their lowest since 1977), concentrated production (three countries provide ninety percent of corn exports, and five countries provide eighty percent of rice exports,) and fewer redundancies. Governments have a much smaller role, and public spending on agriculture has been cut sharply.
   The problem is that, while this system is undeniably more efficient, it’s also much more fragile. Bad weather in just a few countries can wreak havoc across the entire system. When prices spike as they did this spring, the result is food shortages and malnutrition in poorer countries, since they are far more dependent on imports and have few food reserves to draw on. And, while higher prices and market reforms were supposed to bring a boom in agricultural productivity, global crop yields actually rose less between 1990 and 2007 than they did in the previous twenty years, in part because in many developing countries private-sector agricultural investment never materialized, while the cutbacks in government spending left them with feeble infrastructures.
   These changes did not cause the rising prices of the past couple of years, but they have made them more damaging. The old emphasis on food security was undoubtedly costly, and often wasteful. But the redundancies it created also had tremendous value when things went wrong. And one sure thing about a system as complex as agriculture is that things will go wrong, often with devastating consequences. If the just-in-time system for producing cars runs into a hitch and the supply of cars shrinks for a while, people can easily adapt. When the same happens with food, people go hungry or even starve. That doesn’ t mean that we need to embrace price controls or collective farms, and there are sensible market reforms, like doing away with import tariffs, that would make developing-country consumers better off. But a few weeks ago Bill Clinton, no enemy of market reform, got it right when he said that we should help countries achieve "maximum agricultural self-sufficiency". Instead of a more efficient system. We should be trying to build a more reliable one.
What can be learned from the first paragraph?
选项 A、Global financial crisis destabilized governments.
B、Food riots resulted from skyrocketing food bills.
C、Financial crisis worsened food crisis.
D、Food prices surged by 150% in April.
答案B
解析 第一个问题问的是从第一段话中可以推断出什么。第一段话第二句“Precipitous increases in the prices of staples like rice and maize provoked food riots...”，意为“主食，比如大米和玉米，价格的激增引起了因为食物产生的暴动”我们可以得知答案为B。第二句后半句话“precipitous increases in the prices...toppled government”意为由于食物价格激增，政府动荡不安，因此A项说是全球财政危机使得政府动荡不安是不正确的。第一段第三句“But the bursting of the commodity bubble eased those pressures”说的是全球财政危机某种程度上缓和了粮食价格上涨带来的压力，因此C项说财政危机恶化了食物危机也是不正确的；第一段中第二句话说到“粮食价格在几个月内上涨了超过150%，而后在第三句话里面又提到四月份时粮食价格达到最高点，因此涨幅一定是超过了150%，所以D项说涨幅为150%显然是不正确的，因此答案为B。
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