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  3. When food prices rose steeply in 2007 and climaxed in the winter of 2008, politicians and the press decried the impact on the bi

When food prices rose steeply in 2007 and climaxed in the winter of 2008, politicians and the press decried the impact on the bi

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问题     When food prices rose steeply in 2007 and climaxed in the winter of 2008, politicians and the press decried the impact on the billion or so people who were already going hungry. Excellent growing weather and good harvests provided temporary relief, but now prices have once again soared to record heights.
    High oil prices and a weaker dollar have played some part by driving up production costs, but they cannot come close to explaining why wholesale food prices have doubled since 2004. The current price surge reflects a shortfall in supply to meet demand, which forces consumers, fearing that production will continue to fall short, to bid up prices to secure their supplies. What explains this imbalance?
    Crop production has not slowed: total world grain production last year was the third highest in history. Indeed, it has grown since 2004 at rates that, on average, exceed the long-term trend since 1980 and roughly match the trends of the past decade. Even with bad weather in Russia and northern Australia last year, global average crop yields were only 1 percent below what the trends would lead us to expect, a modest gap. The problem is therefore one of rapidly rising demand. Conventional wisdom points to Asia as the source, but that’ s not so. Consumption in China and India is rising no faster than it has in previous decades.
    That starring role belongs to biofuels. In the context of global shortages of fossil energy—oil and natural-gas in particular—governments worldwide are focusing on biofuels as renewable energy alternatives. Since 2004 biofuels from crops have almost doubled the rate of growth in global demand for grain and sugar and pushed up the yearly growth in demand for vegetable oil by around 40 percent. Increasing demand for corn, wheat, soybeans, sugar and vegetable oil competes for limited acres of farmland, which means that tightness in one crop market translates to tightness in others.
    Overall, global agriculture can keep up with growing demand if the weather is favorable, but even the mildly poor 2010 growing season was enough to force a draw down in stockpiles of grain, which sent total grain stocks to very low levels. Low reserves and rising demand for both food and biofuels create the risk of greater shortfalls in supply and send prices skyward.
    Although most experts recognize the important role biofuels play in food price, they often underestimate their effects. Many of them misunderstand the economic models, which are nearly all designed to estimate biofuels’ effects on prices over the long term, after farmers have ample time to plow up and plant more land, and do not speak to prices in the shorter term. Our primary obligation is to feed the hungry. Biofuels are undermining our ability to do so. Governments can stop the recurring pattern of food crises by weighing the demand for biofuels against that for edible food.

选项
答案A
解析 食品价格上涨是由于全球范围内食品的供不应求造成的。文章第三段经过分析后又明确指出，在供应量并没有明显减少的情况下，食品价格的上涨是由于需求的增加引起的。那么需求为什么会增加呢?很多人自然会联想到亚洲的发展中国家在食品消费方面的快速上升。但是作者在第三段中明确否认了这一看法。作者指出，中国和印度的食品消耗量的增长不比前些年快。有很多人很可能由此选定[E]。但是我们这里需要注意的是，文中提到的粮食需求主要有两个方面，一方面是用来食用的粮食，另一方面是用来生成生物燃料的粮食。虽然亚洲地区人口所食用的粮食量没有明显上升，但是不能由此就断定亚洲地区对粮食的整体需求没有明显上升。文章第四段指出，在全球化石能源紧张的情况下，各国都在积极探索使用生物能源，因此导致全球范围内粮食需求的上升。因此，这一题的准确答案应该是[A]。
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