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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B
解析 作者在第二段中提到现在全球市场上的粮食产品价格反映了一种供不应求的形势，那到底是产量降低了还是需求上升了呢?作者在第三段第一句话中就明确说明：农作物生产并没有减缓。去年，即使是在天气条件不利的情况下，全球农作物平均产量只比预期下降了约1％，缺口不大。由此，我们可以判断本题的正确答案应该选[B]，而[D]错误。
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