The world has been facing some tough days recently. Burma's tsunami, western China's earthquake, and the continual rising of food prices has wreaked havoc on many of the world's poorest people. As has been discussed earlier, food prices have been escalating in Central Asis for months now and show no signs of slowing. These rising prices have affected nearly everyone in the world, but the poor are especially vulnerable with one Kazakhstani woman stating ‘all we buy is food, food and food’ and some cannot even do that.

This situation is not only dreadful because of the human suffering, but in the possibilities for greater unrest and instability in nations and societies already in tenious situations, such as Afghanistan where World Food Program officials are warning that the poor and unemployed are being hit the hardest and that their is fear for greater unrest. It has been reported that millions of Afghani's are spending up to 70% of their income on food alone and that many are starting to go hungry.

Even Kazakhstan, the world's fifth largest wheat exporter, has been hit hard by this problem. Its citizens purchasing power has been ‘devasted’ by these rising food prices and the overall economy is suffering, with a Standard & Poor official predicting that its economic growth will fall sharply to below 4% in 2008, well below its recent double digit levels.

Central and Greater Asia are also facing rising levels of inflation as this story reports, the region's central banks are going to have to soon make major decisions concerning interest rates. They must decide if food inflation itself warrants a corrective move in interest rates. Glen Maguire, a chief economist in the region, stated that the key debate was ‘how soon the central banks make the transition from viewing food price inflation as a short-term, cost-push effect to treating it as a long-term structural driver of inflation.’ In these banker's eyes, this does not appear to be an ebbing problem that will go away anytime soon.

Lastly, here is a sobering piece detailing the health-related problems stemming from malnutrition, facing many of Central Asia's most unfortunate.