May 15 (Ap) – Joseph Sullivan, a senior adviser to the Lindsay Group of America, published an article on May 12 on the bimonthly website of Foreign Policy entitled “Biden’s version of “America First” policy is spreading pain around the world. The full text is summarized below:
Biden may say he rejects former President Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda. But the criteria should not be words, but actions. The Biden administration is still pursuing U.S. interests in ways that are detrimental to the interests of the rest of the world.
The Biden administration, for example, allowed only a small number of new vaccines to be exported. Biden’s stance on giving up vaccine patents masks a very disturbing fact that a real delivery of vaccines can save lives. Biden’s U.S. stockpile of vaccines has shared only 3 million doses in the district.
Other policies, if not deliberately implemented like vaccine nationalism, do no less harm to other countries. While the Biden administration’s economic policies are designed to boost domestic growth, it has led to historic increases in the prices of the world’s major commodities, including food. This round of rising global food prices will hit the poor hardest and has forced foreign policymakers to choose between alleviating hunger and mitigating the economic impact of the Coronavirus.
As the Fed expands its balance sheet and prints dollars as quickly as it has in the past, food commodities such as corn, soybeans and wheat rise in price. That’s because trading in these markets, like most other global markets, is usually denominated in dollars. If the Fed injects trillions of dollars of new money into the financial system, it will have more dollars to buy the same amount. That’s why prices have been soaring, not just for food, but also for timber, copper, U.S. real estate and the stock market.
Take Mexico, for example. Most of the country’s staple food, corn, is now imported from the United States. Corn prices have risen 46 per cent in dollar terms since February 2020, the last month before the stimulus began, causing a big problem for Mexico’s poor.
Mexico is not an exception. The FOOD AND AGRICULTURE ORGANIZATION OF THE UNITED NATIONS (FAO) FOOD AND AGRICULTURE ORGANIZATION (FAO) POSTED ITS BIGGEST YEAR-ON-YEAR INCREASE IN A DECADE. In Turkey, there are reports of people hoarding foods such as infant formula because food inflation is thought to be higher than the recent official 17 per cent. In Russia, authorities imposed export restrictions on wheat and sunflower seeds to increase domestic supplies and drive down domestic prices. Given that Russia is one of the world’s largest exporters of agricultural products, this could have a new ripple effect across the developing world.
If central bankers are feeling the pressure of rising food prices, the suffering in developing countries is the greatest. Households in poorer countries spend more of their budgets on food. So the United States can be least concerned about food inflation triggered by the Biden administration.
