Ending The Crisis
While there was no physical shortage of rice, increasing prices created an panic that supplies could not match demand. This fear was lessened when the United States allowed Japan to export unsold American rice (stockpiled in Japan because of a World Trade Organization decision). As of 16 May, anticipation of the move had already lowered prices by 14% in a single week. Although the rice from Japan was never actually sold or shipped, the world market price continued to fall every month of 2008 thereafter.
Read more about this topic: 2008 Global Rice Shortage
Famous quotes containing the word crisis:
“The people of the United States have been fortunate in many things. One of the things in which we have been most fortunate has been that so far, due perhaps to certain basic virtues in our traditional ways of doing things, we have managed to keep the crisis of western civilization, which has devastated the rest of the world and in which we are as much involved as anybody, more or less at arm’s length.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)