Rice price pinches budgets, diets in W.Africa

By Pascal Fletcher

DAKAR (Reuters) - Rice, the daily staple shared in family and communal food bowls across West Africa, risks becoming a luxury as rocketing price rises squeeze the pockets and stomachs of the region's people.

Prices for the commodity have soared this year, part of a wave of increases for major food cereals which humanitarian experts say is a threatening a "silent tsunami" of hunger and increased hardship for the world's poor, especially in Africa.

Fanned by the price hikes, food riots have flared like a trail of gunpowder through West Africa, sending governments scrambling to curb food exports, ease taxes on imports and increase subsidies for basic staples.

West African leaders are also dusting off often-delayed plans to boost domestic food farming, long sacrificed to imports.

From Nouakchott to Ouagadougou and N'Djamena and further south in Lagos and Kinshasa, ordinary West Africans are feeling the impact on tight daily budgets of more expensive rice -- multiplied by higher costs of fuel and other basic staples.

"It's really tough. The kilogram of rice that I used to buy for 300 CFA francs ($0.73) now costs 350 CFA. Since everything else has gone up as well, you can't make ends meet any more," said Odile Zongo, a domestic worker in Burkina Faso's capital Ouagadougou.

Eric Hazard, Oxfam International's regional campaign manager for economic justice in West Africa, said most ordinary people in the region were already spending between 50 to 80 percent of their income on food, so the price spikes were really hurting.

"Those living on the edge are particularly vulnerable to these high food prices," Hazard told Reuters.