Washington: : The “improvement in the diets of people in India and China”, which is forcing the governments there to keep food “inside” is a cause for the current global supply shortage, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said. In an interactive session at the Peace Corps 2008 Country Directors Conference, Rice said the ongoing food crisis was mainly due to “four causes”, even as she specifically pointed out the exchange rate and the simple “inability” of getting food to the people. “There are, kind of, four causes that we really have to look at. We’ve got to understand better what is happening in some conflict areas in terms of the distribution of food. It’s obvious that there are places like Sudan, where we’ve had a sudden up tick in the inability to distribute food,” Rice said. “We obviously have to look at places where production seems to be declining and declining to the point that people are actually putting export caps on the amount of food.”

“Now, some of that is not so much declining production as apparently improvement in the diets of people, for instance, in China and India, and then pressures to keep food inside the country. So, that is another element that we have to look at,” she said.

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