The White House also sought to calm the frayed nerves in India to Mr Bush’s remarks that the rising prosperity of it’s large middle class is contributing to rising foods prices around the world saying the US saw “higher living standards” of people there as a “good thing”.
“Many developing nations like India or China are having greatly increased demand, which obviously is having an impact on price,” the White House deputy spokesman, Mr Scott Stanzel, said at a briefing responding to a question on the crude oil price crossing $120-mark.
“There are a lot of different ways that we can reduce our dependence, but we have more to do and it’s just — and also I would point out that, obviously, the demand for oil is growing around the world,” he said.
Asked to clarify Mr Bush’s remarks on Indian’s food habits, Mr Stanzel said, “We think that it is a good thing that countries are developing; that more and more people have higher and higher standards of living.” However, he apparently did not go back on Mr Bush’s point that Indian food habits were contributing to spiralling food prices, which in turn, were worsen ing the global food crisis.
“The point that I think was to be made is that as you increase your standard of living, the food that you eat can venture more into meats that require more commodities to feed the livestock which, you know, uses more of those commodities, whether it’s corn, or wheat, or other commodities and it drives up the price. So that is just a function of how those food prices that we’ve seen spike around the world," Mr Stanzel said.
Three days ago, Mr Bush had specifically taken the case of Indian middle class to argue that its demand for better nutrition was a factor in pushing the global food prices up.
The White House official also defended US policy on biofuels saying it was having just a “small impact” on the rising prices of food commodities.
“There’s been a lot of discussion about biofuels and the impact that biofuels have on increase food prices around the world. As you’ll see here, over the last year, food prices have increased about 43 per cent around the world,” Mr Stanzel said.
“Of that portion, an increase in the biofuel production, about 1.5 per cent of that is due to an increase in biofuel production,” Mr Stanzel said.
“So the fact that we are making more biofuels so we reduce our dependence on foreign energy has an impact, but we believe it is a small impact,” he added.