Josette Sheeran, head of the UN World Food Program, warned that the global rise in basic food costs could continue until 2010, blaming soaring energy and grain prices—the effects of climate change and demand for biofuels. Some food prices rose 40% last year, and the WFP fears the world's poorest will buy less food, or be forced to rely on aid. Speaking after briefing the European Parliament, Sheeran said the agency needed an extra $375 million for food projects this year plus $125 million to transport the food aid. She said she saw no quick solution to high food and fuel costs. "The assessment is that we are facing high food prices at least for the next couple of years," she said. Sheeran said global food reserves are at their lowest level in 30 years—with enough to cover the need for emergency deliveries for 53 days, compared with 169 days in 2007. Sheeran has already warned that the WFP is considering plans to ration food aid due to a shortage of funds.

From the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), March 3:

On February 20 more than three thousand Salvadoran bakers participated in a march to protest the high cost of flour and other commodities used by their sector. The marchers demanded that the government step in to alleviate the crisis by means of a subsidy. Thousands of Salvadoran families remain unable to put bread on the table, in part due to the rising cost of flour, which bakers are then forced to pass along to their customers.

From the Iraq Freedom Congress (IFC), March 8:

On the 8th of March This Year...
"No to Women Killing... No to the Gangs Who Promote Sexual Cleansing...
Yes to an Iraq that is Free of Women Haters"
The 8th of March is the International Women's Day, on which the voices are lauding and protests against sexual discrimination are widening every day even in the most developed countries. In Iraq however, the discrimination against women has reached to a degree of sexual cleansing carried out by sectarian militias linked to the regime of mullahs in Iran and groups of Al Qaeda. These groups have committed the most heinous crimes against humanity, and women in particular to the extent of sexual genocide in the cities of Basra, Baghdad, Mosul and Diyala.

Iraq's President Jalal Talabani said March 8 he seeks a "strategic" partnership with Turkey as he wrapped up a visit to Ankara aimed at easing tension sparked by the Turkish military's eight-day incursion into Iraq last month. Speaking to members of a Turkish-Iraqi joint business group, Talabani also called on Turkish interests to invest in Iraq's oil sector. "We want to forge strategic relations in all fields including oil, the economy, trade, culture and politics," Talabani said. Addressing Turkish fears, Talabani stressed that Kurdish rebels would not be tolerated inside Iraq's borders, and said Iraq was continuing to put pressure on the PKK to lay down arms. (AP, March 8)

A double bombing in a crowded Baghdad shopping district killed at least 53 people and wounded 130 March 6. The blasts took place in the primarily Shi'ite, middle-class Baghdad neighborhood of Karradah. The tactic was to draw in the people with the first blast—especially security and medical workers—before a second bomb detonates. (AP, March 8) Iraqi security forces uncovered a mass grave containing about 100 bodies in the Diyala province March 8. (Xinhua, March 8)

The leaders of Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela formally ended their dispute March 7 with handshakes and embraces at the 20th Rio Group Summit in the Dominican Republic, approving a "Santo Domingo Declaration," which condemns Colombia's March 1 cross-border raid in Ecuador but emphasizes the need for regional cooperation in combating illegal armed groups. Colombian President Alvaro Uribe apologized for the raid and pledged to refrain from further such incursions, in exchange for commitments on cooperation. The Rio Group, established in 1986, is a regional bloc aimed at promoting political and economic cooperation.

In its 2007 Annual Report, released March 5, the International Narcotics Control Board called on the governments of Bolivia and Peru to ban coca chewing, as well as its sale or export. The indigenous people of the Andes have chewed coca for thousands of years, and the call is likely to fall on deaf ears in the Andes.

Iran plans to open a television station "for all of Latin America," to be based in the coca-growing Chaparé region of Bolivia, President Evo Morales announced at a gathering of cocaleros after his re-election as president of Bolivia's coca-growers union. The station would be "for all of Bolivia, for all of Latin America, recognizing the great struggle of this peasant movement," Morales told the gathering in Cochabamba. (AP, Feb. 19)