January 21, 2008

Food prices keep going up and up and up

Hat tip to BoingBoing for the link to this longish and depressing article at The Guardian:
Is this the end of cheap food?
Outside a Co-op supermarket in Edinburgh on Friday, I met three sisters, all doing their shopping for this weekend. In their baskets were tins, mainly - Ambrosia creamed rice and minted peas. They were peering at stickers and examining labels with the look of hardened sceptics.

'Terrible, just terrible,' said Betty Pryde, at 82 the eldest of the three. 'Look at the price of these eggs.' They were free range, and cost �1.28 for six - 60 per cent more than in most supermarkets a year ago. 'Everything's gone up.'
BoingBoing distilled the article into the four primary reasons for the price increases:
1. Oil prices: "$100 a barrel means food that is four-times as expensive to plant, irrigate, harvest and transport as it was six years ago. Some commodities brokers are now betting on oil going to $200 a barrel within a decade."

2. Climate: "drought, hurricanes and floods around the world last year made for terrible harvests - from Australia to the Caribbean and the United Kingdom."

3. Market speculation and use of crops for fuel: "Since George Bush announced a rush to corn-based ethanol it's done well for American corn farmers - 20 per cent of whose harvest, subsidised by the government, went into fuel tanks rather than flour mills this year."

4. Economic boom in China and India: "Around the world, and through history, people have eaten more meat as they have become richer. This is called the nutrition transition and it's now happening, very quickly, in the two most populous nations on the planet."
Although, it was not George Bush who announced the rush to corn. He asked for alternative fuels and companies like Archer Daniels Midland requested and received from Congress huge subsidies for corn-based ethanol production. It's our tax dollars that is bankrolling this folly... Posted by DaveH at January 21, 2008 1:40 PM