Food shortages
Interesting article in the Times today about food shortages around the globe.
I'm hearing lots of grumbling in the break room at work about food prices, which is unusual in itself, as food has been relatively affordable throughout my entire working life. Not seeing any signs of shortages in these parts just yet. How will people react if bread hits 5 bucks a loaf?
The Deniliquin mill, the largest rice mill in the Southern Hemisphere, once processed enough grain to meet the needs of 20 million people around the world. But six long years of drought have taken a toll, reducing Australia’s rice crop by 98 percent and leading to the mothballing of the mill last December.
Ten thousand miles separate the mill’s hushed rows of oversized silos and sheds — beige, gray and now empty — from the riotous streets of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, but a widening global crisis unites them.
The collapse of Australia’s rice production is one of several factors contributing to a doubling of rice prices in the last three months — increases that have led the world’s largest exporters to restrict exports severely, spurred panicked hoarding in Hong Kong and the Philippines, and set off violent protests in countries including Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Haiti, Indonesia, Italy, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, the Philippines, Thailand, Uzbekistan and Yemen.
I'm hearing lots of grumbling in the break room at work about food prices, which is unusual in itself, as food has been relatively affordable throughout my entire working life. Not seeing any signs of shortages in these parts just yet. How will people react if bread hits 5 bucks a loaf?
Labels: food
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8 Comments:
When bread hits $5 a loaf, I'm either going to start making my own or just say to heck with it and go on South Beach.
Seriously though, what's happening in Haiti is deplorable. I read an article a few weeks ago about people resorting to "clay cookies". So sad.
By
weege, at 2:50 PM
Wheat prices are already over 3x what they were several months ago. Fortunately, they've recently started to retreat a bit. Still, some flours are up 50% in the grocery store. King Arthur has an apology up on its www site about high wheat and flour prices.
WRT the US and rice: You wouldn't think it, but the US is fortunately a minor net exporter of rice, and our crop is generally good stuff. That doesn't mean prices won't go up though.
Personally, I think the US has been both pushing farm commodity prices low and pushing for high yields for a long time. (Perhaps this has been a kind of covert agriwar, to ruin farming in other other lands and make them dependent on the US for food. We do grow a lot of it, after all.) If the US stops doing that, everyone could see food prices go up, even without additional worsening factors (bad weather, switches to ethanol production, energy price increases, and so on).
By
Joseph H. Vilas, at 3:05 PM
In an ironic, long-term sorta way, the recent collapse in real estate prices could have a positive effect on the US as a food producer. The Central Valley in California--which Mr. D. used to call home--is one of the major producers of vegetables (if not THE major producer) in the country. But it was all being gobbled up for subdivisions for commuters to the Bay Area and L.A.
Now, with collapsing real estate prices and high gas prices and rising food prices, subdivisions in the hinterlands make less sense than they ever did.
By
Anonymous, at 9:04 PM
There's also a bit of irony in what's going on in Haiti, as I was helpfully filled in listening to Democracy Now on the way home (God bless that show). In 1987, Haiti grew most of its food domestically. IMF-backed liberalization of food policies opened it up to cheap (and subsidized) US food, which put most farmers out of work, and lead to a growing unemployed urban class.
Low food prices are not an unalloyed good in the long run, as higher food prices have the nice tendency of giving a lot of people good work to do and keeping your domestic food production high. In general, it's much better to focus on helping the poor be better able to pay for food than to try to get the cost of food as low as possible.
By
Unknown, at 9:52 PM
i think it depends somewhat on the reason for high food prices.
if it's because there's not enough food to go around, we're in trouble.
By
Barry, at 10:43 PM
What is "not enough food to go around?" Food isn't some fixed quantity that we have a limited resource of -- the amount available is produced by the amount of productive land available, the way that land is put into use, and getting the food distributed equitably.
There has, with the very, very rare exception, almost never been a famine in the history of mankind where food production was the problem. Access to food, because of economic, political, or sometimes physical conditions, is almost always to blame.
During the Potato Famine, Ireland was exporting large amounts of grain to England. During the famines that would regularly hit medieval China, the next provinces over, often less than 100 miles away, were having surpluses. Famines in China were effectively eradicated by a road construction program. The 1980s famines in Ethiopia/Eritrea were caused almost exclusively by the civil war there.
If we run into a food crunch, it won't be because we're short of productive land. It will be because that land is being used for something else, and the politics and economics of repurposing it will be tricky.
If we ever ran into a food shortage in the US, we could probably solve a great deal of it by convincing every suburbanite with a half acre of grass to till it up and put in a large vegetable garden.
By
Unknown, at 10:53 AM
I would define not enough food to go around as when supply of food < population times minimal subsistence levels of calories + protein.
For example, the population of Haiti is listed as 8,300,000 or so. What's the subsistence level of calories per day? A thousand or so? Protein is what 50 - 60 grams per day? So if you're living off rice, you need what, 10-12 cups per day per person for bare subsistence?
I have no idea what the supply of rice is in Haiti these days. And obviously, even the western hemisphere's poorest people shouldn't have to live on only 12 cups of rice per day.
But that would be how i would define "not enough food to go around."
By
Barry, at 4:16 PM
Again, basically, that doesn't happen, at least in the global sense. Famines and food riots happen when food is in the wrong places and can't get to where its needed; it costs too much because those who control the distribution of food are not economically motivated to sell it at a lower price; people cannot get to the food without fearing for their personal safety, or other reasons.
The notion that we could solve world hunger if we just grew more food is essentially never true or relevant. Similarly, the notion that people starve because people stopped growing food is also rarely ever true or relevant.
Starvation, famine, food riots, food shortages, etc. are all, fundamentally and essentially, political problems.
By
Unknown, at 7:56 PM
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