dagblog - Comments for "Foodflation, Food Insecurity and Civil Unrest"

If it is allowed that the

moat — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 04:08:00 +0000

If it is allowed that the results of price increases in different places have a wide range of different causes and effects, the measure of "actual inflation" is not a precise fix upon the value of a dollar but more of a consensus about the merit of saving money versus using it before it loses buying power. Obviously, wage earners below a certain scale are not participating in the question. They spend what they have because they have to.

So, if people in different places make similar decisions based upon sharply different numbers, what measure allows them to be compared accurately?

Awesome comment, quinn. This

DF — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 20:49:56 +0000

In reply to Meat. Meat. Meat Meat Meat.

Awesome comment, quinn. This is (sort of) what I was getting at above, but you've got to dig into the aggregates, not just slap two graphs together (like Simons) and declare yourself clairvoyant.

I have a good friend who

DF — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 20:42:00 +0000

In reply to I received a similar account

I have a good friend who moved into the city of San Francisco about five years ago. When he did, his rent easily tripled, but so did his income. Now he's getting ready to cash out his stock and move abroad. Despite the higher prices inside the city proper, even relative to the prices just across the bay, he came out ahead without question.

This is part of what bothers me about Donal's insistence on his own anecdotal account of rising food prices. He tells us in his posts, over and over again, that he's paying much more for food than he once was, but this doesn't represent any kind of actual analysis. Forget about the fact that he's not offering us actual data, he's completely neglecting to look at how things are moving in his own region, with respect for both prices and wages, relative to other regions. Then he labels that "inflation."

I'm not saying that he's wrong about paying more. He probably knows very well whether he is or not, but that doesn't tell us anything about actual inflation. It's a single, qualitative observation not even worthy of descriptive statistics.

Rising food prices may have

acanuck — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 22:46:57 +0000

In reply to It is really hard to get

Rising food prices may have been a proximate cause of the Tunisian turmoil, but lack of jobs and hatred for a corrupt, ossified government turned it into a revolution. The point's still valid. People can scrape by for months without a job, and endure tyranny for years, but after a couple of days without food, they're open to desperate measures.

It is really hard to get

David Seaton — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 19:17:25 +0000

In reply to Foodflation, Food Insecurity and Civil Unrest

It is really hard to get middle class people in developed countries interested in this subject because food is a relatively small part of their total expenses. But it is something that can quickly destabilize regimes across the third world, where food is practically the entire budget of the population... and this can have very serious consequences in the rest of the world.

I wrote a column about this way back in 2007 about how dangerous it was that wheat and corn prices were climbing and my editor bitched about it for weeks. "David, nobody's interested in that". I hope that what is happening in Tunisia gets people to thinking.

Less meat eating is probably

Michael Maiello — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 14:33:35 +0000

In reply to Meat. Meat. Meat Meat Meat.

Less meat eating is probably what the future holds for many in the West, for the reasons you say. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I also don't think it's a necessary thing. The world has plenty of arrid land to meet not just people's food needs but their preferences. The problem is that while there's a functioning global market to govern the sale of food stuffs, there isn't a functioning global system to produce it. I suppose this isn't unique to food but it does strike me that many of our problems are the result of selling things on a global market while regulating production in a hyper-local way.

Look at American agriculture. We subsidize people not to grow crops for which there is vast global need. It wouldn't be a bad thing to have some central planning.

I'm in Germany and my

Beetlejuice — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 13:54:37 +0000

In reply to I think maybe DF wins the

I'm in Germany and my landlord has been complaining about the price of food at the markets for the last year.

Well, we always outbid so

Michael Maiello — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 05:42:46 +0000

In reply to I think maybe DF wins the

Well, we always outbid so long as we have a reasonably strong dollar. But... that's not what we're doing now. I think people forget that one of Bill Clinton's genius strokes, so far as American consumers are concerned, was his strong dollar policies.

Swords to ploughshares (or

Resistance — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 02:45:59 +0000

In reply to I think maybe DF wins the

Swords to ploughshares (or swords to plowshares) is a concept in which military weapons or technologies are converted for peaceful civilian applications.

The phrase originates from the Book of Isaiah, who prophesies of a future Messianic Age where there will be peace amongst all humankind:

They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore. — Isaiah 2:4 & Micah 4:3

The ploughshare is often used to symbolize creative tools that benefit mankind, as opposed to destructive tools of war, symbolized by the sword, a similar sharp metal tool with an arguably opposite use.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swords_to_ploughshares

Meat. Meat. Meat Meat Meat.

quinn esq — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 01:45:52 +0000

In reply to Foodflation, Food Insecurity and Civil Unrest

Meat. Meat. Meat Meat Meat. (And some commodity speculation.) And in an environment being whacked by climate change.

But the key is meat. (And I say this as an unrepentant omnivore.)

In the US/Canada, raw food prices are 10%-20% of the finished food product. Not the rise in most raw food prices is heavily insulated. Plus, as a % of consumer spending, food is a fraction of housing - about 1/3 or 1/4. Plus, there is a lot of room to substitute across foods when a particular price rises, or to move down from highly-processed foods. Plus, there's an incredible amount of food being eaten outside the home, which costs.

The real impact is that China and other rapidly-developing nations are adding rapidly meat to their diets. And that takes 2-10 pounds of grains or veggies per pound of meat produced, plus has varying impacts on energy use, GHG emissions, fertilizer and water inputs, etc.

A couple of years ago, some people enjoyed going on and on (and on) about ethanol as the driver of world food price inflation, blaming it. But it was pure kneejerkery. Because rising MEAT demand was dwarfing it.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_4ify7vDXrDs/SB8rqnF-m5I/AAAAAAAACj4/_7hfPBxzqQ...

Or as the NYT put it in their piece on meat....

"The world's total meat supply was 71 million tons in 1961. In 2007, it was estimated to be 284 million tons. Per capita consumption has more than doubled over that period. (In the developing world, it rose twice as fast, doubling in the past 20 years.)"

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/weekinreview/27bittman.html?pagewanted...

China's pork consumption went from 22 to 50 million tons from 1990 to 2009.

Now, I've got no problems with the Chinese eating more meat. But I suspect we're going to have to get used to eating quite a bit less. Which I also have no problems with.

And yes, China and other nations consumers with rising currencies are going to bid up the prices of food. But - for us as a people - I find it hard to shed a tear for we North Americans on this front. I mean, we ate food produced by the peoples of the world for nothing, a song, for decades. Fresh fruit and vegetables and spices and whatever we wanted, when we wanted, for nothing. OPity those who lived on our banana and coffee plantations, right?

But now the world can buy too, and we're crying. (Or - in the case of the rich - whining.)

Because, as a people, we North Americans are assholes.

For our poorer households however, I do shed a tear. And we're going to need to get real busy, real quick, to fix this problem - with better wages for the poor, a better safety net, better training and education in cooking (because the poor are perhaps the most deskilled in this regard), better access to good food, etc.

Meat.