Mar
26
Food prices soaring worldwide
By
The Associated Press is reporting “From subsistence farmers eating rice in Ecuador to gourmets feasting on escargot in France, consumers worldwide face rising food prices in what analysts call a perfect storm of conditions. Freak weather is a factor. But so are dramatic changes in the global economy, including higher oil prices, lower food reserves and growing consumer demand in China and India.
The world’s poorest nations still harbor the greatest hunger risk. Clashes over bread in Egypt killed at least two people last week, and similar food riots broke out in Burkina Faso and Cameroon this month.
But food protests now crop up even in Italy. And while the price of spaghetti has doubled in Haiti, the cost of miso is packing a hit in Japan.
“It’s not likely that prices will go back to as low as we’re used to,” said Abdolreza Abbassian, economist and secretary of the Intergovernmental Group for Grains for the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization…”
Read the rest of the article.
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The perfect storm of devaluing dollars, rising oil prices, and crappy weather are going to drive food prices up for the next decade or longer.
Can we say population overshoot?
7 Comments
March 26th, 2008 at 11:51 am
Would you recommend that we discontinue the practices that lead to devalued dollars?
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March 26th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
you mean the war, Tim?
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March 26th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
No. The war, per se, is not devaluing our dollars.
Certainly it represents excessive spending and this is part of the problem. But excessive spending, in and of itself, does not devalue dollars. However, when excessive spending is funded entirely by printing new additional money that has no tangible backing other than future debt, it is a key contributing factor.
The source though, in my opinion, is the federal authority given to the central banking system, The Federal Reserve, to manipulate the economy, set interest rates for the industry, and print “fiat” money to inject into the system (that’s fake money).
Generating new additional fake, debt-based money into the economy devalues all currently existing money. This also is the source of inflation. Inflation is the corollary of the devaluation of dollars.
This is what I meant.
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March 26th, 2008 at 3:19 pm
Billions are being spent on the war when that money could be used for something else. Those dollars could stay in taxpayers’ pockets, to be spent for goods and services in our neighborhoods and towns. This money could be spent more wisely by the federal government, on essential programs and services. Indeed, the money might be shifted from maintaining forces in/near Iraq to caring for the thousands of soldiers who have already served and have returned home.
And now the deficit is very high indeed.
I would recommend that we discontinue the war, and then we can choose our leaders more wisely. I’m not 100% sure that Kerry wouldn’t have led us into this debacle. Rather than casting a glance back at 2000 or 2004, I am focusing on now and 2008. Shall we do everything we can to avoid being “led” by a simpleton such as Bush in the future? We could also focus on choosing a leader who does not surround him/herself with foreign policy advisors who are pro-war.
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March 26th, 2008 at 8:01 pm
but the billions spent on the war CANNOT be spent on something else, it is all funny money printed to cover the “need” of the war.
it is the defecit, and it apparently can only be run up by the military industrial complex side of the government, or at least that is how it has been
if we could just get people to understand that renewable energy or health care or what-have-you is also national security, we could use that money
until then, forget it
or am I missing something?
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March 26th, 2008 at 10:48 pm
It’s time to get out there and plow the Front Fourty.
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March 27th, 2008 at 8:27 am
We need to focus on local food security. Yes, victory gardens in everyone’s front forty (square feet) and back forty, but also land-use planning that recognizes the need to preserve farm land and the water sources that make farming possible.
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