Food Riots
Last month I wrote about the possibility of global food riots and was roundly mocked in the comments by assorted sunny optimists like Ellen who were confident this would never bother our financial elites. The World Bank told the G-7 Finance Ministers over the weekend that global food prices have risen 83% in the last three years and spiked in the last three months.
At a weekend conference in Washington, finance ministers and central bankers of seven leading industrial nations called for urgent action to deal with the price spikes, and several of them demanded a reconsideration of biofuel policies adopted recently in the West.
Perhaps the "its not our problem" smugness will recede in the next few weeks.
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Comments (12)
And just what did the G-1 Finance Minister have to say, eh?
Without the snark, the point is that our "financial elites" are intending to inflate their way out of our current financial malaise. As they'd be willing to tell you off the record, "Inflation? Bring it on!"
April 15, 2008 10:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm backing Ellen on this one. The snipe is Jonathan's alone. Reading communiques from G-1 without interpretation, or the context of past communiques, is an amateur's mistake.
Jonathan needs to appreciate that there is more to franchise than just money-making. Does he really believe all those feel-good green Shell Oil commercials on TV? What's that about? Is Shell no longer polluting the world and making gobs of money on dirty oil? That will be the case when the G-1 press releases can be taken at face value; and they really care.
April 16, 2008 10:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
Jonathan, Agreed. The push back on biofuels will be substantial. This ush back along is one of the reason that water/water rights/water use will be the great issues of the coming decades. We need to find a better way to think about how we build, where we build and what we build. Consider the amount of people building in the Southwest and moving farther outside of the LA basin and SD into the surrounding mountains.
We've already seen the effect that Global Warming is having on the southern hemisphere. As I see it the issues that we have come down to leadership or the lack of it that the US should have been exhibiting over the last 8 years on these issues.
Its clear that if we aren't ready to lead that things are going to become increasingly worse. If we have a year of lower crop yields worlwide things could become dangeous. Very dangerous.
April 15, 2008 10:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
You can easily solve much of our country's food price crisis just by not growing so much beef. I doubt that a more wasteful food manufacturing scheme has ever been developed. The grain needed to put a steak on every table is enough to feed something like 100 people without the steak. It is true that protein foods are valuable, but beef is just too uneconomical a form of protein.
Then, if we stop subsidizing Iowa to manufacture ethanol, we can cut our consumption of oil, as well as have more and less costly vegetable foods available. There are just too many possible solutions to the food price spike for me to take it seriously.
Like a very large percentage of the problems we face, this one is largely caused by the rapacious greed of big businessmen/farmers. One more reason to get rid of Republican politicians.
April 16, 2008 12:17 AM | Reply | Permalink
Quoting truth. This coming from a guy that loves a steak too.
April 16, 2008 12:28 AM | Reply | Permalink
Actually not. Cattle convert a lot of grass, which we can't eat, to beef that we can eat. Feeding cattle grain is another matter. The issue is not beef, but grain fed vs grass fed beef.
In any case without grain grown for animal feed a bad crop year could have devistating human consequences. Whereas with animals in the picture, a slaughter of part of the herd means a grain shortfall results in fewer animals being fed as opposed to fewer humans being fed.
April 16, 2008 10:49 AM | Reply | Permalink
This is a huge issue! There was a heart wrenching story about the food riots in Haiti earlier this week. The people are mixing salt, sugar and DIRT to make "DIRT cookies" just to keep from starving. It was an outrage! America needs to wake up to what's going on in the world. Right now 33 countries are prone to rioting due to the increasing prices of food. Already India has stopped exporting rice because they are concerned about having enough food for their own population. When more nations take that route, the whole world is going to be in trouble. Bush mentioned something about providing food relief to rioting countries. But at this point, Bush can say anything and not mean a damn word of it. This is a paramount world issue that affects every human being on earth and you are more than right to spotlight it in your blog. Keep posting on the subject.
April 16, 2008 11:48 AM | Reply | Permalink
Bill Moyers' Journal, along with the PBS program Expose, last week featured a program on WaPo's recent investigations about agricultural subsidies.
According to the show, one little-known agricultural program in the U.S. provides subsidies for farmers in the case of disaster. Problem is, farmers (the large ones in particular), with the assistance of their local government and the Feds as well, have (surprise!) learned to game the system.
Much of the land previously dedicated to rice farming now lies fallow because the owners have realized they can make more of a profit by claiming a subsidy for a farming loss than they can by actually farming the land. Coming at just about the same time as the reports on the sudden rise in the price of rice, which is the main staple food of a huge part of the population of the world, the information in the Moyers' program was jarring. And our ethanol subsidies are just as bad.
I can't help but wonder how much of the problem with the world's food supply is a result of these sorts of wrong-headed and short-sighted farming policies in the U.S. (and possibly elsewhere). That said, the world's ever-increasing population was always sure to lead to food supply problems eventually. Combine that issue with the problem of global warming and it wouldn't be terribly surprising to find that the time is now.
April 16, 2008 7:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
Re: You can easily solve much of our country's food price crisis just by not growing so much beef.
This is absolutely true. If everyone in the wealthier countries cut their meat consumption by, say, a third we could make a huge dent in world hunger and send grain prices falling.
April 16, 2008 8:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
There are a few related issues that complicate this discussion.http://cryptogon.com/
"In a bid to stem panic, grain exports halted."
Sounds like a guarantee of panic to me.
http://www.eurotrib.com/?op=displaystory;sid=2008/4/16/193536/451 Subsidized bread staving off starvation and uprisings.
The cattle thing : CAFOs allowed to proliferate and find 'economies of scale' that pollute the aquifer of the Mississippi River Basin have been covered in Grist, BlueBloggin ( use tag search in the blog ) and Berry Street Beacon. That's drinking water, people.
And Josh just posted another : $115 bbl oil.
I tend to get nuts on this one. An Oil Drum contributor laid out the way out of the trap. Nobody seems to know.
http://ergosphere.blogspot.com/
April 16, 2008 11:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
Charlie Rose tonight had a very informed guest on the subject.
April 17, 2008 2:50 AM | Reply | Permalink
In a business sense, the real bottom line is what will food shortages cost the US.
Seems to me the countrys most effected by food shortages are those where our manufacturing base resettled to simply because wages were cheaper. Dead/starving workers cannot produce a sell able end product. So if wages in those countrys are increased so the average worker can put food on their table then the cost of goods manufactured for and consumed in the US will increase.
The US consumer will pay the price for the increasing costs of food on a global scale thru the power of their purse. Thanks NAFTA!
April 17, 2008 3:02 PM | Reply | Permalink