Serious Eats

The Price of Food: Big-Time Columnist Articulates the Peril

Posted by Ed Levine, April 7, 2008

It's one thing when I and a few others in the food media write about the precipitous rise of food prices and the resulting devastating effects. It's quite another when Princeton economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman does. Krugman articulates the problem clearly and cogently.

People in developing countries are eating more meat. Krugman: "Since it takes about 700 calories' worth of animal feed to produce a 100-calorie piece of beef, this change in diet increases the overall demand for grains."
The price of oil. As Krugman points out, "modern farming is highly energy-intensive." Also rising economic powers like China are now competing with old, big economies like ours for scarce resources, including oil and farmland. Also, the war in Iraq has reduced oil supplies in a time of great demand for petroleum.

Bad weather. A country like Australia, the second-largest wheat exporter, has been suffering from a devastating drought that has likely been exacerbated by climate change.
Precautionary grain inventories have been depleted. They used to be held as a hedge against drought or a bad crop year, but these inventories have been drawn down because politicians believed that countries suffering crop failures could always import the food they needed from governments and private grain dealers. This is no longer the case. There ain't none.
The rise of silly, stupid ethanol and other biofuels. They were supposed to promote energy independence and positively affect global warming. Instead they have had just the opposite effect. In the case of corn ethanol, "producing a gallon of ethanol from corn uses most of the energy the gallon contains." Even worse, land that could be used to grow food to feed people is now being used to grow biofuel feedstock. As Krugman says, "People are starving in Africa so that American politicians can court votes in farm states."

According to Krugman, all three of our supposedly thoughtful presidential candidates, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain, have punted on this issue. They have completely disappeared. They are MIA on this essential, vital issue.

What should be done?

"The most immediate need is more aid to people in distress: The U.N.'s World Food Program put out a desperate appeal for more funds."
"We also need a pushback against biofuels, which turn out to have been a terrible mistake."
"But it's not clear how much can be done. Cheap food, like cheap oil, may be a thing of the past."

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