Rising Food Prices Explained
Slate's Explainer tackles the question: "Why are global food prices soaring?" The short answer: "Energy prices. The global food system is heavily dependent on petroleum, not just for shipping goods from one location to another but also for production, packaging, and processing. As the price of oil rises—crude oil is currently hovering at around $100 a barrel—so do the costs of planting, harvesting, and delivering food."
Add a comment:
Previewing your comment:
HTML Hints
Some HTML is OK: <a href="URL">link</a>, <strong>strong</strong>, <em>em</em>
Comment Guidelines
Post whatever you want, just keep it seriously about eats, seriously. We reserve the right to delete off-topic or inflammatory comments. Learn more at our Comment Policy page.
If you see something not so nice, please, report an inappropriate comment.
2 Comments:
I think the popularity of ethanol as a fuel should be considered as well - how much corn is now going into what appears to be a net loss of energy? Food is more expensive because we're burning so much of it.
palmsey at 4:37PM on 04/02/08
Oh yes, definitely ethanol has had a huge impact. The corn crop now devotes 25% to ethanol production and there's 53 or so new plants to come online in this next harvest so even more. That caused corn prices to rise which in itself isn't so bad since they were below the price to produce (hence subsidies but with subsidies came a huge glut hence over 800 things beside food products made out of corn). However, the prices caused a lot of displacing of other crops in favor of corn.
And sugar ethanol isn't so grand either. Not only does it employ slave labor, it too displaces other crops and gets the forests cut down in favor of fields which are also being planted with additional soy and corn to feed China's livestock and new demand for meat.
Which even with ethanol taking up as much as it does and rising, corn mostly goes to feeding animals for consumption. Americans could cut their meat intake in half and still be the leaders of flesh eating in the world but also save 25 to 30% of the crops and land grown that could be used for other crops, raising the animals on the land rather than in buildings, or just conservation to save our songbirds and ducks as well as other wildlife which are all in decline and because of the massive fence-row to fence-row mono-cropping.
Meanwhile, other biofuels are causing huge price rises in other oils. Cooking oil is rising at incredible rates so that it's hard to find even in countries that control prices because people come in from other countries to buy at the low price and sell higher elsewhere.
And biodiesel in the hands of the profiteers is hardly as clean as we've sold.
We need to re-evaluate our use of all power and figure out how to harness more renewables such as solar and wind rather than those that displace our crops, wildlife, and carbon sinks.
Sieseye at 2:25AM on 04/03/08