It's not just oil prices that are soaring
It's also rice, a commodity that is far more important to billions of people around the world.
He [Roland Jansen, chief executive of Switzerland-based Mother Earth Investments] believes governments will maintain curbs on exports as they "want to be able to continue to feed their own populations".This is but one consequence of having a world population approaching 7 billion and still rising fast.
Haitians are already rioting over rising food prices. Expect to see more of the same in the coming years. This is likely to get much worse before it gets better.
3 comments:
Malthus has long since been discredited.
To anonymous: He may have just been a couple hundred years off.
No matter how wrong/right Malthus is, the Earth is still finite. There is only so much arable land and resources for everyone. Sharing them between 8 billion is twice as expensive as between 4 billion (the number of people around when I was a child).
It's more than just the number of people on the earth that is causing the rapid rise of food prices. With the increase in oil prices, the cost of transporting foods has increased.
Similarly, because of agribusiness pushing biofuels, farm land that would produce food for human consumption is out of use. Additionally, corn and other crops are going into biofuel production. This drives up the cost of animal feed. As "Time" magazine recently discussed, biofuels are a scam.
Finally, with the increase of the wealth of Asian countries, like China and India, the demand for both oil for electricity and cars has caused oil prices to increase along with the greater consumption of meat in those countries. Something that was cost prohibitive in the past.
Because China does not have the pollution controls that liberals and environmentalist in the West successfully pushed into place, China has a horrible problem of pollution from both transportation, power generation, and factories. This is taking a toll on farm lands that are being poisoned along with fish farming.
China is one of the world's leading exporters of fish products but the U.S. has recently placed a ban on some of them because products are adulterated with pollutants.
In many ways, China shows how terrible a lack of regulation on business can lead to runaway corruption and lackadaisical concern for public safety. The U.S. suffered similar gross neglect in the food chain in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries before regulation came into play.
Unfortunately, the Bush administration has allowed the FDA and USDA to be compromised as it did with FEMA, allowing for the repeated food hazard recalls that we've seen over the last several years. How many recalls have we had each year? The most recent recall involved millions of pounds of hamburger. Video captured the beef processor killing diseased animals to be processed for human consumption. The USDA was nowhere to be seen. Given the deaths from mad cow disease (incurable disease caused by prions, proteins that act like razors slicing away at the brain) and bacteria like e coli, it's criminal that someone would try to get away this.
Over regulation can strangle business. However, the reality is that regulations and inspections prevent abuses. (The recent Vyoxx scandal that revealed that its makers knew that the product did nothing to treat cholesterol shows how feckless the FDA has become. )
People are seriously underestimating how bad things are getting for a lot of people overseas and at home because of the rising cost of food. Hungry people do lots of desperate things. Food prices for basic staples have increased by by 50% to 100%. The price of a dozen eggs has doubled, for instance.
Another study recently explained that with the continued loss of prime American farmland to housing, valuable crop growing areas are being lost. The lack of serious urban planning and a reflection on our limited resources is going to hurt a lot of people.
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