Peak food?
"Peak Oil" is a widely familiar idea by now, and it certainly seems to be well underway, but the knock-on effects are still trickling down. Does peak oil imply "Peak Food" as well? Hmm.
Here's some sobering news excerpts from the past six months or so:
For as long as most people can remember, food has been getting cheaper and farming has been in decline. In 1974-2005 food prices on world markets fell by three-quarters in real terms. Food today is so cheap that the West is battling gluttony even as it scrapes piles of half-eaten leftovers into the bin.
That is why this year's price rise has been so extraordinary. Since the spring, wheat prices have doubled and almost every crop under the sun—maize, milk, oilseeds, you name it—is at or near a peak in nominal terms. The Economist's food-price index is higher today than at any time since it was created in 1845 (see chart). Even in real terms, prices have jumped by 75% since 2005. No doubt farmers will meet higher prices with investment and more production, but dearer food is likely to persist for years (see article). That is because “agflation” is underpinned by long-running changes in diet that accompany the growing wealth of emerging economies—the Chinese consumer who ate 20kg (44lb) of meat in 1985 will scoff over 50kg of the stuff this year. That in turn pushes up demand for grain: it takes 8kg of grain to produce one of beef.
But the rise in prices is also the self-inflicted result of America's reckless ethanol subsidies. This year biofuels will take a third of America's (record) maize harvest. That affects food markets directly: fill up an SUV's fuel tank with ethanol and you have used enough maize to feed a person for a year. And it affects them indirectly, as farmers switch to maize from other crops. The 30m tonnes of extra maize going to ethanol this year amounts to half the fall in the world's overall grain stocks.
In China, pork has become so expensive they're stealing pigs by the truckload. In Kansas, it's wheat. In Mexico, they've got tortilla riots over the cost of corn. In American supermarkets, the price of milk and eggs has soared.
All over the world, the price of food is headed up. Sometimes way up. And an era of cheap food is over.
We're turning corn into fuel, feeding meat to new millions, paying more for oil to farm -- and there are consequences.
NPR's "On Point", February 12, 2008, "The Soaring Price of Food"
THE food industry is being squeezed from all sides. Last year prices for milk, eggs, corn, wheat, oils and almost all other edible commodities climbed to unprecedented levels. They are still rising, although at a slower pace. The prices of electricity and fuel are also on the increase, which makes processing and distribution more expensive. And passing on higher costs is not easy when customers too are feeling the pinch, as unemployment rises, the value of their homes falls, and inflation erodes their purchasing power.
The president of the World Bank yesterday urged immediate action to deal with sharply rising food prices, which have caused hunger and violence in several countries.
[...]
Zoellick said that the fall of the government in Haiti over the weekend after a wave of deadly rioting and looting over food prices underscores the importance of quick international action.
This isn’t the first time we’ve had a worldwide surge in food prices. There was a huge price rise in 1972-1974 — bigger, in percentage terms, than the current spike. [...] Is this a rerun? Or is it more fundamental? I don’t know the answer …
New York Times, Paul Krugman blog, April 15, 2008, "Memories of the Nixon-Ford administration"
PICTURES of hunger usually show passive eyes and swollen bellies. The harvest fails because of war or strife; the onset of crisis is sudden and localised. Its burden falls on those already at the margin.
Today's pictures are different. “This is a silent tsunami,” says Josette Sheeran of the World Food Programme, a United Nations agency. A wave of food-price inflation is moving through the world, leaving riots and shaken governments in its wake. For the first time in 30 years, food protests are erupting in many places at once. Bangladesh is in turmoil (see article); even China is worried (see article). Elsewhere, the food crisis of 2008 will test the assertion of Amartya Sen, an Indian economist, that famines do not happen in democracies.
There are several reasons for that rise, with consumers blaming everything from the Atkins diet to ethanol — Atkins because of a higher demand for beef, eggs and other food high in protein and ethanol because of the use of corn (also used for chicken feed) in ethanol production and an upwards trend in corn prices. One key issue is actually the rapidly rising cost of transporting eggs from the chicken to your kitchen; that is to say rising gas prices mean rising food prices.
The cost of a dozen eggs has jumped, on average, 60 percent from where it was a year ago, and grocery stores are passing that cost along. [...]
There isn’t a simple solution to combating rising food prices. I’ve been concentrating on making as much of my menu from scratch as I can. But even staples are costing more than they did even a few months ago.
Wisebread, April 17, 2008 "Pricing Eggs, and New Egg Products"
That anger is palpable across the globe. The food crisis is not only being felt among the poor but is also eroding the gains of the working and middle classes, sowing volatile levels of discontent and putting new pressures on fragile governments.
In Cairo, the military is being put to work baking bread as rising food prices threaten to become the spark that ignites wider anger at a repressive government. In Burkina Faso and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, food riots are breaking out as never before. In reasonably prosperous Malaysia, the ruling coalition was nearly ousted by voters who cited food and fuel price increases as their main concerns.
International Herald Tribune, April 18, 2008 "Across globe, hunger brings rising anger"
People can live without oil. It would be inconvenient, it might even trash the economy, but people will survive somehow.
But people can't live without food.
The twenty-first century scares me when I think about it too much.
