Food prices up
Jan 23rd, 2008 by brianschettler
It looks like food prices are on their way up. Kind of sad:
All the indicators, the prices of every food staple, are on the up – wheat doubled in price at one point last year. ‘It’s something the industry has expected and is thus, hopefully, a manageable cycle,’ he says. ‘No hunger riots. But we have enjoyed food prosperity for a long time, and we’re seeing the end of that.’
Also, ethanol is part of the problem, too.
Ethanol, a diesel-type fuel made from plants, must bear a lot of the blame. Since George Bush announced a rush to corn-based ethanol it’s done well for American corn farmers – 20 per cent of whose harvest, subsidised by the government, went into fuel tanks rather than flour mills this year. Bush’s taste for corn-based ethanol is based partly on trying to break the US’s reliance on Middle East oil suppliers, and partly on a (largely misplaced) faith in its ecological credentials. (Its increasingly voluble critics claim that growing grain and then transforming it into ethanol requires more energy from fossil fuels than ethanol generates.)