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Riots and hunger feared as demand for grain sends food costs soaring
Jonathan Watts, The Guardian
The risks of food riots and malnutrition will surge in the next two years as the global supply of grain comes under more pressure than at any time in 50 years, according to one of the world’s leading agricultural researchers.
Recent pasta protests in Italy, tortilla rallies in Mexico and onion demonstrations in India are just the start of the social instability to come unless there is a fundamental shift to boost production of staple foods, Joachim von Braun, the head of the International Food Policy Research Institute, warned in an interview with the Guardian.
The growing appetite of China and other fast-developing nations has combined with the expansion of biofuel programmes in the United States and Europe to transform the global food situation.
After decades of expanding crop yields and falling food prices, the past year has seen a sharp rise in the cost of wheat, rice, corn, soya and dairy products.
“Demand is running away. The world has been consuming more than it produces for five years now. Stocks of grain – of rice, wheat and maize – are down at levels not seen since the early 80s,” said von Braun, whose organisation is the world’s largest alliance of agricultural researchers, economists, and policy experts.
(4 December 2007)
The world’s ever-increasing grocery bill
Money Week
The average UK family now spends £750 a year more on food than 12 months ago; the world’s grocery bill has jumped by 21% this year; Russian bread prices have doubled; and three people have been killed in a cooking-oil stampede in China.
Food inflation is rising sharply as agricultural markets are straining to keep up with demand, and the “farm crunch”, as Ambrose Evans-Pritchard puts it in The Daily Telegraph, is far from over.
Over the past 20 years food output has risen by an annual 1.3%, while population growth has climbed by 1.35%.
(30 November 2007)
Calculating the carbon footprint of wine: my research findings
Tyler Colman, Dr. Wine
Is that a whiff of raspberries and leather you get from that red wine-or a whiff of petroleum? With some premium wines consuming three times their weight in petroleum, don’t be surprised if it is the latter.
My previous postings on the carbon footprint of wine made me want to determine just how much carbon is involved in the making and transporting of our favorite beverage. So I collaborated with Pablo Paster, a sustainability metrics specialist, and we ran the numbers. Our findings have just been published as a working paper for the American Association of Wine Economists, available here as a pdf.
While I welcome your comments on the whole paper, I’ll post some of the key findings here:
- Organic farming has lower greenhouse gas (GHG) intensity than conventional farming but I was surprised that the difference wasn’t greater. Clearly there may be other differences in a local ecosystem but the GHG difference was surprisingly small. But on the whole, it was the transportation that played a more significant role from a GHG perspective.
- Regarding the “food miles” debate, we find that distance does matter.
- But not all miles that a bottle travels are the same. Efficiencies in transportation make container ships better than trucks, which in turn are better than planes.
(30 October 2007)
Experimenting with a global warming garden (Audio, slideshow, links)
Brad Linder, Environment Report
When you think about global warming, you probably think about polar ice caps melting and rising sea levels. But climate change is also having a more immediate effect — on gardeners. As average temperatures rise, many gardeners are finding they can grow non-native plants in their back yards. Brad Linder visited one public garden that’s been nicknamed “the global warming garden”:
(3 December 2007)
