Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
A New, Global Oil Quandary: Costly Fuel Means Costly Calories
Keith Bradsher, New York Times
Rising prices for cooking oil are forcing residents of Asia’s largest slum, in Mumbai, India, to ration every drop. Bakeries in the United States are fretting over higher shortening costs. And here in Malaysia, brand-new factories built to convert vegetable oil into diesel sit idle, their owners unable to afford the raw material.
This is the other oil shock. From India to Indiana, shortages and soaring prices for palm oil, soybean oil and many other types of vegetable oils are the latest, most striking example of a developing global problem: costly food.
The food price index of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, based on export prices for 60 internationally traded foodstuffs, climbed 37 percent last year. That was on top of a 14 percent increase in 2006, and the trend has accelerated this winter.
In some poor countries, desperation is taking hold. Just in the last week, protests have erupted in Pakistan over wheat shortages, and in Indonesia over soybean shortages. Egypt has banned rice exports to keep food at home, and China has put price controls on cooking oil, grain, meat, milk and eggs.
According to the F.A.O., food riots have erupted in recent months in Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen.
“The urban poor, the rural landless and small and marginal farmers stand to lose,” said He Changchui, the agency’s chief representative for Asia and the Pacific.
A startling change is unfolding in the world’s food markets. Soaring fuel prices have altered the equation for growing food and transporting it across the globe. Huge demand for biofuels has created tension between using land to produce fuel and using it for food.
A growing middle class in the developing world is demanding more protein, from pork and hamburgers to chicken and ice cream. And all this is happening even as global climate change may be starting to make it harder to grow food in some of the places best equipped to do so, like Australia.
In the last few years, world demand for crops and meat has been rising sharply. It remains an open question how and when the supply will catch up. For the foreseeable future, that probably means higher prices at the grocery store and fatter paychecks for farmers of major crops like corn, wheat and soybeans.
There may be worse inflation to come.
(19 January 2008)
Hat tip to Devlin Buckley.
Related media presentations are available at the original. This article is part of a New York Times series entitled “The Food Chain: The High Cost of Eating” which will examing “growing demands on, and changes in, the world’s production of food.”
Dave Cohen of ASPO-USA covered soaring food costs for the poor last summer:
What About the Poor? (also at Energy Bulletin).
Read it here first at Energy Bulletin. Read it six months later in the NY Times and WSJ. -BA
Is this the end of cheap food?
Alex Renton, UK Observer
…However, label-watching may become a habit for those Edinburgh women, because – and all the analysts agree on this, if nothing else – this is only the beginning. Walton’s organisation is funded by the supermarket industry, whose bosses are, in public, largely in denial about the significance of the price rises. But Walton, himself, forecasts two further years of similar increases, at least. 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.’
Others offer an even more bleak assessment. Jacques Diouf, head of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, spoke recently of a ‘very serious crisis’ brought about by the rise in food prices and the rise in the oil price. Various global economic bodies are forecasting rises of between 10 per cent and 50 per cent over the next decade.
There have already been riots about food prices in Mexico, West Bengal, Morocco, Senegal and Yemen, although not in Edinburgh. But the factors behind the price rises in Leith are exactly the same as those in Mexico, or in China – where, last Wednesday, the government introduced price controls on dairy products, meat, vegetables and cereals. And while food price inflation hit 18 per cent last year in China, there’s no good reason why they should not do that here. In fact, there are a lot of reasons why they should.
There have been four chief drivers of food price inflation in the last two years. The first is the huge rise in oil prices: $100 a barrel means food that is four-times as expensive to plant, irrigate, harvest and transport as it was six years ago. Some commodities brokers are now betting on oil going to $200 a barrel within a decade.
The second factor is the climate…
(20 January 2008)
High Food Prices: Challenges and Solutions
Erica Barnett, WorldChanging
In recent weeks, there have been a tremendous number of stories detailing the latest crisis in the world’s food system: For much of the world’s population, food–the most fundamental necessity of all our lives–is no longer affordable. What’s more, food is more expensive, almost everywhere, than ever before. The evidence is overwhelming:
…In affluent countries like the US, the ready abundance of cheap, highly processed carbohydrates have pushed obesity and diabetes to epidemic proportions. As Mark Winne notes in his excellent new book Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty (a book I hope to review in more detail here soon), food obsessions such as veganism, freeganism, organic, grass-fed, humane, and local are irrelevant bourgeois luxuries to the poor, who must deal with much more immediate concerns: “getting to a food store where the bananas weren’t black,” for example, or “having enough money to buy any food at all.”
Indeed, according to a new report by the US Department of Agriculture, low-income households up to 130 percent of the US poverty line are generally unable to budget an adequate amount for fresh fruits and vegetables, and only after wages rise significantly will low-income people allocate more money to healthy foods, as opposed to frozen convenience foods and meats.
…How to deal with the fact that fresh produce costs so much compared to its processed caloric equivalent (and if THAT doesn’t sound appetizing, I don’t know what does)? One very promising answer lies in the field of urban agriculture
(16 January 2008)
Related by the same author: Creative Strategies for Reducing Food Waste.
West Africa: Food Prices Still Climbing, Crisis Feared
UN Integrated Regional Information Networks via AllAfrica
Food prices at markets across West Africa are already high for the time of year and are still rising, market analysts warn, suggesting aid agencies should prepare for a potentially serious hunger crisis later in the year as people across the impoverished region may not be unable to afford to buy enough to eat, despite food being available.
Normally in January and February cereal and grain prices in West Africa are driven down as harvests from the year before start hitting the markets.
But production of cereals was low across the region in 2007 because of a late start and early end to the rainy season, which affected production of millet, sorghum and maize, and analysts say traders are seeking to maximise profit by hoarding stocks, because they know the low production will yield higher prices.
“Traders are still buying in as much as possible to hold onto it until the price has doubled or more,” said Salif Sow, regional representative of the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) food monitoring group.
… Almost all farming in West Africa is rain-fed, meaning farmers experience an intense burst of activity during the June to November rainy season, when they must grow and sell enough food to see them through until the next year.
By June, many of the poorest families in the region have run out of money and food. The period is known as the “hunger gap” or “lean season” and is usually accompanied by quickly accelerating malnutrition rates as families skip meals and in extreme cases rely on wild foods like weeds, leaves and berries and rubbish for sustenance.
(18 January 2008)
Situation on food front alarming: Pawar
Express News Service (India)
The country is facing a demand-supply mismatch despite having produced a good quantity of wheat and rice last year, Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar said at the closing ceremony of the India International Potato Expo 2008, organised by the Indian Chamber of Commerce, on Friday.
Stating that the situation on the food front is alarming, he said: “Every state has to take interest in improving productivity and production of all types of cereals, oilseeds and pulses. If we don’t take action now, India will have to import all these items soon.”
“There are reports from organisations, such as the Food and Agriculture Organisation, that predict a global foodgrain shortage in the next 10 years,” Pawar added.
The minister said the country has witnessed a change in the food habits of the people, especially the young, many of whom have switched to wheat from rice.
(11 January 2008)
Food riots feared due to shortage of quality wheat
M Azeem Samar, The News (Pakistan)
Disturbed retailers, shopkeepers and consumers in the city fear food riots as they had been helpless in finding quality and standardised flour at an affordable price.
“I know people are in distress, I too am helpless due to the acute shortage of quality wheat flour but I will not offer flour from my store till the time the current flour crises ends,” said an aged owner of a grocery shop in Malir Town on Saturday who had been in retail grocery business for over a decade.
He said that he could not afford selling any type of flour whose quality he was not at all sure about. He said that some days back he had been selling a well-known brand of fine quality flour with a 10-kilogramme bag of flour priced at Rs250. “But we ran out of the stock some days back and are selling no kind of the essential commodity,” he said.
Another one of his neighbouring grocery retailers is selling a brand of mill flour with each 10-kg bag priced at Rs180. “But before selling it I am vocally saying to every buyer that once this bag of flour is sold it is not returnable or refundable irrespective of the quality of the commodity,” said the shopkeeper whose grocery store was perhaps the only one in the vicinity selling the commodity at almost the government-controlled price.
Many among the concerned quarters of retailers and customers have been raising serious concerns about quality, physical state, and nutritional value of the flour being sold on government-subsidised rates that too at select retail stores.
(14 January 2008)
This URL brings up a “Print” pop-up window. Select cancel and the story will display.
Over 1 million Afghans face food shortage due to rising prices – UN agency
UN News Centre
More than 1 million people in rural Afghanistan are at risk of food shortages due to an increase in prices for staples such as wheat flour and vegetable oil, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) said today.
“There are as many as 1.3 million Afghans who before were considered at borderline risk of food insecurity, but now, because of large price increases may have been pushed into a situation of high-risk of food insecurity,” WFP Country Director Rick Corsino said at a press briefing in Kabul today.
“We have concluded that assistance for this group of people is justified and necessary for the period before the next harvest,” he added, noting that an additional 40,000 tons of food – at a cost of some $30 million – would be needed, in addition to the agency’s ongoing programmes.
WFP has been working with the Afghan Ministry of Agriculture to assess the scope of the increase in prices and identify those most affected by it. The price of wheat flour, for example, has increased by nearly 60 per cent throughout the country over the past year, with some locations having seen price increases of close to 80 per cent.
(14 January 2008)
