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Prices for 16 basic food items shoot up in third quarter
Bloomberg News via LA Times
Supermarket prices for 16 basic food items surged to a record in the third quarter because of higher commodity costs and increased processing and transportation expenses, the American Farm Bureau Federation said Thursday.
The average cost of typical weekly consumer purchases rose 11% to $48.68 in the three months ended Sept. 30, from $44.03 a year earlier, the federation said. Costs rose 4.3% from the second quarter.
“Sustained high costs for processing, hauling and refrigerating food products are reverberating at the retail level,” said Jim Sartwelle, an economist for the federation.
The share of the food dollar that went to farmers and ranchers fell to 19% in the quarter, the lowest in the quarterly survey’s 20-year history and down from about 32% in 1980, the federation said.
(3 October 2008)
Green solution just outside your door
Tim Elliott, Sydney Morning Herald
THE English have their allotments; in Sydney we use the streets. In a variation on guerilla gardening, Sydneysiders are moving veggie plots from the backyard to the street verge, and converting formerly fallow public land into mini-market gardens.
“Environmentally, ethically and, from a community perspective, it’s a great thing to do,” says Eva Johnstone, a landscape architect, who with her husband, Bill, has been growing vegetables on their Marrickville street verge for the past two years.
“We always wanted to grow our own food, but our backyard is quite small, so the logical step was to grow it on the street, which was not being used for anything,” Ms Johnstone said.
The Johnstones now have an established vegetable garden, with spinach, artichoke, rhubarb, peas, potatoes, beans, broccoli and beetroot. A nearby tree bears a passionfruit vine and a sign telling passersby to help themselves.
“We have more than we can consume,” Mrs Johnstone says, “so we are more than happy to share.”
The garden is a “big talking point”, she says. Neighbours want to know how to convert their verges from worn-out grass to “something they can actually eat”.
Street verges are council property but Mrs Johnstone says the council has been “happy to turn a blind eye.
Global warming, the drought and rising food prices have other Sydneysiders looking at local solutions to food production, says Michael Mobbs, a sustainability expert.
(7 October 2008)
Warming Andes stymies Peruvian potato farmers
Eliza Barclay, San Francisco Chronicle
For the first half of his life, potato farmer Gregorio Huanuco used the same formula that had dictated the survival of his ancestors for generations.
Huanuco, 48, waited for rains to fall on his small parcel of land to sustain his crops of potatoes as well as various tubers and quinoa. When ripened, his family ate what they needed and sold the surplus in the nearby central city of Huaraz.
But by 1990, Huanuco began noting strange climatic patterns in this village of 500 residents at 11,000 feet in the Andean Cordillera Blanca. They included battering hailstorms, months without rain and warmer winters. By 2005, the quirky weather became more consistent and included a fungus that blanketed his potato crops.
… Most climatologists blame global warming for Huanuco’s woes.
“Climate change is bringing new and more frequent diseases during the harvest,” said Cesar Portocarrero, a civil engineer who has been studying the effects of global warming on the Peruvian Andes for decades. “As plagues and temperatures increase, farmers are forced to go higher and higher up the mountains to avoid them. Eventually they’ll have nowhere to go.”
One of the big losers is the 1.8 million potato farmers like Huanuco, who depend on predictable climate. Most are ill prepared to handle new pests and diseases that have materialized as temperature and rainfall patterns have shifted, agronomists say.
(5 October 2008)
Charles targets GM crop giants in fiercest attack yet
Geoffrey Lean , The Independent/UK
It is less than two months since Prince Charles was on the receiving end of a fusillade of scientific, political and commentariat criticism for voicing, yet again, his concerns about GM crops and foods. He was widely accused of “ignorance” and “Luddism”; of being too rich to care about the hungry, and even of trying to increase sales of his own organic produce. It was put about that Gordon Brown was angered by his intervention.
Yet the Prince has responded by stepping up his campaign, making his most anti-GM speech yet, in delivering – by video – the Sir Albert Howard Memorial Lecture to the Indian pressure group Navdanya last Thursday. And he made it clear that he was going to continue. “The reason I keep sticking my 60-year-old head above an increasingly dangerous parapet is not because it is good for my health,” he said ” but precisely because I believe fundamentally that unless we work with nature, we will fail to restore the equilibrium we need in order to survive on this planet.”
True to his word, he plunged straight into the most controversial and emotive of all the debates over GM crops and foods by highlighting the suicides of small farmers. Tens of thousands killed themselves in India after getting into debt. The suicides were occurring long before GM crops were introduced, but campaigners say that the technology has made things worse because the seeds are more expensive and have not increased yields to match.
… Recent research had shown, he added, that organic farming techniques had increased yields in Brazil by 250 per cent and in Ethiopia were up fivefold, while the world’s biggest international agricultural study – headed by Professor Bob Watson, now chief scientist at Department for Food, Environment and Rural Affairs – had backed organic farming, rather than GM to tackle word hunger.
Kirtana Chandrasekaran of Friends of the Earth said: “Prince Charles is right that GM crops and industrial farming are profiting big businesses, not feeding the world’s poorest.”
(5 October 2008)
World needs to rethink biofuels – U.N. food agency
Robin Pomeroy and Svetlana Kovalyova, Reuters
The Western world needs to rethink its rush to biofuels, which has done more harm pushing up food prices than it has good by reducing greenhouse gases, a United Nations report said on Tuesday.
The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said policies encouraging biofuel production and use in Europe and the United States was likely to maintain pressure on food prices but have little impact on weaning car users away from oil.
“The report finds that while biofuels will offset only a modest share of fossil energy use over the next decade they will have much bigger impacts on agriculture and food security,” it said in its annual State of Food and Agriculture report.
(7 October 2008)
