Remember when the commodity price explosion was causing food riots, and people were starving? Yesterday’s Economist food price index was 1.9 percent below a year ago. * The title is one of the few literary references at my disposal.
One bright spot in the global economic picture: worldwide financial collapse has led to lower food prices! From the Economist, the global food price index is down 16 percent from a month ago, and is essentially unchanged from prices a year ago.
Global food prices have dropped out of the headlines, lacking the drama of early July, which seems an eternity ago. Today’s Economist food price index sits at 232.2, up just 17 percent from a year ago. Positively tame in comparison.
I don’t really understand what the $700 billion being discussed as a bailout for the mortgage/credit mess means, but here’s a nice benchmark for purpose of comparison: At the start of Monday’s meeting, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged the world’s rich nations to spend $72 billion a year to help Africa achieve U.N. goals to fight …
Continue reading ‘An Order of Magnitude for the Poor Folk’ »
John Mashey had some great comments on my post last week on GM foods. Since it seems unlikely that very many readers dig through old blog comments here, I thought it worth pulling them out and posting here in full. The setup is an argument between David King and Robert Watson over whether starvation in …
Ian Sample had an odd little bit of argument earlier this week in the Guardian about the role of GM crop politics in feeding the worlds’ hungry. First up to the lectern is Sir David King: Sir David King, who left the job at the end of last year, says anti-scientific attitudes towards modern agriculture …
Food prices have gotten a lot tamer of late. The Economist Food Price index out today is 3 percent down from last month, and after the astronomical prices earlier this year, just 22 percent above year-ago levels.
This piece by the AP’sMichael Casey poses a bit of a challenge for market believers like me: Over the past decade, Indonesia went from growing more than half its soy to relying on the U.S. for 70 percent of it. Now the poor among this country’s 220 million people are going hungry because of changes thousands …
As prices rise, the demand for meat in Korea is dropping, according to Bloomberg: “Korea’s corn demand cannot help but fall down the road because feed demand is falling,” said Nicholas Chung, senior manager of the commodity derivatives team at Korea Development Bank. “Cheaper imported beef is coming into the market and overall meat consumption …
I like this story mainly because it’s about a company named “Sara Lee” that makes sausage named “Jimmy Dean.” I mean, how can you not love companies with such cheerfully personified identities, even if they are about to raise their prices dramatically: Sara Lee, maker of meat products such as Jimmy Dean sausages, said costs …