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 …
The Financial Times is reporting pressure at the G8 meeting from what the British call “campaigners” for the West to restrict its production of biofuels because of the effect it’s having on on food supplies: ActionAid, a charity, blamed G8 countries in a report for what it said was a halving of agricultural aid since …
The Economist Food Price Index is at 280.6, up 11.3 percent on the month and a frankly astonishing 66.2 percent over the last year. Elasticity in this case is a measure of people going hungry, I think.
The Economist questions organic farming: But as global food prices soar, hurting the poor in particular, environmentalists may find organic farming trickier to promote. Organic farming produces far less than conventional intensive methods, and so more land must be farmed for the same yield.
The Economist food price index is up again this week, up 4 percent, at 267.7.
Global food prices rose 4 percent in the last week, according to the Economist food price index.
This week’s Economist food price index is at 252.1, essentially unchanged from last week, flat now over the last month, up 50 percent from a year ago.
The Economist food price index this week is down a hair at 252.2, 0.7 percent below last week.