Worldwide, the prices of staple foods have been increasing drastically. Survival Acres has done some research on food price increases over the past 12 months:
The ranges listed below are price increase for the large container sizes (bags or buckets) from 2007 to 2008 (only 1 year):
Hard Red Wheat 58% – 76%
Hard White Wheat 58% – 85%
Corn Whole Yellow 42% – 82%
Alfalfa Sprout Seeds 31% – 48%
Great Northern 16% – 32%
Potato Slices 20% – 24%
Brown Rice 10% – 29%
White Rice 13% – 27%
Eggs Mix 29% – 33%
Rye 17% – 36%
Lentils 22% – 33%
Soy Beans 17% – 24%
Ezekiel Mix 20% – 24%
Pearl Barley 37%
Flax 44% – 54%
Golden Flax 18% – 28%
1 Year, 1 Person, 66 #10 cans 25%
1 Year Basic Food Storage, 13 SP Buckets 69%
All Purpose Flour 59% – 72%
Bakers Flour 54% – 65%
Unbleached Flour 59% – 72%
Whole Wheat Flour 59% – 88%
Apple Slices 44% – 51%
Banana Slices 19% – 27%
7 Grain Mix 32% – 45%
9 Grain Cracked Cereal 36% – 56%
Kamut 17% – 25%
Buttermilk Powder 42% – 53%
Instant Milk 44% – 96%
Regular non fat Milk 24% – 31%
Oats Groats 25%
Quick Rolled Oats 19% – 25%
Regular Rolled Oats 19% – 25%
Peas Split Green 23% – 35%
Peas Whole Green 25% – 30%
Peas Whole Green 25%
Popcorn 25% – 29%
Potato Completely Supreme 24% – 38%
Potato Dices 13% – 23%
Potato Flakes 17% – 26%
Potato Hashbrowns 28% – 41%
Potato Slices 20% – 25%
Why is food going up in price so much, and what should we expect?
Peak Oil. Civilisations industrial agriculture relies on oil on every level of the growing,
harvesting, processing & transport. So, obviously as peak oil hits and the price of oil increases, all energy intensive foods increase in price with it. And yet the mainstream media still rarely mentions peak oil, and most people in the west do not yet realise that their food and the whole supermarket shopping experience relies so much on oil. Peak oil, to many, implies increased prices at the petrol pump, not realising that we are heading into an era of peak everything.
Climate change & water shortages. Erratic weather and water supply difficulties have caused crop failures throughout the world. This is also driving up the price of foods, and leading to famine in several parts of the globe.
Here is a website listing some of the failures:
http://home.att.net/~thehessians/newcropreport.html
Biofuels. Probably the craziest idea ever – ‘hey we are running out of petrol, lets use the worlds food to make buifuels!’. Western industrial countries are attempting to continue as ‘business as usual’ filling their petrol tanks with ethanol or biodeisel, leaving food shortages in many poorer regions. Some are calling biofuels genocide.
Last year, he said, US farmers distorted the world market for cereals by growing 14m tonnes, or 20% of the whole maize crop, for ethanol for vehicles. This took millions of hectares of land out of food production and nearly doubled the price of maize. Mr Bush this year called for steep rises in ethanol production as part of plans to reduce petrol demand by 20% by 2017.
Maize is a staple food in many countries which import from the US, including Japan, Egypt, and Mexico. US exports are 70% of the world total, and are used widely for animal feed. The shortages have disrupted livestock and poultry industries worldwide.
“The use of food as a source of fuel may have serious implications for the demand for food if the expansion of biofuels continues,” said a spokesman for the International Monetary Fund last week.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/nov/03/food.climatechange
“I think that cheap food is history,” he says.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6481029.stm
http://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/
Demand. There are simply too many people relying on industrial agriculture for their food. Cheap abundant energy in the form of petroleum has allowed the human population to overshoot. Conservative estimates are that, without oil, the planet at most can sustain 2 billion humans – obviously far fewer if they expect to consume resources at the rate that americans do. More and more people are being pushed off their land and subsistance agriculture, into cities. Turning self sufficient peasants into dependent consumers. This drive needs to be reversed and quickly.
The price of industrial food is unlikely to stop rising. People need to start switching from consumerism, and start producing food crops locally. Industrial food relies on only a handfull of crops, and only a few varieties of each. This is another disaster waiting to happen, and with changing climate patterns, serious diseases are more likely to attack the vast monocultures.
Permaculture and the diversity of crops it encourages is far more productive, safer from bugs and diseases, and far healthier. Even if you are wealthy enough to contiue buying your foods from the corporations, you will find that food grown organically and locally is far tastier & nutritious.
The present challenges to the global food industry opens up opportunities for widespread support for agroforestry, permaculture, city farms etc. The future will be pretty unpleasant, but if we dont get busy now to create a different society based on cooperation, localisation, direct democracy and small scale agriculture it will be even more unpleasant. Countries like Cuba and Venzuela are leading the way with land reform, a refusal to allow huge corporations to strip mine society and an emphasis on organic local agriculture.
In the near future it may be that if you dont have veg growing in your garden you simply
wont be eating. This is how it is for many of the worlds poorest people (until they get forced off to make way for cash crop monocultures).
Famine in the West is a thought provoking book on the subject, available from here.
