New Food Price Increases

[Atheist-Lite]

Malthus was right. The oil is necessary to grow food and distribute it and with the cheap oil about gone so too the cheap food. Could be really bad once things spiral away. Maybe a billion will perish in the space of a couple or so years?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13086979

Food prices: World Bank warns millions face poverty

The World Bank has warned that rising food prices, driven partly by rising fuel costs, are pushing millions of people into extreme poverty.

World food prices are 36% above levels of a year ago, driven by problems in the Middle East and North Africa, and remain volatile, the bank said.

That has pushed 44 million people into poverty since last June.

A further 10% rise would push 10m more below the extreme poverty line of $1.25 (76p) a day, the bank said.

And it warned that a 30% cost hike in the price of staples could lead to 34 million more poor.

(continued)

[maiforpeace]

[Feck]

Oil would only be needed to move food around Local food is not dependant on the oil price , to the same amount, ... I don't buy NZ lamb or chilli from Kenya I'm not happy that the super markets have just passed on their reduced profits on imported goods to those of us that made a point NOT to buy strawberries in fucking November .

[Rum]

'Global' markets seem to me to benefit one group - large companies and their profits as they trade between high and low price economies.

I foresee a real contraction, local farm land prices in places like the UK rising fast, more food being grown locally and the idea of borderless trade gradually rolling back.

If it doesn't watch how the old 'first world' becomes the second and then the third world..

[charlou]

Malthus was right. The oil is necessary to grow food and distribute it and with the cheap oil about gone so too the cheap food. Could be really bad once things spiral away. Maybe a billion will perish in the space of a couple or so years?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13086979

Food prices: World Bank warns millions face poverty

The World Bank has warned that rising food prices, driven partly by rising fuel costs, are pushing millions of people into extreme poverty.

World food prices are 36% above levels of a year ago, driven by problems in the Middle East and North Africa, and remain volatile, the bank said.

That has pushed 44 million people into poverty since last June.

A further 10% rise would push 10m more below the extreme poverty line of $1.25 (76p) a day, the bank said.

And it warned that a 30% cost hike in the price of staples could lead to 34 million more poor.

(continued)

Who gives a rats arse as long as I'm good.

But serioiusly, some of us have been talking about this for years while every other comfortable person went "lalalalallalallaaaaa" ...

The middle east and north africa being responsible for a downward trend in our stability and comfort? .. fucking irony, as always, I love it.

[nellikin]

Oil is also needed for tractors, combine harvesters... Probably not that relevant to many farmers in the under-developed world, but stil an issue. Since the advent of 'modern' agriculture (mainlyt post WW2) the amount of energy going into a crop has exceeded the amount of energy produced by the crop (my prof told me this at uni, so not sure where the source is on that one). This is largely due to the invention of the Haber-Bosch-Process which converts atmospheric nitrogen to inorganic nitrogen (for use in fertilisers) - the process uses heaps of energy as it is a high pressure (but preferably low temperature) reaction. And then there is all the energy used for mining of phosphates (largely in South America, I believe) used in super-phosphate fertilisers. These are then shipped around the world...

In short, modern agriculture uses large amounts of energy, not just for food transport, which isn't sustainable. In terms of the poor of the world - if they are using fertilisers, this will be affected the price of oil. Working the fields manually should be able to help reduce the effects of oil prices on food, but only for farmers (people who don't produce their own food still have to pay market prices).

[Atheist-Lite]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqDAoyzZ ... re=related[/youtube]

[egbert]

Bring on the Soylient Green! Lotsa bodies in Japan, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Dubai, ....

[Geoff]

Bring on the Soylient Green! Lotsa bodies in Japan, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Dubai, ....

...Wales...

[egbert]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-13086979

Food prices: World Bank warns millions face poverty

The World Bank has warned that rising food prices, driven partly by rising fuel costs, are pushing millions of people into extreme poverty.

World food prices are 36% above levels of a year ago, driven by problems in the Middle East and North Africa, and remain volatile, the bank said.

That has pushed 44 million people into poverty since last June.

A further 10% rise would push 10m more below the extreme poverty line of $1.25 (76p) a day, the bank said.

And it warned that a 30% cost hike in the price of staples could lead to 34 million more poor.

(continued)

The World Bank has pushed more people into poverty than anything else.

[egbert]

Bring on the Soylient Green! Lotsa bodies in Japan, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Dubai, ....

...Wales...

Mmmmm...Welsh Rarebit.....

[Atheist-Lite]

http://liberalconspiracy.org/2011/04/22 ... al-unrest/

How Food Shortages Will Bring More Global Unrest

contribution by David Malone

It’s not often that one can look into the future and say with some degree of certainty what is going to happen and where.

Thanks to a just released World Bank/IMF report, I think we can say the social and political upheaval that has swept from Tunisia and Egypt to Iran, Sudan and Syria, and which has been, at least in part, fueled by spiralling food costs, is going to intensify and spread to new countries. We can even, I think, hazard an informed guess as to which countries will be next.

Last week on April 16th the IMF and World Bank held a joint meeting to discuss a study they had commissioned on world food shortages and prices.

It makes for grim reading and says quite clearly that the global food price crisis is going to get worse. At the meeting Robert Zoellick, the World Bank President, said the global food situation was “one shock away from a full-blown crisis.”

According to their report, in just 10 months, since June 2010, 44 million more people are having to live on less than $1.25 per day, which is the poverty line set by the World Bank. 44 million more hungry and frightened people watching food, which only a short time ago they could afford, now spiralling beyond their reach.

It’s not the already abjectly poor who worry the World Bank and our political leaders. It is those who thought they had struggled up out of hopeless poverty but who, as food prices spiral up, will now have the sickening sensation of feeling themselves and their families slipping back in to hunger and desperation. They are the tinder for revolution.

In an article I wrote back in Feb called Food, Democracy and Markets, I made the point that we could make sense of which countries had had uprisings simply by looking at which most relied on importing Wheat to feed their people.

Wheat was and is the most important food import in Egypt and most of the other countries in North Africa and the Middle East, and experienced the greatest price rises and volatility over the last year. Those countries which imported the most wheat per capita were the ones where the people took to the streets in protest.

The simple fact that there are another 44 million people reduced to hunger says the unrest is not over. But what, I suspect, really alarms Mr Zoellick, however, is the clear prospect that with prices of food continuing to rise their study indicates,

another 10 million people may end up among the ranks of the poverty-stricken if food prices climb by a further 10 percent, and another 34 million would suffer a similar fate if prices of staples were to rise by 30 percent.

Will the price of food continue to rise? Food prices, with generous help from speculators, spiked in 2008 and then fell back. The bad news is that since the middle of last year food prices have been rising sharply. Today they are almost back at the highs of 2008 and the trend is up further.

Prices are already up 63% from a year ago.

The difference from 2008, is that globally we have not replenished world reserves to off-set another spike and we are facing bad harvests in a number of countries. China is still in the grip of a long and widespread drought. If the drought does not break China may seek to compete for imports.

At the same time a severe drought

… has hit corn and plantain production in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. Among all Eastern African countries, Somalia was worst affected by drought where the price of sorghum and maize increased by 80 percent and 20 percent respectively in comparison with January.

It is easy to see political and social unrest spreading south form North African countries down the East coast of Africa to nations already riven with internal conflict.

In Bangladesh the government headed off unrest by stabilizing prices using its own stocks of rice. Stocks which is now needs to replenish by doubling what it imports. But with other countries also needing to increase imports what price will Bangladesh have to pay and will it have the means?

Any further spread in Africa will also feed back I think, to those countries already in open revolt. I think Egypt is not settled by a long way. If, as it appears, wheat is going to remain expensive and perhaps get more so, then the military in Egypt will not, I don’t think, be able to keep the lid on things as they have done in their brief honeymoon period.

And last but not least food prices rises are going to become a factor here in Europe and in America. Food prices went up 2% just last month in Hungary. They have been going up in Portugal. Austerity and food price rises are a volatile mixture.

I think we are getting a little fore taste of the resource wars to come. Food, Water and Oil to name but three.

(continued in chaos)