food prices

It is hard to believe that summer is coming so rapidly to a close, and that the opportunity to put up for winter will pass so fast.  So if you'd like help and guidance in doing so, I'll be running my food storage and preservation class starting Thursday, August  and running for six weeks into October. The class is online and asynchronous and will cover everything from putting up the summer's glut to building up food storage and a reserve to help temper hard times.  That's going to be particularly important this year with predictions of skyrocketing food prices due to drought and other…

Yesterday was World Food Day, and NPR has a good piece about the role of speculation in food prices: The economists argue that increased trading is a significant part of the reason grocery prices are higher this year. And grocery prices are indeed up this year. For example, in August, the average price of bread in U.S. cities was up 17.4 percent over last year, while milk was up 12.4 percent, according to the latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Brandon Kliethermes, an agriculture economist with the forecasting firm IHS Global Insight, agrees that speculators do increase…

- The basic Rogoff/Reinhart observation that financial collapses due to asset bubbles just take a long time to work through. Given the size of the 2008 collapse, historical evidence suggests that it's going to take five or six years to recover, and that's that. - The Tyler Cowen "Great Stagnation" hypothesis. We've picked through all the low-hanging economic fruit over the past century, and like it or not, we're now entering an extended period of low productivity growth because we're not inventing lots of cool new stuff. - The related (I think) investment drought hypothesis. Ben Bernanke…

Earlier this week, riots erupted over food prices in several Algerian cities - according to Reuters, prices for flour and salad oil there have doubled over the past few months. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization's food price index is now slightly higher than it was during the last global food crisis in 2008, though the New York Times' William Neuman points out that the absence of inflation adjustments makes a direct comparison tricky. The overall situation isn't as bad as it was in 2008, but whether the world tips over the edge into another full-blown crisis depends largely on upcoming…

Hat tip to reader Abbie who pointed me to this video. When we talk about local and organic, one of the central things that often gets lost is this - who does the work? And how are they paid? And how do you change this so that they get paid fairly - because right now the way we pay for food leaves a lot of folks out. Dateline NBC introduces you to your five year old tomato picker Sharon.

Thanks to reader Sunshine for forwarding me this AP article, which I think does a really good job of pointing up something I've been talking about for a long time - the food crisis that was in the news two years ago never actually went away. While food prices stabilized in the developed world and things like the economic crisis shoved the situation of the poor and hungry off the front pages, that doesn't mean the food crisis came to an end. With food costing up to 70 percent of family income in the poorest countries, rising prices are squeezing household budgets and threatening to worsen…