A dire prediction quoted over at Zero Hedge:
…We consider it likely that food inflation will prove to be more pernicious and durable this time than in the Seventies.
Why?
Because, back then, food shortages generating food inflation were almost entirely caused by weather or crop diseases. Today, we still have problems with weather disruptions in key grain-growing regions, but pesticides and herbicides have dramatically reduced crop losses of earlier times. However, we now have man-made assaults on food supplies, and they have every indication of being both dangerous and durable. Politicians cloaking their personal political greed in green garb could easily create food shortages of Biblical proportions.
Indeed. We have the capability not just of feeding the whole world, but of over-feeding it. The last thing which should be suffering inflation is food. We’ve really got the technology on this one nailed down. But a series of short sighted policies ranging from government subsidies to environmentalist idiocy has curbed the ability of the United States and the rest of the world to produce sufficient food. The bowl is getting empty and we’re busy killing off the means of re-filling it.
This doesn’t affect Americans too much. For Americans, higher food prices are really an inconvenience. If food prices spike another 10 or 15%, it will hurt and it will have a severe effect on the economy (more spent on food, less spent on other goods…presto!, recession)…but it won’t ever risk an American’s life. On the other hand, those areas of the world which have short food supplies at the best of times and where people spend half or more of their income just on food would be catastrophically hit if food prices continue to rise. As is usual when liberal elites set to work (in this case, in “saving” the planet) it is the poorest of the poor who suffer the most.
We really need to reform American government from top to bottom. A century’s worth of liberal idiocy has wormed its way in to our institutions and unless we can purge this nonsense we’ll never fully recover. America is supposed to be the economic powerhouse of the world – in food as well as in all other activities. We’ve bound ourselves hand and foot with liberal policies, and now some places of the world are running out of food because of it. Time for a real change – and 2012 just can’t get here fast enough.
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