In a country where I can walk to Taco Bell and get a crunchy taco filled with at least 36 percent beef for only 99 cents, the idea of rising food prices might seem a bit foreign. Oh, but they are rising, and how. In December, the Food and Agriculture Organization Food Price Index hit an all-time high and January might be even worse. Today, food prices in Egypt are 30 percent higher than they were at the same time last year. In Tunisia, high unemployment and rapidly spiking food prices helped light the powder keg that led to revolution. As much credit as we’d like to give to the internet and increased access to information, in developing countries where not many people have computers, it’s still the basics like the price of a bag of wheat that incite political unrest.
This has been brewing for awhile. In the past two years, we’ve already seen food riots in Haiti and Mozambique. Politicians freaked out in 2008 when the price of rice doubled, causing fears of widespread unrest in Asia. This, in short, is not a temporary problem and it’s also not one that is going away anytime soon.
Why are food prices rising? Global warming provides one clue. Unstable weather like droughts in China and floods in Australia have wreaked havoc on global food supplies. Global warming, contrary to what many naysayers say as they look at the increased snowfall this winter, is not about the world getting warmer. It’s about the weather getting weirder, as regions experience weather conditions that hundreds of years of agricultural experience has not prepared them for.
The drop in global food supplies has been disastrous because demand is only going up. In case you haven’t read the news lately, countries such as China, India and Brazil have a rapidly rising middle class, most of whom have the middle-class appetites to match. That means people aren’t content with, say, a bowl of rice topped off by some vegetables or a plate of rice and beans anymore. Increased wealth means an increased appetite for meat. Consumption of meat in China has risen 112 percent since 1995. Why is it a problem if your average Chinese person wants to chow down on a Big Mac? Well, consider that seven pounds of grain go into every pound of beef. That means more and more of the crops we grow are going to feed cows, which means we are getting less efficient at feeding a growing global population and are raising food prices to boot.
Then there is our ol’ pal capitalism. In the old days, each country could rely on the food grown in their figurative and literal backyards. This isn’t how it works today. Crops are a commodity traded on the global markets, subject to excessive speculation by traders. According to Bloomberg, the European Union is so concerned about this that they are looking into new regulations that will curb the proportion of a commodity derivatives market that a single trader can control in an attempt to tame volatile food prices.
It’s time to face a new reality. Climate change isn’t going to slow down. The newly wealthy in countries like China and Brazil aren’t likely to curb their appetite for a diet that those in the United States and Europe have been enjoying for a long time. The only real weapon we have here is changing how food prices are regulated worldwide and how food is distributed from countries rich in crop yields to countries poor in crop yields. Until then, we can expect more civil unrest like we are seeing in Egypt and Tunisia.
Photo: Joonas Plaan, Flickr, CC
