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Food News 2008

posted on April 18, 2008

Slaves to the sheaf

Blame our addiction to wheat for rising prices — not hungry Third Worlders

By: Wayne Roberts
Published: 18/4/2008
Source: nowtoronto.com

Fact that wheat bakes into puffy bread lets capitalists sell air.

As prices for rice, wheat and corn hit record levels globally, the media and stock traders are having a heyday with stories about the end of cheap food.

But reports of the death of cheap food are greatly exaggerated. The more interesting threat is that we will have expensive cheap food.

That’s because monopolies, centralization and uneducated tastes are the cheap tricks of the cheap food industry. And of 7,000 plant species that can be cultivated by humans, only 150 are grown commercially, and the three mentioned above represent half the calories consumed in the entire world.

But we get ahead of ourselves. The price hysteria proceeds apace. Donald Coxe, global portfolio strategist for the Bank of Montreal, claims food scarcity has become the world’s second-biggest danger after the threat of nuclear war.

The expanding middle classes of India and China want their share of meat, dairy and egg products, and that’s driving up the price of feed grains that fatten livestock, Coxe says.

“We are facing the real possibility of the worst global food crisis for which we have records,” he told a Toronto business crowd in mid-February, a crisis that will probably require a major boost in spending for genetically engineered products to meet the demand.

The editor of influential U.S. mag Foreign Affairs has sounded similar alarms about the challenge of feeding an expanding global middle class of meat and grain eaters while holding the line on prices in North America and Europe.

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