Why your grocery bill is about to hurt

Wheat, corn, beef: prices are soaring. Is the global food supply in danger?

…Then, last summer, a dynamic took hold that neither fickle weather nor the greed of cynical middlemen could adequately explain. In the dust-blown streets of Mauritania, the cost of a bag of wheat flour doubled within a few short weeks. In Niger, a country already riven by poverty and rebellion, the price of staples like corn and soya sailed into the stratosphere, as they did in neighbouring Mali and Burkina Faso. Odd, because it hadn’t been a particularly poor harvest year. And hunger quickly fermented into anger. By November, food riots were breaking out in Nouakchott, the Mauritanian capital, as residents found themselves priced out of basic supplies. “This is putting people in a very tight bind,” said Morard from her office in Dakar, another city that saw street protests, also over food, in November. “It’s affecting all of West Africa.”


West Africa, it turns out, and the rest of the world. With the global supply of cereal grains falling to 40-year lows, and with consumption trending ever upward, the earth’s supply of food is suddenly under pressures unknown in half a century. Two weeks ago, wheat prices hit an all-time high of US$18.53 a bushel, while corn, driven in part by demand from the biofuel industry, climbed to $5.34 a bushel, more than double the average price before 2007. The political repercussions have been swift, and in some cases violent. In Mexico, about 70,000 people hit the streets to protest the doubling and tripling price of tortillas. Chinese officials are warning that rising rice and corn prices could lead to civil unrest in rural areas. Even the food-rich West is starting to feel the pinch. In September, rising pasta prices, a direct function of the soaring value of wheat, sent Italians flooding city squares in Rome, Milan and Palermo to demonstrate. In the United States, the skyrocketing cost of chicken and cattle feed is hitting the pocketbooks of consumers at all points of the economic spectrum. Milk, eggs and filet mignon are all going up. So is Kraft Dinner.

This escalation has been sudden enough to start a heated debate about exactly how much cause there is to panic. Is the recent price bump due, as some argue, to passing or localized phenomena, like Australian droughts or the biofuel fad? Or is it rooted in longer-term forces that augur sustained and potentially distastrous shortages? After all, many of the conditions necessary to make the food armageddonists’ predictions come true are now upon us. Water is scarce, fossil fuels are prohibitively expensive, fish stocks are near collapse and the world adds 80 million people every year. To that, you can now add global warming, which agronomists say is drying up vulnerable countries where farmlands depend on rain.

And then there’s China. With ever greater purchasing power, Asian consumers are moving toward the higher-protein, better-tasting, meat-laden diet westerners have enjoyed for decades. Producing all that beef, pork and eggs requires vast quantities of grain that might otherwise be used to feed people. “On the amount of grain fed each year to cattle in the United States, you could feed 850 million people as vegetarians,” says David Pimentel, a Cornell University agricultural scientist who studies the global food economy. “That’s not a value judgment. It’s a fact.”

Macleans