the tourist
Blue Crack Addict
- Joined
- Dec 25, 2003
- Messages
- 27,919
Shipping costs more now than it ever has, too.
New York Times, June 22
The sharp rise in food prices is being felt acutely by poor families on food stamps, the federal food assistance program. In the past year, the cost of food for what the government considers a minimum nutritional diet has risen 7.2% nationwide. It is on track to become the largest increase since 1989, according to April data, the most recent numbers, from the United States Department of Agriculture. The prices of certain staples have risen even more. The cost of eggs, for example, has increased nearly 20%, and the price of milk and other dairy products has risen 10%. But food stamp allocations, intended to cover only minimum needs, have not changed since last fall and will not rise again until October, when an increase linked to inflation will take effect. The percentage, equal to the annual rise in prices for the minimum nutritional food basket as measured each June, is usually announced by early August. Some advocates and politicians say that this relief will not come soon enough and will probably not be adequate to keep pace with inflation.
Stacy Dean, the director of food assistance for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington social issues research and advocacy organization, estimates that the rising food prices have resulted in two fewer bags of groceries a month for the families most reliant on the program. “We know food stamps are falling short $34 a month” of the monthly $576 that the government says it costs a family of four to eat nutritional meals, she said. “The sudden price increases on top of everything else like soaring fuel and health care have meant squeeze and strain that is unprecedented since the late 1970s.”
The declining buying power of food stamps has not gone unrecognized in Washington. In May, Congress passed a farm bill that would raise the minimum amount of food stamps that families receive, starting in October. The bill, which was passed over President Bush’s veto, will also raise for the first time since 1996 the amount of income that families of fewer than four can keep for costs like housing or fuel without having their benefits reduced. This month, a coalition led by Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. called on Congress to immediately enact a temporary 20% increase in food stamps. Officials at the Agriculture Department, which administers the program, say there is no precedent for such an action. Families on food stamps have been hit hard across the nation, but perhaps not as hard as families in New York, where food costs are substantially higher than prices almost everywhere else, including other urban areas, according to the Food Research and Action Center, a research and advocacy group in Washington. The more than one million New Yorkers on food stamps receive on average $107 a month in assistance, which is slightly higher than the average for the rest of the country. But it is not enough to close the gap in food costs, experts say.
You seem to be mocking FYM.
Ethanol no longer seen as big driver of food price
by Sam Nelson
Guardian (UK), October 23
CHICAGO -- Heavy demand for corn from ethanol makers was seen as a key driver of corn futures to record highs in June, but since then the sharp decline of corn along with other commodities shows that belief was mistaken. Corn is down about 50% from its record high in June, even as the amount of the grain used to produce the renewable fuel in the United States remained the same.
"The record high prices were a speculative bubble," said Stewart Ramsey, senior economist for Global Insight, Philadelphia. "We had a lot of reasons for prices to go up and to go up a lot and ethanol use was one of those," he added. US food prices, which normally rise by about 2.5% a year, surged by 4% in 2007, the biggest increase in 17 years. World food prices jumped a stunning 40%, causing food riots, hoarding and bread lines in some countries. The government has forecast that U.S. food prices will rise 5.5% this year and 4.5% in 2009.
...The use of corn to produce ethanol in the United States does add to the price of the grain. Analysts, including some in the ethanol sector, say ethanol demand adds about 75 cents to $1 per bushel to the price of corn, as a rule of thumb. Other analysts say it adds around 20%, or just under 80 cents per bushel at current prices. Those estimates hint that $4 per bushel corn might be priced at only $3 without demand for ethanol fuel.
Federal law calls for production of 9 billion gallons of biofuels this year and 10.5 billion next year. The requirement increases to 36 billion gallons by 2022, with ethanol supply from corn capped at 15 billion gallons. It takes roughly one bushel of corn to produce 2.8 gallons of ethanol. The Department of Agriculture has earmarked 4 billion bushels of corn, or roughly a third of this year's US corn crop, for ethanol use next year, up from 3 billion bushels or about 23% of last year's record 13.1 billion bushel crop.
Analysts said soaring corn prices were a symptom of big shifts of investment money into corn and other commodities. As big money began shifting out of stocks a few years ago, commodity markets like corn futures began climbing. "There was a speculative bubble in the market and that's one of the bigget things that came out of the market, is just that equity markets weren't good and for a while the money came into commodities," Ramsay said. By mid-February non-commercial investors, including speculators, index and hedge funds and managed pools of money, held nearly 484,000 long positions in CBOT corn futures, or 2.42 billion bushels of corn. That would be enough to produce more than 6.7 billion gallons of ethanol and more than 20 million tonnes of livestock feed, according to the Renewable Fuels Association, Washington DC.
By October those investors held about 240,000 long positions in the corn market, less than half the levels seen in the spring and early summer, the RFA said. "We had adequate corn stocks, there was no shortage of corn, that wasn't the issue," said Don Roose, analyst and president of U.S. Commodities, West Des Moines, Iowa. "What we got into is the dollar went so low, crude oil went up and that inflated a lot of things...it was that factor of the least resistance moving up...it was an all-in attitude in the commodity markets in general no matter what it was."
U.S. capacity to make ethanol has risen about 60% since last year to about 11.2 billion gallons per year, and if all the new plants and expansions come on line total US capacity would be about 13.8 billion gpy.
The guardian article implies there is no food shortage, when in fact there is. The same land and water that is used to grow food for machines could be used to grow food for people. The government subsidies for corn ethanol are driven by special interests, and it requires fossil fuels to produce and distribute. It doesn't produce any net energy.
As far as an actual food shortage that's up for debate.
I'm referring to the billion plus in the world who are hungry.
But isn't Spam nothing but fat?