So this is entirely unsurprising:
- Load up the pantry (Wall Street Journal dot com)
Yeah, apparently food prices are rising faster than “inflation“. That won’t surprise any of us who’ve been paying the least bit of attention.
Stocking up on food may not replace your long-term investments, but it may make a sensible home for some of your shorter-term cash. Do the math. If you keep your standby cash in a money-market fund you’ll be lucky to get a 2.5% interest rate. Even the best one-year certificate of deposit you can find is only going to pay you about 4.1%, according to Bankrate.com. And those yields are before tax.
Meanwhile the most recent government data shows food inflation for the average American household is now running at 4.5% a year.
And some prices are rising even more quickly. The latest data show cereal prices rising by more than 8% a year. Both flour and rice are up more than 13%. Milk, cheese, bananas and even peanut butter: They’re all up by more than 10%. Eggs have rocketed up 30% in a year. Ground beef prices are up 4.8% and chicken by 5.4%.
These are trends that have been in place for some time.
And if you are hoping they will pass, here’s the bad news: They may actually accelerate.
Those figures are averages across the United States. They don’t necessarily correspond to local figures. Good luck, folks, You’re On Your Own.
Well, no, that’s not entirely true. The Canadian government, at least, is looking out for its citizens by… uh, well, by artificially inflating pork prices.
I am shitting thee negative. People actually think this way.
The Canadian government announced that it would pay pork producers as much as $50 million to kill 150,000 pigs by fall. It’s an effort to reduce supply in order to raise the price of pork and help struggling hog farmers, says Clare Schlegel, president of the Canadian Pork Council.
[...]
Schlegel says that is not the case for many other farmers who are facing three main obstacles. First is the unprecedented rise in the value of the Canadian dollar — now trading about par with the U.S. dollar — which means pork prices north of the border have halved. Meanwhile, feed prices have almost doubled, which Schlegel says is primarily due to ethanol demand and fuel policies.
Thirdly, Schlegel says, a cure for a difficult hog disease called circle virus has worked “wonderfully” — and cruelly — for the industries in Canada and the United States. “Our pigs are healthy, happy — they’re growing and making it to market,” he says.
Yeah, you read that correctly. The three biggest problems facing hog farmers today are (a) government intervention in the private sector, (b) government intervention in the private sector, and (c) healthier hogs.
I just don’t know what to say to that.
I suppose that perhaps some of the hog farmers who can no longer make enough money selling hogs could perhaps switch to corn, or canola, or some other heavily subsidized ethanol-producing crop. Heck, maybe they could even get government money to make that switch!
They surely can’t sell their excess pork to markets around the world where people have been rioting for lack of food. That would, uh… disenfranchise the local farmers who haven’t been able to keep up with demand! Or something:
As for a noble goal of, for example, shipping the food to Haiti’s poor, Schlegel says that would be impractical, citing food safety reasons, matters of cost and potential problems from flooding a fragile market with free meat. “We don’t want to simply transfer our pain to farmers in other parts of the world.”
Okay, okay, I was too hasty: it’s apparent that no-one’s considered selling this extra pork to those who want to buy it. They’ve only considered giving it away, and immediately rejected the notion as a heinous monstrosity which would undercut local farmers. Selling pork at market price is apparently completely unthinkable.
Which may be why we have a problem in the first place.
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