The owner of a St. Louis-area pizza parlor chain, Fortel’s, recently told KMOX radio that the price of 50-lbs. sacks of flour she uses in her pizzas has risen from $11 to more than $30 in recent months. Her suppliers told her to expect the price to exceed $50 soon.
Both the US and the UN have announced plans to reduce food distribution programs to the world’s poorest people. Both site hyper-inflation in food prices, mostly grains, dairy, and meat, as we see in this piece on WashingtonPost.com:
The prices have risen as more of the grains are being consumed by biofuel production and fast-growing markets in China and India, The Washington Post reports.
Poor people must die for Western liberals to feel good about themselves.
The U.N. program is confronting similar price pressures. It announced this month that it was facing a $505 million shortfall due to soaring food and fuel costs, and would cut distribution if it did not receive new funds. Meanwhile, need is increasing.Afghanistan, for instance, recently put in an emergency request for $77 million to cope with skyrocketing prices that have put key staples out of reach for more and more Afghans.
If you think “hyper-inflation” hyperbolic, think again:
“Look at what’s happened to wheat prices alone – they shot up 25 percent in one day last week,” said Josette Sheeran, executive director of the World Food Program. “This is really the first emergency we’ve faced without a drought, war, natural disaster. We will have to cut the amount of people being served or the amount of food being served if we do not get more funds.”
The planet is dying, you know. Despite the fact that the world has been cooling since about 1998, liberals, including that lovely couple that just moved in down the street, are convinced that human activity is causing temperatures to rise. (Of course, they can’t explain why temperatures rose to similar levels in Medieval times.) They just know, as an article of faith, that people like me and you are killing the planet.
So the push for bio-fuels, which emit more greenhouse gases than a 1972 Chevelle.
We know from economics 101 that increased demand will raise the equilibrium price of a good or service. And higher prices result in increased supply, as the profit potential influences more sellers to enter the market. (Thus, high gasoline prices resulted in high diesel fuel prices as refiners shifted production from diesel to unleaded.)
In this case, wheat and other kinds of farmers are shifting to corn production because the price of corn is so high. (Corn is the principal ingredient in most bio-fuel recipes.) Less wheat is produced relative to demand, the price rises to equilibrium, and poor people starve. The cheapest food source on the planet, grain, leaves the mouths of starving kids in Africa to fuel Barbara Streisand’s Tuesday afternoon lunch with Bette Midler.
Perhaps scientists will find a way to power automobiles with carcasses of African children. Then, alas, the poorest of the poor will be well-fed.
Technorati Tags: food distribution,flex fuels,poor people
Technorati Tags: biofuels