A few weeks ago I walked into my local supermarket to see that a 10 oz. bar of cheese was “on sale” for $5.39. I did a double take–maybe they meant two bars of cheese for $5.39. Generally, the sale on that brand of cheese is 2 for $4.00 or 2 for $5.00, but sure enough this was somehow supposed to be a sale. I’ve been complaining about this since last year–the cost of food is soaring. Last year, I could generally get out of the supermarket paying around $65-85.00 for two people, now I’m paying $90.00 or more. The higher prices seem to apply across the board–fresh produce, canned foods, flour/rice, and most dramatically dairy. Of course, I’m fortunate to be able to suck it up and pay the higher prices, but many lower income folks in this country and other wealthy countries are struggling, and in poorer countries, people are taking to the streets in protest because they are unable to feed their families.
A quick search of Google news indicates that we really are in a world wide food crisis. I’m not so sure that there is an actually shortage of food, but the crisis appears to be the cost. Some of the countries where people are struggling with soaring food prices, include–Afghanistan, Haiti, South Africa, Namibia, New Zealand, Ivory Coast, and numerous others. The situation is getting so serious that the United Nations (and the World Bank) weighed in last week :
The head of the UN World Food Programme has warned that the rise in basic food costs could continue until 2010.
Josette Sheeran blamed soaring energy and grain prices, the effects of climate change and demand for biofuels.
Ms Sheeran has already warned that the WFP is considering plans to ration food aid due to a shortage of funds.
Some food prices rose 40% last year, and the WFP fears the world’s poorest will buy less food, less nutritious food or be forced to rely on aid.
Speaking after briefing the European Parliament, Ms Sheeran said the agency needed an extra $375m (244m euros; £187m) for food projects this year and $125m (81m euros; £93m) to transport it.
She said she saw no quick solution to high food and fuel costs.
“The assessment is that we are facing high food prices at least for the next couple of years,” she said.
Ms Sheeran said global food reserves were at their lowest level in 30 years – with enough to cover the need for emergency deliveries for 53 days, compared with 169 days in 2007.
Several factors have been cited as causes for the food price crisis including: rising fuel cost, the shift towards biofuels (e.g. ethanol), population growth, the growth of capitalist economies, and weather patterns. The greatest criticism in the range of articles I read has been reserved for government subsidies for bio-fuels, specifically ethanol. Many feel that the shift to ethanol and bio-fuels is environmentally harmful, but now we can add soaring food prices and hunger to the list of arguments against bio-fuels1.
- If you want more information of about the food crisis, these graphs from the BBC website have useful information about the food price crisis. The only additional point I would add is that (see the chart of trade balances) while some countries like the US will benefit in the area of trade, I don’t think that the average American is benefiting from this. A few corporate farmers may be getting rich, but the vast majority of people are hurting. We’re not hurting anywhere near as much as poor people in poor countries. [↩]
Very nicely written! However, very frustrating. What is the solution?
What’s the solution? An expansion of our development of fossil fuels, and a simultaneous major redeployment into nuclear power. The food prices are rising because energy and transportation costs are rising; the only way to fix it (as opposed to putting a bandaid on it, by increasing subsidies for the very poor so they don’t starve) is to reduce energy costs.
Fortunately (or perhaps unfortunately), most of the stickiness of energy costs are purely political. There’s nothing stopping us from putting up 100 nuclear plants tomorrow, except for all the greenies who file lawsuits. We could open up ANWR tomorrow, and so on. We can have cheap power whenever we decide to stop making it expensive, and food costs will plummet when that happens.
The ethanol thing is very easy to fix. Stop requiring ethanol in commercial gasoline, stop subsidizing ethanol made from food crops. That would admittedly bankrupt businesses that had bet on an unending boom in corn ethanol, but that’s the peril of building a business model around particular clauses in the tax code.
In the longer term, we probably need to increase food production. My impression is that there’s a good deal that can be done, particularly in the developing world, with current technology, and without significant environmental or social disruption.
In several African countries, for instance, food production is substantially impaired by politics. I’m thinking in particular of Zimbabwe, which used to export food, and is now having a heartbreaking famine, due to the systematic destruction first of commercial farming and then of the entire economy by the Mugabe government.
The problem cannot be easily solved by building lots of nuclear reactors, because the bulk of the problem is transport costs, which are mostly increased because of the higher oil price (and, admittedly, because every country has increasingly gone over from rail to road transport, but this again cannot be reversed overnight).
Another major part of the problem is depletion of the environment (for instance, the destruction of fishing stocks and the growth of deserts across much of the world as a result of overgrazing and excessive cultivation). Again, this cannot be easily reversed.
The poor are paying a terrible price for the bad choices made by the rich.
I’m not sure I follow the logic here. Energy goods are largely substitutable, and presumably nuclear power would reduce demand for oil for electrical generation, thus reducing price, no? (This argument applies all the more so if you think that nuclear power would be displacing natural gas and coal that can be economically converted to motor fuel at current prices.)
Of course, nuclear power plants take a long time to construct, so this is hardly a near-term solution, and depending on how expensive they ultimately wind up being, they may not be the most economical solution, ever. But there’s nothing unreasonable, it seems to me, in drawing a connection between electrical power generation from non-fossil fuel sources, and reduced transportation prices.
Environmental damage is also a factor, but my impression is that there as well, cheap energy would be helpful. I know that in California, a major cause of fishery decline is water diversion for irrigation and residential consumption. Given sufficiently cheap energy, desalination and long-distance pumping become feasible approaches. I haven’t worked through the math on this, and it may well be uneconomical in California today, but this is sensitive both to technology and to our societal comfort with large engineering projects — which will shift over time.
Well, not to be too radical about it, but we could probably do quite a bit to increase availability if we all switched to vegetarianism (since meat is 10x less efficient, or thereabouts.) We could also, of course, reduce population or at least population growth: demand has a lot to do with cost.
And generally, we could simply switch a lot of things from luxury to caloric production. A given acre planted with baby carrots or watercress will produce far fewer calories than one planted in soybeans. It’s a lot more efficient to make tofu than it is to make cheese.
But in any case, one thing is fairly certain, which is that if we continue with this trend, the concept that we can “eat what we want to eat” is not going to last very long outside the very upper classes.
The whole concept of burning food for fuel has to stop. For one thing, it’s not economical. Take away the subsidies and ethanol fuels would become prohibitively expensive. Then there’s the fact that people need that food.
And while I’m all for foreign aid to help save starving people, I wouldn’t trust the U.N. with a burnt-out match, never mind food and money. Nor would I provide any money to the governments in those countries; in a great many cases the government is either corrupt and genocidal to boot, or is simply ineffective. I’d provide aid directly to the affected people and their local leaders.
People have got to start cleaning up their own messes. Zimbabwe could – and did – feed their entire population and those in the countries around them. Their problems are self-generated, and the rest of the African nations, Europe, etc. aren’t doing much about it.
I agree on the nuclear power issue as well. Yes, there’s a lag time. But as they say, “The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” The sooner we get moving on this, the sooner we will be able to put this option in the mix.
A shorter term fix would be to build a few more refineries. A lot of our problems with fuel shortages is not the price of crude but the inability to meet demand for refining capacity; we can’t make gasoline, kerosene, diesel, lubricants, etc. fast enough once we get the crude oil in the country.
I’m not so sure whether hybrids are the answer or not. Yes, they use less oil to operate. The manufacturing costs and disposal/recycling costs are not clear to me, however – there’s a lot of very poisonous heavy metals, etc., in those batteries. There’s a lot that could be done with more efficient standard engines. But I’m open to debate on the subject.
Robert, what percentage of U.S. oil demand would ANWR fill? Enough to make an actual difference in fuel costs (although there’s the issue of having a strategic reserve under our own control to consider)?
We need to put a lot more effort into alternative energy sources. Solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, etc., etc. As I’ve said before, I told my wife after the election “I couldn’t stand to vote for Gore [and Kerry was worse!], but we’re going to regret putting a Texas oil man in the White House.”
ANWR is estimated to have somewhere between 4 and 11 billion barrels. If we used it to fill 5% of US oil needs (which would have a solid deflationary impact on prices) it would last about 20 years.
Ironically, Saliorman meat prices rose the least (check the charts in the foot note). I’m sure they are still more expansive, but they haven’t shot up.
If we are really thinking long term on the fuel issue we need more renewable energy. Fossil fuels and nuclear are not good long term solutions–solar, geothermal, and wind would be where I’d want to invest money.
I agree that renewable sources are the long-term solution – although for environmental reasons it is likely to be high-tech space-based systems rather than covering Wyoming with wind farms – but in the long term, we’re all dead. The short and medium term need attention as well.
I’m sure we can’t directly reduce population in a way that isn’t monstrous. I don’t think we can even really reduce growth rates that easily, since most of the world’s population growth is outside the First World.
Who’s “we” in that sentence? I have a bunch of friends who are allergic to soy, but who do try to eat their vegetables. I’m not sure I like the idea of centralized, top-down planning for food crop production. I don’t even really like the idea of top-down incentive structures. I’d much rather let people buy what they want.
As a matter of engineering, trying to change people’s habits and preferences is usually a mistake. I don’t believe people are prepared to shift their diets radically, without extreme pressure. There’s a lot of people who really want to eat meat, and they’ll push back, hard, if you try via public policy to take it away from them.
I don’t think “we all become vegetarians” is a sensible approach; there’s a bunch of less drastic approaches that we could implement much more easily without requiring an extraordinary level of social mobilization.
The public aren’t fools; they’ll notice if the government is mandating corn diversion into a biofuel boondoggle, while prohibiting feeding cattle, and they’ll be irate.
One way to promote vegetarianism without lashback is to let the market work. End agricultural subsidies, and let the market price for meat products (and veggies too) go to where it should be. If it takes 10x the energy to produce meat, then that will show in the market price, and meat eating will decline on its own – probably not through people becoming vegans, but through people shifting their own consumption patterns.
Maybe people could learn to cook again? It is a crying shame that most of the population will buy prepackaged, microwaveable instant meals instead of learning how to mash potatoes. Want cheaper rice? Buy regualar rice instead of uncle bens instant. I think it is like 15 – 20 $ for a 50lb bag of regular short/medium grain rice. Potatoes…what are they now, 50/70cents a lb. in bulk? Probably less than that to be honest, I think they were 29cents last time i checked. I know that isnt the end all answer but maybe if we spent a little less on jello cups and serving size mac and cheese we wouldn’t have such high grocery bills. Cut out an hour of TV time in the evenings and cook a meal instead of chef boyardee.
I have found to my sorrow that ed’s comments are more on point than I’d like to think. Kids want to know what they can cook on a campout. The requirement is that the kids cook a meal essentially from scratch – while they can use stuff like pancake mix, etc., they can’t pass the requirement by opening up a can of stew, throwing it in a pot and heating it and serving it up. They need to cut up and brown meat, peel and cut up carrots and onions and potatoes, etc.
So I answer them by saying, “just ask your Mom or Dad how they make your favorite meal, and we’ll make it on a campout.” Turns out that the way that Mom or Dad (about 100:1 Mom, BTW) make the kid’s favorite meal is either to order out or to open up a prepared meal and heat it up. I actually went shopping with one kid and his Mom once (ran into them by chance in the grocery store and she asked me to tag along) when they bought the food for a campout. Mom didn’t have a clue how to buy individual food items and assemble them into a meal. Except for a steak dinner, but you can’t eat that every meal.
Back in ancient times, when dinosaurs walked the Earth and I was in college, I worked as a checkout clerk in a grocery store in Cambridge, Mass. in Central Square. It seemed like there was a direct correlation between the amount of prepared meals purchased in an order and the proportion of it paid for by food stamps. When I was a kid I went to the grocery store a lot with my Mom. She used to have me do the math to keep track of how much she was spending (this was before hand-held calculators), so I got a pretty good handle on what kinds of things you buy to make various types of meals. I knew that these folks would save a lot of money by buying the raw materials instead of the finished meals, but it wasn’t my place to say anything.
NotACookie said:
As a matter of engineering, trying to change people’s habits and preferences is usually a mistake.
As a matter of tax policy, we try to do this all the time.
There are various estimates out there about how much oil is left in the ground and how much energy can be obtained from it. I wonder if there are similar estimates for nuclear fuel? It’s non-renewable, but it could be an excellent bridge to get us through to the point where we use a lot more renewable energy.
We do try it. My sense is that we often make a mess — witness the whole ethanol debacle that started this conversation.
Also, tax-based incentives work differently well for different things. For something as stable and ingrained as food preferences, I think you’d need really steep tax incentives to cause a big swing against meat, and people would push back.
RonF – yes there are such estimates, but I’m not going to look them up. It’s a long time, hundreds of years’ worth, and that assumes there are no uranics in the solar system, which there are. It might not be economical to ship methane from Titan, but it’ll certainly be economical to ship uranium or thorium. (But of course by that time, the Hayes Solar Array will be in place in orbit, blasting down gigawatts or vaporizing insurgents, depending on the order of the day.)
The problem with nukes isn’t running out of the fuel, it’s dealing with the processes, which are environmentally messy at best. Easier to deal with those than to deal with starving millions, though.
The packaged vs. prepared things is certainly a valid point in the larger sense, but the people who are suffering from crisis in food prices now aren’t Americans on food stamps who keep buying Kraft dinners, it’s Mexican campesinos who used to be able to buy 10 lb of corn flour for fifty cents but now need $2 (that they don’t have).
Easier still to drive a little less. But that could still be somewhat inconvenient at times, so best to rest the blame on “greenies who file lawsuits”.
I have to agree with Robert’s point here:
“The packaged vs. prepared things is certainly a valid point in the larger sense, but the people who are suffering from crisis in food prices now aren’t Americans on food stamps who keep buying Kraft dinners, it’s Mexican campesinos who used to be able to buy 10 lb of corn flour for fifty cents but now need $2 (that they don’t have).”
While it certainly is true that the middle class and the poor (and the wealthy too) in America and other wealthy countries need to get back to basics and cut down on prepackaged foods, the bulk of people in poorer countries still eat the old fashioned way. Personally, that’s one reason why I have shifted to doing more shopping at 2 local markets that cater to immigrants. That prepacked food is not only bad for us nutritionally (usually high in sodium, sugar, and fat), it’s also bad for our environment given the packaging it takes.
We could open up ANWR tomorrow, and so on. We can have cheap power whenever we decide to stop making it expensive, and food costs will plummet when that happens.
All that would do is make it worse.
We have plenty of oil in the ground — about as much as what we’ve taken out since the beginning of the Oil Age. However, because we’re near Peak Oil, annual production will go nowhere but down from now until eternity. Each year that we put off the shift to renewable (and corn ethanol is not renewable, unless you include deaths due to starvation in the formula) fuels, the more difficult it will be to fill the gap between where oil production is heading, and the demand for oil.
Ten years back I bought a car that’s a real testament to wasting oil — it gets 12MPG and goes like nobody’s business. A real throwback to the decade it was built — the 1970’s. As long as the wealthy (or upper middle class) have the money to buy gasoline at whatever price, the poor and working classes (and middle class with kids) are screwed. The solution isn’t for the upper classes (Bill Gates, Michael Dell, DINKs …) to buy Hummers, it’s for those people to buy Teslas and leave the gasoline to people who have no choice. Or at least, have no choice until someone makes something more stylish than a Prius. Rich people can afford to buy expensive cars — and they should, that way everyone knows they are rich. And aren’t wasting the dwindling supply of readily accessible oil that has to last until we replace all the things that can’t be cheaply replaced by battery power or big long electric wires. Like airplanes. Drilling in ANWR is like giving crack addicts free bus passes — sure, they get their crack, but at the end of the day, they are still a crack addict.
Oh, I was just commenting on that one point. I’m well aware that the real problem is with people who normally spend 50% of their budget on food having to now spend 70%+ on it or more, mostly because of the reasons cited above – burning food for fuel and corrupt governments in various countries whose policies hold back the productivity of their subjects.
If you want to change people’s diets via government action, one quick way to make a whole lot of changes would be to remove government subsidys for sugar, etc., especially for farms that are owned by public corporations rather than by individuals. If pricing for corn, sugar, etc. depended solely on market forces, you’d see a real realignment on what gets produced and what gets used.
Actually, going with solar and wind power generation is much faster than nuclear ever could be. As soon as you put them up they are generating, and you don’t have to put all your eggs in one basket. They don’t pollute like nuclear does, and the worst that can happen is a wind tower could fall on a bunch of cattle standing under it.
Then, if we push more hybrids and electric cars, the oil could be used for food generation uses. It would go much further that way.
There’s benefits and drawbacks to different sorts of power plants, and even aside from cost issues, you probably need a mix. Solar and wind can be quicker to build, but they’re less reliable, and in the case of solar, never available at night. Bulk energy storage, and long-distance transport, are basically unsolved problems, so you really do need base-load plants to satisfy night-time demand.
A more technical problem is that solar panels (and many wind turbines) don’t generate reactive power, and that means you need to go to a good deal of trouble to supply the appropriate capacitance to avoid grid voltage collapse.
The site also matters. Wind turbines, and most forms of solar deployment, are quite space-intensive. That’s an issue in many places. For instance, there isn’t a lot of land near New York City for wind or solar farms, there’s quite limited long-distance transmission capacity, and there are political and technical obstacles to building more.
In sum, I don’t think it makes sense to be too dogmatic about power sources; different sites and needs demand different blends of generation.
There’s benefits and drawbacks to different sorts of power plants, and even bnaside from cost issues, you probably need a mix. Solar and wind can be quicker to build, but they’re less reliable, and in the case of solar, never available at night. Bulk energy storage, and long-distance transport, are basically unsolved problems, so you really do need base-load plants to satisfy night-time demand.
Bulk storage and transmission are both solved and have been solved for a while. For bulk storage its just a question of how you want your storage to work. The problem isn’t a lack of technology, it’s a lack of someone having built large amounts of it. And transmission is the same as always with new generation. If I go build a GW of solar, Oncor (the transmission company) and I are going to have a discussion about transmission lines.
Basically, the fossil fuel base plants have to go away. Not today or tomorrow — just don’t build any more of them. Ever. Conservation can make a huge dent immediately (click my name) for residential, which is just a tiny fraction of total power consumed, but still — conservation can bridge the gap as renewables start building out. Who knows — we might even get to see stars again.
A more technical problem is that solar panels (and many wind turbines) don’t generate reactive power, and that means you need to go to a good deal of trouble to supply the appropriate capacitance to avoid grid voltage collapse.
Fortunately, there are large capacitor banks out there already for producing VARs (reactive power). Power factor is a problem, and the EU has been putting rules into place to deal with things that have lousy power factor. As with real (non-reactive) energy wastage, VARs are “wasted” in that a lot of equipment was designed on the assumption that reactive power was just always going to be there. It’s not a technical problem, it’s a poorly designed and built machinery problem.
There of course are technologies for moving and storing bulk power. Transmission lines work fine — however, you can’t get much more capacity out of the current grid without building new towers, and that’s politically impractical in much of the country.
You can talk to Oncor about power lines*, but there isn’t a lot of spare transmission capacity in most of American. To build more, someone has to talk to every zoning board and gang of NIMBYs on the way. Any scheme that relies on moving power long-distance (more than a few hundred miles) has serious political problems. As a result, powering the coasts with solar power from the southwestern deserts is not currently practical.
Storage is the same story — possible in theory, but not yet practical for real use. Large-scale pumped storage turns out to be at least as hard to site as any other large-scale hydro, and maybe more — and that means you’re paying a serious environmental cost, dislocation of residents, etc. There’s a reason it’s so rare.
As you point out, conservation helps. But Industrial power demands aren’t really shrinking; power demand for electronics is going to be rising for a while yet. So we’ll still need base load plants. They’re not going to be solar, and they probably won’t be wind, due to the reliability issues. That doesn’t leave a lot of renewable options, particularly since there isn’t room for major new hydro construction.
Capacitor banks, as you point out, exist and are straightforward to build. There are difficulties though in hugely ramping up our installed base of reactive power sources — in particular, figuring out who should pay for it, and building a control architecture for it. You can describe those problems as not “technical”, but they’re significant problems in practice.
* Wikipedia tells me that Oncor is in the distribution business. My impression is that transmission in Texas is run by ERCOT, not by the utilities. They might handle a kilowatt — I don’t believe they could handle gigawatts.
In Israel, rice has started to be rationed in supermarkets because of supply shortage.
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