Here in the UK it’s been a long time since there were either food shortages or significant and ongoing increases in the cost of food. Back in the 1970s food disappeared from supermarket shelves and cost more every time you went shopping mostly because of non-food-related issues like inflation and strikes. In the 21st Century, however, the availability of food is shaping up to be impacted upon severely by the weather changing around the world.
While in the north of Britain we’ve suffered the fourth grey and wet July in a row, with August so far proving pretty damn miserable as well, in the south-east they’ve had a heatwave and very little rain since June.
Now we read that President Putin of Russia has banned wheat exports through to December, owing to the fires raging across his country that have destroyed one third of its cultivable land. Already wheat prices internationally have hit a 23-month high upon traders hearing this news. There is only way for wheat prices to go, and that is up. This is bad for everyone.
As a poultry keeper I know that wheat and corn prices for my birds will rocket. They’ve only been going upwards and never down for the last three years, with Putin’s decision only certain to increase the speed of price increases hitting all farmers and livestock owners who need to feed their animals foodstuffs that are in shortage. In February 2008 a sack of organic corn cost around £7. In 2010, that’s shot up to just under £15.
I stopped feeding my chickens organic corn and layers pellets last year. I still feed them non-GM but I simply can’t afford the organic path any more. If prices don’t stop going up I may eventually be forced to consider buying from feed packagers that don’t guarantee there being no GM content and, as bad, add chemicals to the feed (to kill parasites, but those of us set against factory farming prefer to employ other pest control measures we consider safer, more ethical and planet-friendly).
At the end of the day, being able to feed my animals something is what matters if push, as looks likely, comes to shove where availability and pricing are concerned. They’ll never starve because of my conscience and convictions.
- Image via Wikipedia
Everyone will feel the effects of rapidly rising wheat prices. Already a loaf of bread in the UK is predicted to go up, initially, by 5p. Not a lot, you might think, but consider that we have a government almost sexually turned on, certainly with an ideological fetish, by its plans to push millions of public sector workers onto the dole.
The LibCon coalition has cut youth unemployment support services, it is about to mangle the NHS, it is cutting funding for everything, including benefits, which means people will have less money and there will be more made homeless when the long-term entitlement to housing benefit if you’re out of work is ended, with a time limit placed on how long it can be claimed and cuts made year on year to how much is paid out.
The government pretends landlords will develop a sudden and surprising flexibility, and that the private sector will employ all those people the coalition no longer wants to. Yet already private sector businesses are failing and shedding workers owing to the loss of lucrative government contracts. In truth, the government pretends because it doesn’t actually care so long as the Great Tory Project runs to time and is done with the wrecking ball makeover by 2015. Many calamities and changes will hit in the next five years but this government is deliberately engineering quite a few of them.
People carry on as normal, by which I mean as they have for the last 30 years of good times, even though it becomes more and more obvious that we are going to have to switch, those of us who were never rich, from being consumers to survivors in our approach to life if we are to stand any chance of getting through to the other side of these troubled times. That means spending less of course, for one thing, the reduction having its own dark side with economic phrases like deflation and stagflation being bandied around already.
Britain no longer produces enough food to support its population in the event of unspecified disasters or blockades in times of war. It was hard enough to get through World War Two in terms of avoiding starvation at home, with people encouraged to keep chickens, grow food anywhere there was space and ‘make do’. It will be even harder, as this century continues, given that we no longer have (and I’m not being sexist here, purely historical) mothers and daughters of all classes capable of sewing, mending, cooking and keeping a kitchen garden. Entire generations have no basic survival skills, no concept of making things last.
Times have changed and, in the absence of truly visionary and socially compassionate government, it is down to us as individuals to do what we can to secure our own food supplies as much as able, which will never lead to total self-sufficiency but that’s not the point. Be it a window box or a garden, an allotment or a pot on the windowsill, growing some food at home is a very good idea. Save money and eat better.
Some good will come from these times if we keep our heads, and learn. One thing is certain: the world has changed, and keeps on changing, to such an extent that the ways in which we live our lives, and the yardsticks by which we measure their quality, will have to change. More rapidly than anyone is prepared for.
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- Agflation fears as Russia halts all grain exports (telegraph.co.uk)
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- Wheat’s Jump Revives Food Crisis Concern, Asia’s Top Buyer Says (businessweek.com)
February 18, 2011 at 3:11 am
This Aussie found the site through its connection with global food prices, so I have no bias in British politics to raise. Let me comment on the latter part of the article on fiscal policy – even though a digression from the initial subject.
I see plenty of vitriol being tipped on the coalition government, and predictions of millions of unemployed. Yet, I read in vain for an economic alternative. But the proposition that the UK government can follow the Argentine path to ruin can only be short-sighted. That country insisted on a compassionate solution, come what may. It ended up with destructive inflation, a crisis in the external accounts, sharply falling exchange rates, shortages of all imported goods and a collapse in the standard of living. Or, perhaps the UK should go down the path of Ireland, instead, and let ‘er rip? At that point, there will be no room for ideology, because the UK government will become a slave to the IMF. I’d be impressed with a solution that caused only a fall in wages and incomes, but not unemployment. Yet, does anyone know how to engineer such a solution? Will wage earners confident they can keep their jobs surrender any part of their incomes to keep more in the workforce? I’ll believe it when I see it. Regardless, a part of their incomes will be sacrificed to pay for welfare demands.
The real culprits are your banks. There always were too many employed in the ludicrously over-rewarded parts of the UK financial sector. Certainly seems to be evidence of that. Those bankers, not the government, are the group who brought ruin upon the UK, after living high on the hog so long. ‘Too big to be let fail’, said the government, so taxpayers money was used to replace stupendous losses from shonky investments. But every economic activity must be funded. The disappearance of so much wealth comes at a price, because capitalism depends on productive investments, not wild speculation, to create prosperity. So if you want to criticise and ostracise someone, turn to the real source of your trouble; the banks.
March 31, 2011 at 1:13 pm
If only the banks had stuck to the idea that every economic activity must be funded. There are a number of valid alternatives to the cuts being implemented – including fairer taxation, with the rich and banks paying their share, plus modest taxes on all financial transactions over £100k alone would bring in a fortune annually. Certainly enough to stop the cuts to benefits for the sick, disabled and unemployed. Certainly enough to save our National Health Service, a credit to the UK and envied the world over.
The banks were only partly to blame. They were able to do what they did thanks to lax legislation, for which we must blame politicians going back to at least 1979. The ‘real source of our trouble’ today in the UK, right now, is not the banks but the consequences of having an unelected junta coaltion forcing savage cuts on the very services that define our nation as not only free but also civilised and caring.
Thanks for your comment.