by Cole Mellino
Food prices are rising so consistently, Americans are starting to do crazy things.
Earlier this month, the UN predicted food prices would continue to get more volatile. Now, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is predicting an increase of 3.5% to 4.5% for American retail food inflation this year. Retail inflation increased just 0.8% last year.
The changes in retail prices are making many cash-strapped shoppers go to great lengths to get good deals, according to a recent story in the Wall Street Journal.
“If I don’t think it’s a good deal, I don’t buy it,” Evelyn Jackson, a student at Columbia College in Chicago said Tuesday as she loaded groceries into her car, which she uses for comparison shopping despite the high cost of gasoline. She said she had not only turned up her nose at okra recently offered at $4.99 a pound in a Jewel supermarket, but had taken a picture of lower-priced okra in a competing store and showed it to a manager at Jewel, a unit of Supervalu Inc. She has also balked at Asian pears offered at $2.99 apiece.
“Oprah Winfrey wouldn’t pay $2.99 for one of those pears,” she said.
If Oprah wouldn’t pay it, good luck getting most Americans, who make a fraction of her income, to pay for it.
Let’s not forget about the tens of millions of people around the world who barely have access to food today. The price increases in America are symptomatic of what’s happening in the rest of the world — creating food-access problems that even Oprah can’t solve.
While the global economic slowdown tempered the dramatic rise in food prices, they’ve still been at levels not seen since the late 1970s. In 2008 alone, food prices rose 5.5%. Prices of staples including milk, beef, coffee, cocoa and sugar have risen sharply in recent months. Many of these price hikes, such as the one in cocoa, are being linked to temperature and weather shifts due to climate change.
As the world heats up and causes worsening food crises that disproportionately impact the poorest people, a lot crazier things are going to happen than Americans taking multiple trips to the grocery store to find cheap fruit.
— Cole Mellino, Center for American Progress intern, with Stephen Lacey
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
There is something seriously wrong when some get rich while others starve.
On the other end of the spectrum there is another problem brewing.
I run an organic farming operation that sells vegetables at farmers markets in the Washington DC metro area. In a number of conversations with other farmers over the last couples of months we have been discussing how we have been unable to make any price increases stick over the last couple of years. Our expenses have risen significantly over that time (fuel and labor especially). Yet we really struggle to pass those expenses on. Many of the farmers I have spoken to are making less money now than a couple of years ago.
For instance at today’s market I received complaints about high prices 4 times. The prices have not changed at that market in 2 years. And that market is one of the cheapest markets in the area.
This situation does not bode well for the local food movement. The proliferation of farmers markets across the US is actually hurting profitability right now. The average vendor gross sales per market is down significantly due to spreading out the customers between more markets. To make up many farmers are adding markets to increase sales, but expenses also go up fast. Your net per market goes down. So we are, once again, running into the get really big or get out situation.
If we really want a vibrant local food economy customers have to be willing to pay well above Costco prices. More like the prices you will see at Whole Foods or equivalent. If the economy gets so bad that there is not a core of customers willing to spend more as a matter of commitment to evolving away from industrial agriculture then local small scale farming will be unable to grow to the point it can provide significant percentages of the food requirements during the growing season.
Welcome to Global Warming, America.
You can’t spin floods and droughts for long.
Oh, yeah. The rest of the world doesn’t hate us for our freedoms. They hate us because of the way we abuse our power.
The wake up call?
How is eliminating the internal combustion engine going to help reduce food costs?
How is growing corn for fuel going to help reduce food costs?
How is forcing farmers to purchase expensive new, cleaner diesel tractors going to help reduce food costs?
How is growing 10s of thousands of acres of rice and leaving it unharvested for duck consumption going to help reduce food costs?
How is forcing farmers to hire service agencies to monitor their soils and waterways at a cost of approximately $14,000 per farm going to help reduce food costs?
How is forcing farmers to run back and forth across fields tilling in crop stubble at a cost range of $80 to $150 per acre, instead of burning when appropriate for the conditions, going to reduce food costs?
Keep legislating our food production, making sure that every perceivable concern is addressed and enforced by the government and watch how effectively our food prices become out of reach for every day Americans.
Dang, I didn’t know that the floods in Thailand were caused by Obama the Antichrist’s over-regulation. Thanks for telling us!
</sarc>
– frank
Thoughtful response.
I’m glad the authors had the decency to remember the 10s of millions who “barely have access to food”, i.e. are starving, in the context of an article about the price of a pear in the USA. It strikes me as incongruous, if not bizarre, that the price of a pear is causing such angst when we are watching the great food bowls of the world go down, one after another, and NGOs are desperately scrambling to scrape enough together to get below minimum rations, and clean water, to those 10s of millions.
The prices of food in the USA are not symptomatic of what is happening around the world – they merely indicate the level of inequality, and lack of reality, we have reached.
And what about your own poor? I watched Americans buying food with food stamps in 1983-4 and I can tell you pears were not on the menu for those families then. There wasn’t a lot of “staples” like milk or beef on those menus either. They featured wheat, rice, fat and sugar. And you have a lot more of those families now than you had then.
A totally bizarre article but if that’s what it takes to get even a modicum of reality through to some of the richest people on Earth, so be it, ME
Exactly, ME.
Forty million people in America are on food stamps. That’s double what it was a few years ago. The trends are clear, and clearly they won’t be reversed without a lot of effort and protest.
http://blogs.reuters.com/david-cay-johnston/2011/10/19/first-look-at-us-pay-data-its-awful/
First look at US pay data, it’s awful
David Cay Johnston — Oct 19, 2011 17:15 EDT
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-10-26/cost-of-essentials-going-up-as-luxuries-fall/3602286
Now that I know the ‘free market’ is the cure I’ll sleep so much better at night. Just vote Tea Bag and problem solved.