Why food inflation has skyrocketed out of control

https://electricsheep.substack.com/p/let-them-eat-cake

by jger15 • 5 years ago

22 41 5 years ago

electricsheep.substack.com

skywal_l3• 5 years ago

What happen when a patented GMO is engineered not to reproduce naturally and then spread and replace the naturally occurring one?

virgilp• 5 years ago

How would both of these be simultaneously possible? Surely, if it spreads to replace the naturally occurring one, it must reproduce naturally (or otherwise it can't "accidentally" spread/ without active involvement of the patent-holder).

skywal_l3• 5 years ago

Through the natural way of how plants reproduce. The terminator gene gets spread through cross-pollination.

But I would gladly be educated on this matter of course.

chrisseaton2• 5 years ago

If it's not reproducing naturally then how is it spreading and replacing other crops?

skywal_l3• 5 years ago

Because the other plants still reproduce and accept the genes that have been engineered. The next generation of the "natural" plants being then unable to grow viable seeds.

specialist• 5 years ago

I quite liked Pollan's treatment in Botany of Desire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Botany_of_Desire

Any more, I regard GMO as just another form of rent seeking (corporatism). In this context, I haven't thought of a way the GMO trait would change the trend towards monocultures. Maybe accelerate it?

p_l3• 5 years ago

The engineering against natural reproduction is something required by, among others, Greenpeace in order to prevent spread and replacing of naturally occurring ones.

nl• 5 years ago

Last week, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization said that its global food price index hit its highest point in nearly a decade.

Can anyone find this?

Their latest bulletin[1] doesn't seem to say this as far as I can see.

There is "East Africa: Prices of coarse grains followed mixed trends in April; exceptionally high levels persist in the Sudan and South Sudan" but that seems to be offset by "Domestic prices of rice generally stable in April with exception of some main exporters where they decreased; those of wheat followed mixed trends"

Their price trend release[2] is also mixed news.

[1] http://www.fao.org/3/cb4720en/cb4720en.pdf

[2] http://www.fao.org/giews/food-prices/international-prices/de...

rbinv• 5 years ago

FAO Food Price Index: http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/foodpricesindex/en/

"It also marked the twelfth consecutive monthly rise in the value of the FFPI to its highest value since September 2011"

Chart: http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/worldfood/images/home...

Historical chart: http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/worldfood/images/home...

icegreentea24• 5 years ago

You found the May report, the June one is out.

Summary page is here: http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/foodpricesindex/en/

The specific graph that captures that point would be here:

http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/worldfood/images/home...

Note that the 'real' line (yellow) hit its last peak in 2011.

occamrazor2• 5 years ago

In the article I can't find support for the thesis that food inflation has happened, or is happening.

icegreentea24• 5 years ago

It's not the best written article because while it opens with talking about slow moving systemic things (see the other comments/discussion in the thread linking to the actual UN FAO reports showing that their global food price index is infact up quite a lot over the last couple years), but the real HEART of the article is this one-two punch:

1) Famines (not the same thing as food inflation) are typically man-made, or CERTAINLY man amplified

2) While the biggest 20th century famine events can easily be laid at the feet of authoritarian governments, our current global system has capitalism playing a similar threat. I feel like the heart of this article is wrapped up in this paragraph:

The cartel of western farmers want to export their product as cheaply as possible, which opens them up to all sorts of Black Swan risks. When the music inevitably stops, the countries that were net-importers of these commodities take the hit while these massive cartels, many of whom are subsidized by their governments, can afford to do so and live another day.

Now, of course the hilarious reason why western farmers (partly) have so much to export is because of food security incentives that their domestic governments have in place to ensure enough capacity in production to absorb various shocks. Which I felt that the author should have brought up.

jfengel• 5 years ago

If we made agriculture as efficient as the automotive production pipelines, hiccups like the chip shortage would literally end civilization. So, bonus.

Unfortunately, when you stomp efficiency in one place, it'll tend to pop up somewhere else. Usually in the places without money, because they can't afford the luxury of inefficiency. That that makes them really, really susceptible to your point (1): they're vulnerable to anybody in power with their finger on the artery.

It's aggravating, because we've got so much technology that we managed to get out ahead of the arithmetic/exponential conflicts that were reasonably predicted to cause serious hardship. We can feed 8 billion people. It's hateful that a relatively small number of people in just the right places can starve billions at once.

occamrazor2• 5 years ago

Thanks for the detailed reply. and for drawing me towards the core claims. In fact point 2, which I believe is the main argument, after reading the article again, is at odds with the “inflation” hypothesis, at least if we define inflation as a long-term trend of increasing food prices.

The systematic overproduction of agricultural product by rich countries for food security has actually kept global prices low, even with the increase in demand from population growth. The recent movements in the price index are not obviously part of a long term trend (and with all that passed in 2020-21 it will be difficult to distinguish what is a trend and what is a one-off shock).

I would like to read an article that looks at these themes in more depth.

K0balt• 5 years ago

It’s in the jume report. Definitely seeing it in this developing nation, food prices across the board are un 10 to 50 percent ( I provisión a farm for 10 workers, and 8 families members so I have a consistent monthly purchasing pattern)

Filligree• 5 years ago

Can you link to this report? Google isn't being helpful.

bryanlarsen2• 5 years ago

Vaccines: Trust the science.

GMO: Don't trust the science.

Choose one or the other. Hypocrisy isn't a good look.

bombcar• 5 years ago

Replace “the science” with “my politics” and all becomes clear.

rualca2• 5 years ago

You wouldn't post these kinds of cynical and deeply ignorant remarks if you had the faintest awareness of the science behind the GMO debate, specially the warnings and problems already flagged in the real world where GMOs played a critical part.

Santanlan2• 5 years ago

Would be nice if you could post some links to where we can read up on your claims. Not saying that you're wrong but my only real sources are from university when we got lectures on the very fringe of the core of my education on GMOs. And the source is of course a professor who work on GMO and was very steadfast on how safe it was, not biased at all...

But seriously, some sources would be appreciated.

matkoniecz• 5 years ago

This is your chance to post sources on this topic.

"GMO is bad" may be true but I never seen a good sources supporting it.

What I encountered was always on a level of astrology, new age, homeopathy, vaccines-cause-autism quackery.

cheese_goddess5• 5 years ago

But are those two opposing views held by and advocated by the same people? If not, there is no hypocrisy.

NikolaeVarius• 5 years ago

Article does not cite any sources for claims

cheese_goddess5• 5 years ago

Fundamentally, the story of golden rice is a metaphor for how tech isn’t the be-all-and-end-all for the hunger crisis, the web of bureaucrats, NGOs, and geopolitics is enough to block any sort of disruption into the ecosystem.

In truth, the planet produces enough food to feed its billions, but most of this is produced in affluent, developed nations where supply outstrips demand by a large margin, so a third of the supply ends in landfills as food waste (https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/10/1048452) instead of going where it's needed, particularly Africa and South America where "undernourishment and severe food insecurity are on the rise" (from the UN article linked earlier).

This is not a bureaucratic issue, or an issue with regulations etc. Rather, the people who make the food that feed us all don't make it because they want to feed us, but because they want to turn a profit. If they can't turn a profit, then they don't sell the food. So it's a matter of distribution, and economics and not a matter of regulation, or technology.

As to GMOs, green hysteria aside, GMOs address the wrong problem at best, throw fuel to the fire at worst: where there is a problem of distribution, as in the developing world, GMOs address a non-existent problem of supply. Where there is oversupply, as in the developed world, they just exacerbate it.

To be perfectly honest I'm not an expert in any of this and the above is my clunky, probably half-wrong version of what's going on, that I've pieced together from my patchy knowledge of the food production business (I make cheese, not for a living, but it has given me a narrow perspective from which I think I can safely extrapolate, up to a point). The most alarming part of the truth is that most people -in developed and developing nations alike- do not understand where their food comes from, who makes it, how they make it and where it ends up when they don't eat it. We have centralised food production, made our lives in cities far away from wher the food is made, built our societies around producing all sorts of things we can't eat- and now we're all paying the price. Because, what it all comes down to is that human needs food badly and there's no way around that.

p_l3• 5 years ago

Golden Rice however addressed a problem that couldn't be addressed in other ways (not without much bigger strife), by providing a decentralized, locally viable way of addressing the vitamin shortage that all other options failed at.

(Of course we could just do it by force, but that has other issues)

cheese_goddess5• 5 years ago

I don't understand this comment. There's enough food to feed everyone, and more. Why do we need Golden Rice to ensure everyone gets enough vitamin A? Why can't we distribute enough food with enough vitamin A to the people who need it, without that food being Golden Rice? And how is Golden Rice solving the problem of getting all the already existing food containing vitamin A to people? Why do we need to fulfill peoples' need of vitamin A with Golden Rice, in particular?

icegreentea24• 5 years ago

Cheap transfer of food from developed to developing nations poses its own risks (which this article touches on). It can undercut developing nations own farmers, and realigns incentives, and is also more easily corruptible (these large imports usually need to pass through government hands).

Here's a paper (I am certain there are a lot, expressing every possible view point) http://www.fao.org/3/ag301t/ag301t.pdf

I think the abstract sums things up well:

Although food aid can have negative unintended consequences, the empirical evidence is thin and often contradictory. The available evidence suggests that harmful effects are most likely to occur when food aid arrives or is purchased at the wrong time, when food aid distribution is not well targeted to the most food insecure households, and when the local market is relatively poorly integrated with broader national, regional and global markets

This assertion (which I think is sound) re-emphasis the importance of the entire system working well, not just having cheap supply.

Another thing to help think about the first world's "food waste" problem (and I do think its something we need to manage), is to imagine what the target food waste goal should be. How much over-supply on average do we want to insure us against shocks and disruptions? For shits and giggles, I looked at the USDA's stats on bushels of wheat harvested (https://www.nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_Subject/result.php?9...) from 2000 to 2019. The average (both mean and median) production divided by minimal over that time frame is ~1.3. I think that helps set an useful scale.

cheese_goddess5• 5 years ago

I don't understand your comment. The abstract you copied here says that the evidence that "food aid can have negative unintended consequences" is "thin and often contradictory". Moreover, I didn't say anything about "just having cheap supply". I said there's a problem of distribution rather than regulation. What are you disagreeing with, in my comment, can you explain?

wuschel2• 5 years ago

In truth, the planet produces enough food to feed its billions (...)

Your statement is very general in nature. I assume you mean humans, and I assume by feeding you mean a sustainable process. Would you please quote your sources here? The modern industrial agriculture that keeps modern society alive is based on efficiency innovations such as the Haber Bosch process, soil management, antibiotics, automation, transportation etc that being huge scale effects. Personally, I have no idea of the human population ceiling if all were optimally distributed home farmers. It sure would come with inefficiencies.

source: had some interesting conversions with individuals from the from BASF/Cargill/Tyson Foods.

To be perfectly honest I'm not an expert (...)

It is a super complex topic - biology, farming, engineering, markets. Hard to be an expert here. Let us hope one shows up and writes a comment :^)

cheese_goddess5• 5 years ago

What I mean is that the food we produce is already enough to feed everyone (yes, humans). The UN article I link starts with this:

Enough food is produced today to feed everyone on the planet, but hunger is on the rise in some parts of the world, and some 821 million people are considered to be “chronically undernourished”. What steps are being taken to ensure that everyone, worldwide, receives sufficient food?

The first sentence includes a link to the source of the claim.

What do you mean by "inefficiecies" at the end of your second paragraph?

jancsika• 5 years ago

we can’t precisely measure life satisfaction, but we can quantify GDP per capita, which as we know can be easily faked.

So the problem worthy of note with GDP is veracity of the figure? Not an economist, but I thought the problem was that it doesn't illuminate important aspects of the economy we'd want to know-- e.g., whether there's an increasing income disparity in the given nation.

jacknews• 5 years ago

"A Cambrian explosion in the price of food"

huh?

dubeye• 5 years ago

"highest in a decade". Was it out of control 10 years ago too? When prices were presumably higher than now.

Glavnokoman• 5 years ago

Because only retard can believe in unlimited exponential growth under limited resources?

Why food inflation has skyrocketed out of control

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