Commodity Price Spikes
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2011-02-16/commodity-price-spikes
Around the world, prices for food and other basic commodities are going up. The price of food has climbed by almost 30% in the past twelve months. Cotton is near a ten year high, and copper is the highest it’s been in forty years. Some say the price hikes are a sign of global economic recovery, but for the world’s poor, the increases can be devastating. Please join us to talk about what’s behind the recent price spikes for food and basic commodities and what these increases could mean for consumers and governments worldwide,
Guests
Robert Zoellick
president, The World Bank
former Deputy Secretary, U.S. Department of State
David Orden
senior research fellow,International Food Policy Research Institute and professor, Virginia Tech Institute for Society, Culture and Environment.
Zanny Minton Beddoes
economics editor, "The Economist;" formerly, economist at the International Monetary Fund
David Leonhardt
columnist, New York Times
Comments
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How about industrial hemp? Henry Ford used hemp to produce large quantities of renewable biofuel. Hemp grows on marginal land without fertilizer or pesticides. Hemp can be grown and produced in all the states providing the basis of a new industry, long ignored by your so called experts and capable of providing millions of jobs.
Hemp production was the key to our forefathers economic independence and can do it again.
Are your experts informed enough to join with George Washington who said of hemp, "Plant It Everywhere"
I simply do not understand why it is OK to even LET global financial markets affect the cost of people's FOOD at a local level. Something seems really odd about this system. Why should individuals ever have to worry about the commodity costs?
It seems that your guests are glossing over the seriousness of the growing demand for more meat in the developing countries, especially China. I have heard that it takes 6 times the resources (grain, water, arable land) to produce meat as opposed to vegetables. This could be at least as serious a problem as water shortage in the very near future.
It's the end for the world as we know it. I have been fallowing the PEER reviewed global climate change studies for 34 years. 5 years ago I predicted that First their would be storms. Next their will be famine. I also predicted that the New Kings of the World (Big Businesses and the people who own they) Would make sure that Government would be out of $ to make the Infrastructural chances to get us off of oil. Next there will a rapid melt off of glaciers, Arctic sea ice and permafrost. O that is happening now.... Next an Huge increase Methane and nitrous oxide in the atmosphere.
The seas will die. The forests will burn. It seems people will not change the way that they live into a sustainable, oil free, non-capitalist local economy.
We are doom because of our stupidity and unwillingness to change and slow down.
I think your guest is contradicting themselves. The "rich" world already IS dictating to poor countries what they should eat simply through some of these harmful trade policies... that you were already talking about.
Citing Triumph of the City and its statement that the entire world population could be fit into townhouses in a Texas-sized area illustrates the myopia of the ecologically blind economist. As the human population grows, it devours more resources, including food. Those resources are appropriated by the human population at the expense of biodiversity. We are degrading and diminishing all of Earth's biomes for our own species' use. We are impoverishing all other life forms on the only inhabited planet we know of in the Universe. We do so at our peril.
There is no Hemp production due to the control of our Government by the Oil industry. Explain why else the prohibition Alcohol was repealed, but not marijuana. The strain of Hemp used to make rope is not the same used to smoke. So why can't farmers grow a viable productive useful crop? There are many uses for the oil as well as the fiber. I think We need to move beyond the "Reefer Madness" scares of the 20s, and beyond the gateway drug rigamarole and get down to the business of solving our collective needs for renewable energy sources, as well as a wide range of job possibilities.
Please share again the name of the book a guest mentioned near the end, a book about cities. This guest mentioned how all the world's population could fit into Texas townhouses.
Hey Diane. Wish one of your guests today had been either more knowlegable re: CCOs (collateralized commodity obligations) or less invested in the free-market paradigm. Speculation in commodities, particularly 'long-only' index trading is definitely playing a significant role in the current price hikes. For a plain English explanation and insight, might I suggest:
http://www.eurodad.org/uploadedFiles/Whats_New/News/Speculation%20in%20F...
This was written during the first such spike back in 2008 but is amazingly lucid on all pertinent points...
I do not believe that we will be able to find the solutions to our food or energy needs until we are able to change our collective mindset. How can we hope to have a more equitable and sustainable world, where basic human needs are met,without changing what we have come to accept as normal business and desirable behavior. Continuing to view what is required in providing basic Human needs and comfort simply as commodities to be traded and sold to the highest bidder is part of the problem. Sure business must profit, or it dies. And people should be rewarded for their efforts and their ability and willingness to assume risk. There is a big difference between reasonable even good profits and the greed for great wealth and excessive consumption by a few, that seems to be driving us. A little mindfulness goes a long way. The best way to promote a greener World is to produce and consume local products as much as we can. Let the supply of available food aid as a guide to population growth in any given area. "You cant always get what you want...." Rooftop gardens, foraging, we have a lot to learn, we can do it!
On food we neef to take the food eaten by animals that eat grass get them off grain.
Robert Zoellick- that name sends chills down my spine. He is the Bush operative who helped cover up the 9/11 inside job and was rewarded with the World Bank post. He followed almost the same path as Robert MacNamara, who helped prolong the Vietnam War.
Hemp might provide some small energy and fiber advantages but it is not edible. It can grow wild on neglected land and becomes almost impossible to eradicate without biocides. To corroborate that it cannot save America observe its sparse cultivation in the rest of the world. George Washington was a martinet military man and an expert slave driver but hardly an agronomist. It was Jefferson doing the rice research.
Watch cotton (nearly $2) a pound and see how much sheets and jeans go up. Our agriculture program is sadly mistaken in its support of corn and soybeans for fuel while neglecting domestic vegetables and fruits. More of our produce, frozen foods and canned goods are imported all the time. Read the small print on the label which often mentions China.
It is warm today and I've planted lettuce while listening to this show. I have cauliflower, broccoli, tomato and pepper plants started. I cannot survive on what I grow and I do see price hikes at the grocery our government denies. They expect people to switch to less desirable substitutes that may be tainted or unavailable as they calculate inflation. It parallels the fiction that people outside the workforce are not unemployed. If wheat and or rice crops are reduced this year by climate change there will be famine. Reserves are very short. There already exists a food price famine for half of humanity.
I want to second Susan's concern about the lack of diversity in viewpoints in this segement on food prices.
Please see "The Food Bubble: How Wall Street Starved Millions and Got Away With It"
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/7/16/the_food_bubble_how_wall_street
Harpers magazine has an article by Kaufman
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/07/0083022
Kaufman is not alone. I'm teaching a course on food and I have many articles and books on the perils of neoliberal governance of the world food supply, as dictated by trade policies such as NAFTA and organizations such as the WTO, IMF, and World Bank.
The caller who identified the role of the IMF and World Bank in dismantling food self-sufficiency in the developing world by dictating export oriented monocultural production was not addressed, but rather was dismissed by the guest who serves as an apologist for financial speculation.
I am extremely disappointed by the lack of diversity of viewpoints and wonder about hidden agendas' role in shaping this program's regime of truth...
Thank you, Majia, I was disappointed in the narrowness of this conversation, and grateful for your thoughtful response.
What was Rehm thinking in limiting the conversation to these voices?
Just have to echo what so many others have pointed out: not one mention of hemp as a biofuel alternative, which would eliminate the shameful waste of food for current biofuel stocks. Also no mention of the rise of monoculture, and the recklessness of consolidating food production into particular geographic regions, where severe weather can now have global instead of local impact.
Why not have someone like Michael Pollan or Mark Bittman on this show instead of a bunch of corporate shills?
Increasing production hasn't prevented hunger since the days of Earl Butz. Hunger is a distribution problem, not an agricultural productivity problem. The more subsidized US/EU agriculture had increased in productivity, the more agriculture in developing countries is undermined. This is rank dumping.
The economist failed to address the role of commodity market speculation in driving up food prices.
i cannot believe those two dimwits you had on the feb 16 show. between that woman claiming organic food was only for the rich and you can't grow as much food without commercial fertilizer and pesticide. she is so far out of touch, i can't believe you even let her on the show. here in maine - home to the largest organic organization in the country - mofga.org - our local npr station doesn't carry you live so thats why i'm commenting now. what century is that woman living in. everything she said has been disproven a milion times over. she needs to get up to speed and then the guy sez GMOs aren't harmful. Oh, then why has all of Europe banned them and why are there thousands of lawsuits against ADM and Monsanto if they are such a great idea. Organic experts say that if Roundup ready crops - which, by the way, the insects have already outpaced- continue to be planted, within ten years due to seed drift, there won't be a truly non-GMO crop in this country.
If you're going to have "experts" on, at least get some that are more balanced and not so far out of touch.
Hi diane,,
Great show! I want to agree full-heartedly with the gentleman from Louisianna about the danger of Genitically engineered crops being introduced to 3rd world countries. It is a problem because it keeps them from using the seeds that they have collected for generations. Seeds for crops that have adapted to their regions of the world and will withstand so many of the climatic extremes that are unique to their specific regions. If genitically engineered seeds are sold to a third world country and the farmers use them, Monsanto holds the patent so seeds can't be saved as they have been for generations. The farmer is obligated to go back to Monsanto every year for seed. Meanwhile the farmers abandon their heritage seeds and when there is a crop failure due to lack of genetic diversity, the farmers are at a loss and so are those people who depend on them. Genetically engineered seed is hugely profitable for large companies like Monsanto, but leave the most vulnerable even more vulnerable. Genetic diversity is the most important element of food security.
ann Currier
oxbow, maine.
This was a terrific show on such an important topic. It was most useful to point out the biofuel component of the hunger problem. In addition to the U.S. burning nearly 40 percent of our corn in cars, Europe and Brazil, the other two largest producers of key grains and cooking oil, have immense biofuel programs driven by mandates.
Biofuel production also is one of the few causes of world hunger that we in the U.S. can address in the near term to avoid suffering and death caused by world hunger. Unfortunately, EPA just raised the limit on blending ethanol with gasoline from 10% to 15% for cars produced after 2001, ignoring that we are already in a food crisis. As this change is implemented, many more lives will be at risk.
Biofuel mandates create demands which greatly accelerate the conversion of rain forests, prairies, and savannas to produce more crops. Since WAMU's program focused on food issues, these biofuel impacts were not mentioned. But the two outcomes are related: If forests were not being destroyed to produce more food, the world hunger caused by biofuel production would be even worse.
It's unbelievable that every single time this same argument comes up blaming biofuels for rising food prices, people conveniently forget to mention the fact that for each bushel of corn you not only get several gallons of ethanol, but you also get 18 lbs. of high-quality protein animal feed called distillers dried grains (DDG's).
DDGS are scientifically proven to be MORE nutritious for livestock than straight corn.
Not to mention the fact that the corn used for ethanol is not the sweet corn that you and I eat - it is a different grade only used for animal feed.
So will someone please explain to me again where all the missing food went?
And on a different topic - corn-fed beef is less healthy for us humans to eat than grass-fed beef. There's a reason we have a health epidemic in the US - we'd all be better off eating a more vegetarian diet.
I have worked at the World Bank and can tell you that Robert Zoellick will say almost anything to get more money from donor countries. But consider this, Americans: soon the Bank will undertake a huge staff reduction (perhaps over 20 pct), aimed at shaking out the most able and senior staff from developed countries, particularly non-tribally affiliated American males, and replacing them with mainly female developing country staff with lesser credentials. An internal campaign has started, lauding "diverse educational backgrounds," by which the Bank means developing country applicants who graduated from inferior instiutions with inferior grades despite their very privileged backgrounds (the scions of Mubarek minions figure prominently among Egyptian Bank staff). This is an institution that gives lip service to the expertise of its staff, but even its own internal evaluation department has pointed out that in the last couple of years, basic economic analysis of prospective projects has been woefully lacking. The place is just shoveling out money in order to mark up its scorecard of deliveries. Because of weak management, the Bank in the past has contributed to the current agricultural problems by failing to take a strong stand with its clients on what it knew was bad policy; it will compound the problem in the future by getting rid of its staff who know what bad policy is.
I'd just like to second what Majia and Bill said. I usually love your show, Diane, but you really did a disservice to this subject matter by having such narrow opinions on and not even attempting to question them on the various assumptions they made in dismissing callers' legitimate questions and concerns. The need to feed the world's population with the methods and resources we are currently employing in the US should not be taken for granted. To think what we are doing here is sustainable - setting aside the overpopulation issue - is to be taken in by corporate propaganda. Technology will not allow us to live however we want, in whatever numbers we want, in perpetuity. It will merely allow us to ignore the underlying problems of living unsustainably, which is exactly what you did on your show today. Such a sham and such a shame.
To NathanielB and the other luddites: What would you propose as a rational solution, and what evidence do you have that it would work? Romanticism about "sustainability" does not solve the problem. If any real agricultural scientists listen to NPR, please weigh in, so it is not just the knee-jerk anti-establishment utopians like these.
I was at an appointment and listening to yesterdays show as I was waiting to be called. I was shocked to hear the guests poo-poo the effects of GMO crops. Our food chain starts in the soil. Altering the soil with chemicals such as Round up pollutes the soil. Then said soil feeds the grains which we are now feeding our cattle, pigs and chickens. None of these species are grain eaters. Therefore, their tummies get sick and then we give the animals antibiotics to ward off the sick tummies. Then we eat the antibiotic laden meat, and our tummies get sick, more antibiotics, and more resistance to disease. Obama must be in cahoots with Monsanto, Cargill and the other Big Agriculture Corporations. Geez, he has children, What is he thinking?
check out : you tube greening the desert. there are many ways to address the issues we have. it may require a little more education on a specific situation. i personally don't want tot be a gmo guinea pig. look at all the miracle drugs, pesticides, etc that have been recalled when the miracle turned into a nightmare. solutions can be found on a community level . just go community by community.who wants to be dependent on some huge factory farm or conglomerate when all they've been proven capable of is screwing people over. put the power back to the individual(s).
One of the guests on your show stated that they did not believe that the world is overpopulated, and supported this assertion by stating that everyone on earth could fit in Texas and have a townhouse.
I first encountered this idea in an article by Stephen Moore entitled "Body Count" (1999, National Review), in which he stated: "Fact: If every one of the 6 billion of us resided in Texas, there would be room enough for every family of four to have a house and one-eighth of an acre of land-the rest of the globe would be vacant." The implication is that there is room for lots more people and therefore the world is not overpopulated.
I would like to dispel this distortion of the truth. It is irrelevant whether we could all fit in Texas, or even Rhode Island for that matter. What matters is the amount of biologically productive land and sea that we need to support our standard of living. Human demand for food and other goods, together with the absorption of wastes, requires approximately 5.4 acres per person (Wackernagel et al. 2002. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 99(14): 9266–9271.) This includes the land needed to drill oil for our cars and polyester, grow wood, mine for bauxite, catch fish for our food, build universities and your corner Starbucks, and bury your trash. Moreover, the average AMERICAN requires 23.5 acres to sustain their lifestyle.
Here's the problem: there are less than 4.5 acres of biologically productive land and sea available for each person on earth, if we leave no space for other species. The magnitude of the imbalance is so large, and the trend in consumption rates worldwide so clearly upwards, that the final conclusion is robust to variation in specific input values.
I'm surprised and disappointed that your guest quoted such a simplistic (ridiculous, really) "fact" in support of his statement that the world is not overpopulated.
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I agree with those who say the show was tilted toward a free market or neo-liberal ideology. Ms. Beddoes just kept repeating that commodity speculation (derivatives in most cases) have little to do with food prices or shortage but she never went beyond a bare assertion. Matt Taibbi in his book Griftopia did a pretty thorough job of establishing the connection during the 2006-8 time period.
More viewpoints, please.
One of your guests suggested that if farmers increased there growing then food prices would come down. What would motivate farmers to plant more? If the value of my current crop goes up then what tends to happen is that fertilizer and seed and farm equipment prices also rise. The next crops that I plant will cost me more. If food prices fall during the next growing season then I'll lose the profits from the last season. I think that farmers would rather produce less in order to keep there margins higher.
Frank. Saint Augustine FL
How can it be that not one of your guests chose to share the following population information with your listeners? Each day around the world there are about 580,000 births and 153,000 deaths, so that earth’s human population grows larger by about 227,000 extra persons every 24 hours. Thus, if today is Friday, by this same time on Monday, earth will be home to about 681,000 extra people, so that it would seem to be necessary for someone, somewhere to grow a LOT of extra food over the weekend (and to do so repeatedly over every three-day period thereafter.)
Meanwhile, a compelling scientific argument can be made that earth’s carrying capacity for an industrialized humanity (assuming a Western European standard of living for all) is on the order of two billion or less - numbers which we passed back in 1930. And yet this year we will reach our 7th billion (FIVE additional billions in less than a single human lifetime), with still more billions (numbers 8 and 9) on-track to arrive by 2050. While these numbers may serve economic interests, they are eradicating and damaging vast portions of the only planetary life-support machinery so far known to exist anywhere in the universe.
This is to also critique guest Leonhardt’s claim that he doesn’t “think the world is overpopulated.” Rather than basing our planet's worldwide population-environment policies, however, on the opinions of a columnist, we might consider instead the opinions of the 99 Nobel Laureates in science who in 1992 issued an “Urgent Warning to Humanity” about world population growth and the environment, or to the similar warnings issued jointly by officers of the U.S. National Academy of Science and U.K.’s Royal Society.