Rush to Use Crops as Fuel Raises Food Prices and Hunger Fears

rush to biofuel stressing markets?  - Wiki

The New York Times

The starchy cassava root has long been an important ingredient in everything from tapioca pudding and ice cream to paper and animal feed.

But last year, 98 percent of cassava chips exported fromThailand, the world’s largest cassava exporter, went to just one place and almost all for one purpose: to China to make biofuel. Driven by new demand, Thai exports of cassava chips have increased nearly fourfold since 2008, and the price of cassava has roughly doubled.

Each year, an ever larger portion of the world’s crops — cassava and corn, sugar and palm oil — is being diverted for biofuels as developed countries pass laws mandating greater use of nonfossil fuels and as emerging powerhouses like China seek new sources of energy to keep their cars and industries running. Cassava is a relatively new entrant in the biofuel stream.

But with food prices rising sharply in recent months, many experts are calling on countries to scale back their headlong rush into green fuel development, arguing that the combination of ambitious biofuel targets and mediocre harvests of some crucial crops is contributing to high prices, hunger and political instability.

Read Full Article 

Enter your email address to subscribe to our newsletter:


Delivered by FeedBurner

Long Term Food Storage Basics - How to Pack Rice, Wheat, Beans and Dry Goods (Video)

Youtube

RELATED ARTICLE:

5 Easy Ways to Prepare for Food Inflation

Enter your email address to subscribe to our newsletter:


Delivered by FeedBurner

Energy, food costs push up US consumer spending

Groceries Wikimedia Commons

AFP

WASHINGTON (AFP) - US consumer spending rose in February, outpacing income growth, as Americans faced higher costs for energy and food, official data showed Monday.

Consumer spending rose 0.7 percent from January, more than double the 0.3 percent increase in January, the Commerce Department reported.

It was the strongest increase since October and topped forecasts for a 0.5 percent rise.

"The problem isn't that consumers aren't spending, they are," RDQ Economics analysts told clients. "But spending gains are being soaked up in higher prices for food and energy."
"Consumer spending looks to be a significant hurdle for first-quarter real growth," they added.

Personal income gains slowed, rising 0.3 percent, after a 1.2 percent jump in January.

Adjusted for inflation, consumer spending was up 0.3 percent after stagnating in January. Personal income slipped for the first time since September, by 0.1 percent.

Higher energy and food prices led the gains. The PCE price index for personal consumption rose 0.4 percent in February, compared with an increase of 0.3 percent in January.

But excluding food and energy, the PCE price index rose for the second month in a row by 0.2 percent.

With rising spending outpacing incomes, the savings rate slipped to 5.8 percent from 6.1 percent in January, according to the Commerce Department data.

Still, Americans were saving roughly the average rate for all of 2010 in the face of falling home values and high unemployment, key obstacles to the economy's full recovery from the severe recession that ended in June 2009.

Consumer spending is the key driver of growth in the world's largest economy, accounting for roughly 70 percent of output.

Gross domestic product growth in the final quarter last year in part reflected stronger personal spending that had accelerated from 2.7 percent in the third quarter to 4.0 percent.

The government revised upward Friday its GDP growth estimate for the 2010 fourth quarter to 3.1 percent, following a 2.6 percent gain in the third quarter.

© AFP -- Published at Activist Post with license

Enter your email address to subscribe to our newsletter:


Delivered by FeedBurner

Wholesale prices rise 1.6 pct. due to biggest jump in food costs in more than 36 years

Wikimedia Commons image

Yahoo/AP

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Wholesale prices jumped last month by the most in nearly two years due to higher energy costs and the steepest rise in food prices in 36 years. Excluding those volatile categories, inflation was tame.

The Labor Department said Wednesday that the Producer Price Index rose a seasonally adjusted 1.6 percent in February -- double the 0.8 percent rise in the previous month. Outside of food and energy costs, the core index ticked up 0.2 percent, less than January's 0.5 percent rise.

Food prices soared 3.9 percent last month, the biggest gain since November 1974. Most of that increase was due to a sharp rise in vegetable costs, which increased nearly 50 percent. That was the most in almost a year. Meat and dairy products also rose.

Energy prices rose 3.3 percent last month, led by a 3.7 percent increase in gasoline costs.

Read Full Article

RELATED ARTICLES:
5 Easy Ways to Prepare for Massive Food Inflation
7 Reasons Food Shortages will Become a Global Crisis

Enter your email address to subscribe to our newsletter:


Delivered by FeedBurner

Groundbreaking New UN Report on How to Feed the World's Hungry: Ditch Corporate-Controlled Agriculture

A new report from the UN advises ditching corporate-controlled and chemically intensive farming in favor of agroecology.

Wikimedia Commons

Jill Richardson
AlterNet

There are a billion hungry people in the world and that number could rise as food insecurity increases along with population growth, economic fallout and environmental crises. But a roadmap to defeating hunger exists, if we can follow the course -- and that course involves ditching corporate-controlled, chemical-intensive farming.

"To feed 9 billion people in 2050, we urgently need to adopt the most efficient farming techniques available. And today's scientific evidence demonstrates that agroecological methods outperform the use of chemical fertilizers in boosting food production in regions where the hungry live," says Olivier de Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. Agroecology is more or less what many Americans would simply call "organic agriculture," although important nuances separate the two terms.

Used successfully by peasant farmers worldwide, agroecology applies ecology to agriculture in order to optimize long-term food production, requiring few purchased inputs and increasing soil quality, carbon sequestration and biodiversity over time. Agroecology also values traditional and indigenous farming methods, studying the scientific principals underpinning them instead of merely seeking to replace them with new technologies. As such, agroecology is grounded in local (material, cultural and intellectual) resources.


A new report, presented today before the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, makes several important points along with its recommendation of agroecology. For example, it says, "We won't solve hunger and stop climate change with industrial farming on large plantations." Instead, it says the solution lies with smallholder farmers. The majority of the world's hungry are smallholder farmers, capable of growing food but currently not growing enough food to feed their families each year. A net global increase in food production alone will not guarantee the end of hunger (as the poor cannot access food even when it is available), an increase in productivity for poor farmers will make a dent in global hunger. Potentially, gains in productivity by smallholder farmers will provide an income to farmers as well, if they grow a surplus of food that they can sell.

With its potential to double crop yields, as the report notes, agroecology could help ensure smallholder farmers have enough to eat and perhaps provide a surplus to sell as well. The report calls for investment in extension services, storage facilities, and rural infrastructure like roads, electricity, and communication technologies, to help provide smallholders with access to markets, agricultural research and development, and education. Additionally, it notes the importance of providing farmers with credit and insurance against weather-related risks.

In the past, efforts to help the hungry involved developing high yielding seeds and providing them along with industrial inputs to farmers in poor countries. However, in poor countries, smallholder farmers who often live on less than $1 or $2 per day, cannot afford industrial inputs like hybrid or genetically engineered seeds, fertilizer, pesticides, or irrigation. Many work each year to make sure their crops go far enough to feed their families, with little left over to sell. And for those who live far from roads and cities, there might not be a market to sell to anyway.

Agroecology requires replacing chemical inputs with knowledge, often disseminated by farmers who work together with scientists and aid organizations to teach their fellow farmers. "Rather than treating smallholder farmers as beneficiaries of aid, they should be seen as experts with knowledge that is complementary to formalized expertise," the report notes. For example, in Kenya, researchers and farmers developed a successful "push-pull" strategy to control pests in corn, and using town meetings, national radio broadcasts, and farmer field schools, spread the system to over 10,000 households.

Read Full Article

RELATED ARTICLES:
5 Easy Ways to Prepare for Food Inflation
4 Best Off-the-Grid Food Production Methods

Enter your email address to subscribe to our newsletter:


Delivered by FeedBurner

http://c3ceefr8kopngdd42ijnrckxzk.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=GPAhttp://fa24dlv8jgooh53a9hples0lfx.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=GPA