The contrarian in me is screaming that Reuters' recent piece on food prices is the food inflation equivalent to Businessweek's famous "Stocks are dead" headline from a 1982 issue.  Yet another piece is whispering in my hear "baby, it ain't over yet!"  

Doing my usually Saturday morning rounds: First Costco for the necessities, then the grocery store for the few luxurious items that are better or have a better selection from Stop & Shop; bananas, red bliss potatoes, cereal.

I buy some cereal at Costco, but one of my little luxuries is Stop & Shop "Nutty Nuggets."  They are a generic version of Grapenuts.

I adore Grapenuts, but at $3.49 per box, there's no way, especially when Nutty Nuggets is $2.00 per box.

Today Nutty Nuggets wasn't there.  Neither was the store-brand All-Bran, Total, or other generics.  There was a store-brand Cheerios (Oaty-Os), Store-brand Frosty Flakes, but that was about it for generics in the cereal aisle.

This summer is the summer of pain. Families across America are struggling with higher prices for gas and food along with record unemployment rates, flat wages, and the deepening housing crisis. In April 2008, gasoline prices easily shattered an inflation-adjusted record that had stood since March 1981, and they have only continued to soar since then, hitting new record highs almost weekly. Ever-higher food prices, which rose 22.7 percent from March 2001 to April 2008, are taking another bite out of families’ wallets.

Given the rising price of petrol, many people have advocated the movement towards increased production of biofuels as an alternative to oil-based fuel sources. In fact, the european union has proposed a mandatory policy advocating that 10% of all member states' transport fuels are derived from  biofuels.

We also have seen increased production of biofuels from developing economies like Brazil and Indonesia. Biofuels are also less polluting than traditional oil-based fuels. Many have seen this as a potential way to move away from a resource-constrained fuel (i.e., non-sustainable) to others that are producible and would be less devastating for the environment.

While clearly biofuels are a positive step from traditional oil-based fuels, there are substantive difficulties indicated given the rising price of foodstuffs.

More signs that the Bush Economy is still booming!

Based on the current limited amount of information concerning the ANWR drilling proposal the oil companies are getting a huge slice of the oil proceeds.  Then the Alaskans get half of what is left.  And last and least, the rest of the American people get some royalties and tax revenue out of the deal.

I have written on this subject before.  But not until today June 6, 2008, did I realize the scope of this operation and the fascism that it lives and breaths.  Not until today did I see Barack Obama tied to the deaths of millions of people by virtue of his support for biofuels.  And not until today did the little lite bulb come on about the true story of ANWR.

The Republican apologists have really put this one together well.  It is hard to imagine people that want fascism but they seem to want it badly.

According to the Burros of Labor Statistics, the CPI is defined as:

The CPI inflation calculator uses the average Consumer Price Index for a given calendar year. This data represents changes in prices of all goods and services purchased for consumption by urban households. This index value has been calculated every year since 1913. For the current year, the latest monthly index value is used

In plain English, the CPI pretends to measure the inflation rate. But in reality it does not. Today's CPI is little more than a make believe figure, used by government and large corporations to increase profitability, and to keep the real bad news out of the headlines.

The COST OF LIVING MEASURE, depending on how its variables and data points are weighted, is actually a better measure of inflation. If we took 2007 as a baseline, and the 2008 COL was 110, we would estimate that to maintain the identical living style now costs 10% more than last year.

We can safely state that the COL for 2006-2008 is far, far higher than the official guess estimate of  2.9%.

Ever heard of Celiac disease?  People with the condition can't eat wheat, barley, rye, or most oats.  As worldwide rice prices skyrocket, most folks can shift their diet away from rice, but for a person with Celiac, wheat, rye, and barley are not among the choices.

What about people with life-threatening food allergies to soy?  Corn?  Or the millions with food intolerances? Not life-threatening, as a food allergy is, but life-altering, triggering gastrointestinal issues, fatigue, skin disorders, and a host of other medical problems.

What happens when food allergies, medical conditions, and skyrocketing food prices converge?

For the past few weeks news sources have talked about the dangerous influence alternative fuels have on our cost of food.

"The recent rise in corn prices--almost 70 percent in the past six months--caused by the increased demand for ethanol biofuel has come much sooner than many agriculture economists had expected. . . And that increase, says Marshall Martin, an agriculture economist at Purdue University, "is the main driver behind the price increase for corn."

No disrespect to Marshall Martin, but the price of corn isn't quite a simple as blaming it all on biofuels.  

I spoke with Jim Martin (no relation to Marshall) who is on the Federal Technical Advisory Committee for Biomass Research and Development, and he confirmed that blaming it all on ethanol neglects a number of other factors that don't always fit into a 30 second analysis.

There have been some whispers out there that I'd like to check out, but I don't know where to begin looking for evidence.  Specifically, I was wondering how to prove the following thesis:

Big financial players who took a bath in the real estate collapse are trying to recoup their loses by taking advantage of naturally rising oil and food prices and pushing them into a speculative bubble.

I made several trips to India and Pakistan between the late-1960s and the early-1980s. The ‘Green Revolution’ was just emerging during my first trip in 1967-68, when I spent 6 months collecting agricultural data for my Ph.D. dissertation near Allahabad, on the fertile Gangetic Plain of northern India. I later lived for 1-½ years in Pakistan during the mid-1970s, as an agricultural economist with the U.S. Agency for International Development. By the time of my stay in Pakistan, the Green Revolution pace of change in the subcontinent had begun to slow. During and immediately following my various trips, I was always struck by the contrast between the prevailing U.S. view of ‘markets’ and the views of Indian and Pakistani governments. It seemed to me that India and Pakistan needed to place more reliance on markets and the U.S. needed more regulation of markets.

According to this from Dahr Jamail's site:

Sharp increases in food prices have generated a new wave of anti-occupation and anti-U.S. sentiment in Fallujah.

"This is a country that was damned by the Americans the moment they stepped on our soil," Burhan Jassim, a farmer from Sichir village just outside Fallujah told IPS. "This is Iraqi land that has always been blessed by Allah with the best production in quality and quantity, but now see how it has been turned into a wasteland."

It's time to ask: what are we really trying to "protect"?

Source: Digital Smack

The average household spends three times more on food than on gasoline.  Farmers, pressured by the rising cost of gas and labor, have also seen the price of fertilizer double from what it was three years ago and have been forced to raise crop prices.

The key crop is corn, used to produce that notorious high-fructose corn syrup in our processed foods, and more to the point, to feed our livestock.  The same livestock that is the source of our milk, eggs, and so forth, which rise accordingly.

There's so much discussion about the economy and what can be done or proposed to enhance it that I felt that a diary dedicated to the economy might be something that others (besides me) were interested in!).

I'm currently a single woman age 50 and live alone.  I've been through the raising of children and having to provide for them as a single parent.  Between the 'gas tax holiday' and the 'tax incentive checks' and some of the recent media attention on our economy there are some basic, overlooked facts.

Now we all know and anticipate that prices are going to go up, it's just the way it is - I'm grounded in reality whether I want to be or not.  As a grandmother I wonder how my children manage today - especially when compared to when I was bringing them up!

If you are wondering why the stock market has been soaring when we have a credit crunch, job layoffs, a housing crisis among other negative factors, you are not alone.

But...maybe there is an explanation. I call it the boa constrictor economy.

[cross-posted on And, yes, I DO take it personally]

i've been posting on various perspectives of kabul and afghanistan... here's another one that captures fairly well the experience of driving around the city of kabul...

Getting around in some parts of central Kabul is like driving inside trenches: two lanes of road between high walls made of modern versions of sandbags referred to by their brand name: "Hesco barriers." They consist of 4-foot-tall wire mesh containers lined with heavy plastic and filled with sand, gravel or dirt, all topped by concertina wire. Other streets have classic sandbag structures, high walls and/or concrete-like barricades. Every dozen yards along the roads are heavily armed guards -- dead serious, with sunglasses, earpieces and legs menacingly spread.

Since March 2007, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the price of eggs has jumped 35 percent. A gallon of milk is up 23 percent. A loaf of white bread has climbed 16 percent. And a pound of ground chuck is up 8 percent. Overall, U.S. food prices in 2008 are expected to rise 4 to 5 percent, about double the increases of recent years. And while the total rise is far less drastic than elsewhere around the world, the sharp hike for staples means everyone is feeling the pinch.

For most in the US we have not fully felt the impact of the Global Food Crisis in anything like the way it has hit other nations.  Perhaps we might be like the woman featured at the beginning of today's final article in the Washington Post Series, Crimping, Scrimping, Saving, who no longer buys organic meat and buys organic milk only for the small child.  If that is the most serious impact upon our lives it may not feel like a crisis.  Perhaps we need to recognize how lucky we are.

Two Washington Post articles in the past week provide an interesting little localized contrast of the challenges related to finding a path toward an Energy Smart future.