Sometimes the New York Times has great little local stories that are more illuminating than the entire San Francisco Chronicle, and sometimes the local "color" discovered by the Times turns out to be misleading. I don't know what I will ultimately think of Thursday's story on a rice shortage in San Francisco, particularly in Chinatown and Japantown, but I did have to read it. I don't buy rice in bulk, and I don't even look at price (unlike Heather!) when I pick up a package of brown rice. (Oh, and I love that 15-bean soup! I always kick off the winter with it.) But the idea of San Franciscans suddenly hoarding rice: I've been reading about global food shortages but it suddenly came home.
I also liked this story in The Hindu criticizing Condoleezza Rice's claim that the food shortage is due to improved diets in India and China. I went to "How the World Works" to see if Andrew Leonard has written about this in the last few days, and I found his great post on the Laughing Buddha, which I felt compelled to link to here. I don't know what it means that my thoughts about the rice shortage led me to Buddha, except: Don't hoard. So I won't.
But where is Andrew Leonard, anyway? He should cross-post Laughing Buddha here...
DakiniDancer
Niece of Dakini
Sheldon The Wonderhorse
Susan Walsh
Big Uncle Jack
jimmymac1025
Salon.com
Comments
The Chinese rural family that we all read about in grade school in THE GOOD EARTH by Pearl Buck is breaking up. The children who used to stay on the farm helping their parents tend the crops are moving to the cities at the rate of millions every day. Once there, they get jobs, quite often the jobs that have been shipped overseas by US companies that would rather pay the Chinese workers a fraction of what they pay US workers. Once they have jobs, they become consumers of all kinds of things including better food. They also are buying more cars and motorcycles. They tend to eat more meat.
The meat that they eat comes from cows, lamb, chicken and pigs that are all fed large amounts of grains like wheat and corn. Next thing you know, there is not enough of these agricultural products to feed people, or at least not the lower income people who cannot afford the higher prices.
Now, to make matters worse, the US government decides that the cure to our energy problems is corn-based ethanol, so they institute subsidies to make ethanol production more profitable. This, in turn pushes up the price of agricultural products even more, because now the human consumer of these products has to compete with the livestock farmer AND the owner of the ethanol plant.
Another unintended consequence: this situation has led to the temporary divergence of beef and milk prices. Have you noticed that in your supermarket right now beef is cheaper than it was a year ago but milk more expensive? That's because dairy farmers are tired of paying up for grain to feed their cows, so they have slaughtered more of their cows last winter than they ever had before. That, in turn, floods the market with beef, making it cheap, but slashes the supply of milk, driving its price up.
So ultimately, the price of milk is up and their are rice shortages so much because we all can't seem to reduce the amount we drive, and nor can the Chinese, who are getting more cars and motorcycles all the time.
If you already knew all this, forgive me explaining it again. Just trying to help...