Michael Panzner introduces a post from Prudent Investor on price inflation in food prices, featuring a chart from the Economist comparing different countries.
Behind the Sense of Urgency
By Michael Panzner at When Giant’s Fall
In yesterday’s post, "A Hunger for Food Security," I highlighted an article detailing the global scramble to acquire farmland and bolster food security.
Another post published today at the Prudent Investor Newsletters blog, "Chart: Global Food Price Inflation," points to a report in The Economist that might help explain the sense of urgency driving at least some of those efforts.
Inflation’s impact is always relative. And it can be seen in food prices across different nations.
According to the Economist,
"Changes in global food prices are affecting some countries much more than others. Despite a big fall from peaks in 2008, food-price inflation remains high in places such as Kenya and Russia. In China, however, falling international commodity prices have been passed on to consumers faster. The price of food, as measured by its component in China’s consumer-price index, rose by more than 20% in 2007 but fell by 1.9% in 2008 and by a further 1.3% in the past three months alone."
Of course, there are also many factors that gives rise to these disparities, aside from monetary and fiscal policies (taxes, tariffs, subsidies, etc…), there are considerations of the conditions of infrastructure, capital structure, logistics/distribution, markets, arable lands, water, soil fertility, technology, productivity, economic structure and etc.
Our concern is given the present "benign state of inflation", some developing countries have already been experiencing high food prices, what more if inflation gets a deeper traction globally? Could this be an ominous sign of food crisis perhaps?
