The Realist Idealist

So Jake has been trying to convince me to start blogging. To tell you the truth, I’ve always been a behind-the-scenes kinda girl, so putting your thoughts out there for the world to see is a whole new experience for me. The topic that I have been itching to put my fingers to the keyboard on is something that I think is a little off the beaten path for this blog, but Jake insists that it can work, so here goes nuttin.

My name is Ali Savino, and I will be your political foodie blogger. The reality is everyone has got to eat, and the ideal is that everyone has enough to eat. Getting to that point tho is going to be quite complicated and touches on everything from subsidies to trade to regulation to energy and back again. And there’s lots of politics involved both here in the US and abroad.  Should be a wild ride.

As anyone who has been grocery shopping lately knows, things are getting a little pricey. And that’s not just East Coast city phenomenon. David Streitfeld has a piece in the New York Times today that takes us from farms in North Dakota to markets in Nigeria.

Everywhere, the cost of food is rising sharply. Whether the world is in for a long period of continued increases has become one of the most urgent issues in economics.

Many factors are contributing to the rise, but the biggest is runaway demand. In recent years, the world’s developing countries have been growing about 7 percent a year, an unusually rapid rate by historical standards.

Now David doesn’t tell us if the 7 percent refers to population or economic growth, which has two very different implications. My hope is that he’s referring to economic growth which has very serious implications on the world food supply, but definitely not as dire as 7% population growth. Here’s where a link to the source data could be quite useful (hint, hint).

Regardless, the reverberations of this growth are rippling outwards across the globe and we’re all going to feel it. Food prices in the US jumped by 1.7% in the last month alone. This may not seem like a lot, but trust me it is, food prices have been incredibly stable, and in some cases falling in the past 20 years.

If that comes to pass, it is likely to present big problems in managing the American economy. Rising food prices in the United States are already helping to fuel inflation reminiscent of the 1970s.

And the increases could become an even bigger problem overseas. The increases that have already occurred are depriving poor people of food, setting off social unrest and even spurring riots in some countries.

We’ve seen amazing world-wide growth over the past 10 years, which is a good thing. However, this growth will present the world with a whole new set of challenges. And some of them are quite scary.

Around the world, wheat is becoming a precious commodity. In Pakistan, thousands of paramilitary troops have been deployed since January to guard trucks carrying wheat and flour. Malaysia, trying to keep its commodities at home, has made it a crime to export flour and other products without a license.

Pakistan is deploying troops to protect its food supply. That’s pretty crazy stuff. Now I don’t know enough about Pakistan to know if this is a new protection, but that pretty intense if a country like Pakistan which has huge security issues already is expending troops to secure food distribution - that’s an allocation of resources that could be used in the very tenuous tribal areas or on the border with Kashmir.

The militarization of food distribution should not be taken lightly. Yes, Pakistan is incredibly stressed area of the world already, but as the world’s poor increasingly enter the international market, these stresses will spread. Is this just the early warning signs of the future of food?