End of cheap food era - bad news for poor

The era of cheap food is over. The price of corn (maize) has doubled in a year, and wheat futures are at their highest in a decade. The food price index in India has risen 11% in one year, and in Mexico in January there were riots after the price of corn flour (used in making the staple food of the poor, tortillas) went up fourfold. Even in the developed countries food prices are going up, and they are not going to come down again. We are entering a period when three separate factors are converging to drive food prices up. The first is simply demand. Not only is the global population continuing to grow (about an extra Turkey or Vietnam every year), but as Asian economies race ahead more and more people in those populous countries are starting to eat significant amounts of meat.

The global poor don't care about the price of meat, because they can't afford it even now - but if the price of grain goes up, some of them will starve. The mania for "bio-fuels" is shifting huge amounts of land out of food production. The amount of U.S. farmland devoted to bio-fuels grew by 48% in the last year alone, and hardly any new land was brought under the plow to replace the lost food production. In China and Brazil it's the same straight switch from food to fuel. As economist Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute told the U.S. Congress last month: "The stage is now set for direct competition for grain between the 800 million people who own automobiles, and the world's two billion poorest people." Guess who wins.

Soaring Asian demand and bio-fuels mean expensive food now and in the near future, but then it gets worse. Global warming hits crop yields, but only recently has anybody quantified how hard. The answer, published in Environmental Research Letters in March by Christopher Field of the Carnegie Institution in Stanford, Calif., and David Lobell of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is quite simple: for every 0.5C hotter, crop yields fall between 3-5%. So 2C hotter, the lower end of the range of predicted temperature rise in this century, means a 12-20% cent fall in global food production.

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