Yet more talk about food prices

Food prices seem to be on everyone's mind of late.  Check out this interesting New York Times round table that asks the question "Is the world producing enough food?"  It includes viewpoints from several contributing authors.  One of them (Michael Roberts) cites a recent paper authored by Jeffrey Reimer and Man Li who are in the AREC department here at OSU!  They argue that many of the price controls and trade restrictions that countries use to keep food affordable and to support local producers actually have the perverse effect of  increasing global food costs.  But read the contrary opinions (Raj Patel) in the NYT round table.

NPR also has had a couple of recent stories about rising food prices.  Check them out here and here.

Speculating on Food

It was a bad year for winter wheat in China, and this is not doing anything to alleviate the concerns about global food prices. Read about it in the Washington Post here.  Also, watch this interview with Abdolreza Abbassian, senior economist at the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization.  In particular, note the discussion (around 2:04) about how investors can make money off the situation.  Abbassian brings up the topic of what he calls "investment tourists".....speculators who invest in food (or really a financial derivative representing food) with the  pure hope of turning a profit.  These speculators have been part of agriculture (probably since its invention) but at least since the development of modern futures markets, and there are a lot of reasons to think that they have had a generally positive impact on the livelihood of farmers and the availability of food.  Yet, there is growing concern that an increasing reason for the recent spikes in food prices is irrational speculation by investors rushing into the market and driving up the price in a speculative bubble. One of the purest examples of this was the great Dutch tulip mania of 1637.  Some see the current mania for gold as another classic bubble.  However, unlike gold or tulips, investor driven irrational spikes in food prices have a very real negative impact on all of our lives....in particular the poorest people on the planet.  But then again, maybe its not speculators, but something more profound like global warming.  Check out this article by Economist and NYT columnist Paul Krugman.

Living Large

The world is getting fatter.  That's the conclusion of a recently published study looking at how risk factors for heart disease have been changeing around the world.  Read a Washington Post article about the study here and check out a cool interactive graphic depicting relative world fatness here.  One of the great paradoxes of our time is that even though as a whole the world is getting fatter, there are still 925 million hungry people in the world.  Resolving these two seemingly contradictory problems is another of the great global challanges that we face.

100 Questions For Agriculture

Anita Azarenko forwarded an interesting article recently published in the International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability titled "The top 100 questions of importance to the future of global agriculture".  You can read it for free here. It is an interesting list.  Do you agree these are pressing questions?  Did they miss any?  Are you hopeful that we will be able to answer them?

Growing Food

Check out this cool video about efforts to refocus farming in the Willamette Valley towards more localized food production.  Thanks Kelly Donegan for pointing it out to us.

The video touches on a number of topical questions and issues in agriculture.  Should we re-organize our food system so that it is more local and regionally focused?  Should we focus most agriculture on producing food (rather than say crops for biofuels)?  Should our society be better connected to where our food comes from and the  farmers who grow it?  Should we pay more for food to ensure that the people who produce it have equitable working conditions and standards of living?  I think that the makers of the video (Harry MacCormack and his Southern Willamette Valley Bean and Grain Project) would clearly answer yes to those questions...and the best part of the video for me is that it provides examples of how some of our local  farmers are trying to implement these ideas.  Harry is right here in Corvallis at Sunbow Farm.

Yet even if you agree with the video's vibe, being at a university requires us to be critical and skeptical!  Can a more local food system really work...particularly in places less blessed by climate and soil than the Willamette Valley?  Will most people really pay more for food?  How do you get a whole society to re-think its relationship to food and how it is grown?