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"April 22, 2010
U.S. Food Inflation Spiraling Out of Control
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) today released their Producer Price Index (PPI) report for March 2010 and the latest numbers are shocking. Food prices for the month rose by 2.4%, its sixth consecutive monthly increase and the largest jump in over 26 years. NIA believes that a major breakout in food inflation could be imminent, similar to what is currently being experienced in India.
Some of the startling food price increases on a year-over-year basis include, fresh and dry vegetables up 56.1%, fresh fruits and melons up 28.8%, eggs for fresh use up 33.6%, pork up 19.1%, beef and veal up 10.7% and dairy products up 9.7%. On October 30th, 2009, NIA predicted that inflation would appear next in food and agriculture, but we never anticipated that it would spiral so far out of control this quickly.
The PPI foreshadows price increases that will later occur in the retail sector. With U-6 unemployment rising last month to 16.9%, many retailers are currently reluctant to pass along rising prices to consumers, but they will soon be forced to do so if they want to avoid reporting huge losses to shareholders.
Food stamp usage in the U.S. has now increased for 14 consecutive months. There are now 39.4 million Americans on food stamps, up 22.4% from one year ago. The U.S. government is now paying out more to Americans in benefits than it collects in taxes. As food inflation continues to surge, our country will soon have no choice but to cut back on food stamps and other entitlement programs.
Most financial experts in the mainstream media are proclaiming that the recession is over and inflation is not a problem in the U.S. Unfortunately, they fail to realize that rising food and gasoline prices accounted for 58% of February's year-over-year 3.85% rise in retail sales. NIA believes price inflation is beginning to accelerate in many areas of the economy besides food and energy, and all increases in U.S. retail sales this year will be entirely due to inflation."
National Inflation Association
Wholesale prices in food and fuel continue to rise. Fuel is driving some of the rise in food cost but the thing nobody talks about is the potential for food shortages this year and the affect that is having on the price.
Retailers have tried to hold down prices because retail sales are already soft, regardless of the happy, happy, sunshine talk from the administration. However, they can't do this forever. At some point the cost of food at the retail level will have to begin to reflect the wholesale cost.
Food and fuel are two things we must have. We can only cut them so far before we have to start cutting elsewhere. As the price of these commodities continues to rise they will begin to have increasingly dramatic affects on the rest of the economy.
If you can find cheap food now, buy it. Store it in your basement. You have to eat; this isn't going to change. Better to buy it while you can at a reasonable price instead of waiting until later when the costs have gone through the roof.
And don't forget, it's springtime. Get those gardens in and learn how to preserve your harvest. This could become a matter of life and death.
"Wholesale prices rose more than expected last month as food prices surged by the most in 26 years.
The Labor Department said the Producer Price Index rose by 0.7 percent in March, compared to analysts' forecasts of a 0.4 percent rise. A rise in gas prices also helped push up the index.
Still, there was little sign of budding inflation in the report, which measures price changes before they reach the consumer. Excluding volatile food and energy costs, wholesale prices rose by 0.1 percent, matching analysts' expectations.
Food prices jumped by 2.4 percent in March, the most since January 1984. Vegetable prices soared by more than 49 percent, the most in 15 years. A cold snap wiped out much of Florida's tomato and other vegetable crops at the beginning of this year.
Gasoline prices rose 2.1 percent, the department said, the fifth rise in six months.
In the past year, wholesale prices are up 6 percent, with much of that increase driven by higher oil prices. But excluding food and energy costs, they have risen only 0.9 percent."
Yahoo Finance
I read somewhere once that vegetarians that go back to the darkside and begin eating meat again overwhelmingly do so because of bacon. Is there any wonder?
ihasahotdog.com
This should serve as a warning to everyone about the necessity of prepping your family for emergencies. A little extra food, some water and a few other things can make it possible to survive most situations. This time it's a volcano; maybe the next time it's an earthquake or a tornado. Regardless, our food supply chain has become very extended. The average meal in America travels 1500 miles to your plate. It doesn't take a huge natural event to disrupt this, even if just for a week or so. In that time, if you haven't prepared, you and your family could get pretty darned hungry.
So buy a couple extra cans when you go to the store and put them in the basement. It won't cost much and it could save your life.
"The Freight Transport Association said that even if British airspace finally begins to open up in the coming days it would take a fortnight to clear the backlog of flights and food destined for the UK. Reports have already emerged of food beginning to rot at airports, with millions of pounds of vegetables and flowers destined for British supermarkets being destroyed in Kenya.
If disruption continues into this week shoppers will begin to notice a shortage of a number of food products normally airfreighted into the country, particularly from south east Asia and Africa.
The Freight Transport Association (FTA), warned that some imported fresh fruit and vegetables could soon be in short supply.
Jo Tanner, the Freight Transport Association spokeswoman, said last night: "We will start to see food shortages this week and we will not see a return to normality for at least two weeks"
Matthew Albert, head chef at Michelin starred Thai restaurant Nahm, in London, said they had been fortunate in receiving their weekly supply of produce from Thailand last Wednesday, a day earlier than normal because of a local holiday. Any later and it would have been grounded by the eruption. "But if flights don't resume soon this week it will become increasingly difficult to source Thai ingredients in Britain and we will have to make changes to our menus," he added."
Telegraph
It seems as though the AG Business giants want it both ways; they will sue farmers for having their seed in the farmers possession without a contract while claiming that they can't control the spread of their Frankenstein plants.
This is paving the way for all crops to be grown under contract to just a few giant corporations, essentially giving supply of the food chain to a small group of companies that have well established relationships with governments around the world.
We've decided to use our food supply as fuel (ethanol) and to tamper with God's creation to make up the difference by genetically modifying plants for greater yield. We are crossing over a line that we may not be able to reverse, one that could spell our doom.
What happens when we find out that the modifications to these plants are harming us and we can't go back because all of the natural plants have been destroyed through cross pollination? What if our food starts killing us and we have no other choice?
"Chaos theory is a field of study in mathematics, physics, and philosophy studying the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions. This sensitivity is popularly referred to as the butterfly effect. Small differences in initial conditions (such as those due to rounding errors in numerical computation) yield widely diverging outcomes for chaotic systems, rendering long-term prediction impossible in general.[1] This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future behaviour is fully determined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved.[2] In other words, the deterministic nature of these systems does not make them predictable.[3] This behavior is known as deterministic chaos, or simply chaos."
Wikipedia
We ain't that smart people! There is no way on God's green earth that even the best computer programmed by the greatest minds in science can anticipate the effects of playing games with the genetic codes of plants or animals. One tiny error, and who among us is perfect, will have long reaching and unpredictable consequences.
We are assuming unto ourselves power that is reserved only to God Himself. And we are going to pay for our hubris in the most horrible of ways.
"Drug and chemical giant Bayer AG has admitted that there is no way to stop the uncontrolled spread of its genetically modified crops.
"Even the best practices can't guarantee perfection," said Mark Ferguson, the company's defense lawyer in a recent trial.
Two Missouri farmers sued Bayer for contaminating their crop with modified genes from an experimental strain of rice engineered to be resistant to the company's Liberty-brand herbicide. The contamination occurred in 2006, during an open field test of the new rice, which was not approved for human consumption. According to the plaintiffs' lawyer, Don Downing, genetic material from the unapproved rice contaminated more than 30 percent of all rice cropland in the United States.
"Bayer was supposed to be careful," Downing said. "Bayer was not careful and that rice did escape into our commercial rice supplies."
The plaintiffs alleged that in addition to contaminating their fields, Bayer further harmed them financially by undermining their export market. When the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced the widespread rice contamination, important export markets were closed to U.S. producers. A report from Greenpeace International estimates the financial damage of the contamination at between $741 million and $1.3 billion.
Bayer claimed that there was no possible way it could have prevented the contamination, insisting that it followed not only the law but also the best industry practices. The jury disagreed, finding Bayer guilty of carelessness in handling the genetically modified crops. The company was ordered to pay farmers Kenneth Bell and Johnny Hunter $2 million.
"This is a huge victory, not only for Kenny and me, but for every farmer in America who was harmed by Bayer's LibertyLink rice contamination," Hunter said.
According to Hunter, the company got "the wake-up call they deserved."
Bayer is still being sued by more than 1,000 other farmers from Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas."
Natural News
“Monsanto’s primary reason for enforcing its patents is to ensure a level playing field for the vast majority of honest farmers who abide by their agreements, and to discourage using technology to gain an unfair advantage.” – From Monsanto’s website.
As benevolent as that might sound, make no mistake about it, Monsanto is only concerned about its bottom line (no, not farmers), which would not necessarily be a bad thing per se were it not for the aggressive enforcement of its patents, tactics which include, among others, hiring private investigators, video surveillance, demanding access to records and field inspections, as well as having a toll-free hot line provided for farmers and business owners to anonymously report violations to what farmers call the “seed police.” And of course, there is always the threat of litigation. (In case you wondered, according to USDA records, in 2008, Monsanto was the holder of 674 biotechnology patents.)
But that’s not all. For Monsanto, patent protection (and therefore investment protection) involves not only oppressive investigative techniques and lawsuits, but also entering into agreements with farmers that are heavily one-sided in favor of Monsanto."
GMO Journal
"Pope Benedict XVI denounced the failure of world leaders to agree to a new climate change treaty in Copenhagen last month, saying Monday that world peace depends on safeguarding God's creation.
He issued the admonition in a speech to ambassadors accredited to the Vatican, an annual appointment during which the pontiff reflects on issues the Vatican wants to highlight to the diplomatic corps."
Yahoo
So, I just went to the Vatican website (
Vatican.va)
to read the Pope's statement in its entirety. In the words of Gomer Pyle, "Surprise, surprise, surprise!". There is so much more to this statement and the problems cited by the Pope than just the environment. Admittedly, his main focus is on the allocation of resources and the impact of environmental degradation, but the causes of this destruction and mis allocation are not as simple as "global warming" proponents would have us believe.
From the pope's address:
"How can we forget, for that matter, that the struggle for access to natural resources is one of the causes of a number of conflicts, not least in Africa, as well as a continuing threat elsewhere? For this reason too, I forcefully repeat that to cultivate peace, one must protect creation! Furthermore, there are still large areas, for example in Afghanistan or in some countries of Latin America, where agriculture is unfortunately still linked to the production of narcotics, and is a not insignificant source of employment and income. If we want peace, we need to preserve creation by rechanneling these activities; I once more urge the international community not to become resigned to the drug trade and the grave moral and social problems which it creates.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the protection of creation is indeed an important element of peace and justice! Among the many challenges which it presents, one of the most serious is increased military spending and the cost of maintaining and developing nuclear arsenals. Enormous resources are being consumed for these purposes, when they could be spent on the development of peoples, especially those who are poorest. For this reason I firmly hope that, during the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference to be held this May in New York, concrete decisions will be made towards progressive disarmament, with a view to freeing our planet from nuclear arms. More generally, I deplore the fact that arms production and export helps to perpetuate conflicts and violence, as in Darfur, in Somalia or in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Together with the inability of the parties directly involved to step back from the spiral of violence and pain spawned by these conflicts, there is the apparent powerlessness of other countries and the international organizations to restore peace, to say nothing of the indifference, amounting practically to resignation, of public opinion worldwide. There is no need to insist on the extent to which such conflicts damage and degrade the environment. Finally, how can I fail to mention terrorism, which endangers countless innocent lives and generates widespread anxiety. On this solemn occasion, I would like to renew the appeal which I made during the Angelus prayer of 1 January last to all those belonging to armed groups, of whatever kind, to abandon the path of violence and to open their hearts to the joy of peace."
It seems that the pope is not the environmentalist nut, tree hugging green boy the mainstream media would like us to believe. His concerns about the environment transcend the typical Greenpeace talking points and Al Gore financial solicitations to expose the true evil that arises when man mistreats God's creation.
RIGHT ON, BENEDICT!!
I wonder if perhaps he has something like this in mind:
"If you read any economic, financial, or political analysis for 2010 that doesn’t mention the food shortage looming next year, throw it in the trash, as it is worthless. There is overwhelming, undeniable evidence that the world will run out of food next year. When this happens, the resulting triple digit food inflation will lead panicking central banks around the world to dump their foreign reserves to appreciate their currencies and lower the cost of food imports, causing the collapse of the dollar, the treasury market, derivative markets, and the global financial system. The US will experience economic disintegration."
Market Skeptics
Just a thought.
Here's an investment tip for you; food. Don't buy stocks or worry about investing in the commodities market, just buy food. Look for sales of food with long shelf life and buy it. Put it in the basement.
You've got to eat. And in the end, this is what is going to cause food to hyper inflate compared to the rest of the economy.
Most things you can put off buying. But not food. They've got you on this one. The great thing though is that this is an area that you can control. Plant a garden and buy food now while it's still relatively inexpensive. Get a deep freeze and get your meat from local producers. It's better for you and cheaper. Learn to preserve your food.
Do it now, while you have time. I am convinced that the easy, year 'round availability of cheap food that we have grown so accustomed to is going to become a thing of the past."Falling production in commodities from rice to milk is bad news for just about everyone except investors.
Rice may surge 63 percent to $1,038 a metric ton from $638 on Philippine imports and a shortage in India, a Bloomberg survey of importers, exporters and analysts showed. The U.S. government says nonfat dry milk may jump 39 percent next year, and JPMorgan Chase & Co. forecasts a 25 percent gain for sugar. Global food costs jumped 7 percent in November, the most since February 2008, four months before reaching a record, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization."
Bloomberg
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