gimboland

Impending food crisis?

Reading and listening to Long Now stuff has given me an (at its most optimistic) more skeptical and (at its most pessimistic) more long term non-human-centric view of stories like this, but it’s nonetheless food for thought (excuse the pun): Financial Times: impending food crisis? [i-r-squared via jreighley, randomly via twitter].

Hard red wheat is limit up again (i think thats 9 days out of 11) and is at $19.80 a bushel. When it broke $6 a bushel last summer that was an all time high.

…

A WFP official, for example, recently showed me the red plastic cup that is used to dole out daily rations to starving Africans – and then explained, in graphically moving terms, that this vessel is typically now only being filled by two-thirds each day, because food prices are rising faster than the WFP budget.

But it’s this that really caught my eye:

2008-02-15 21:24:11 · comment
earth economics long-now people