“Food is an important part of a balanced diet.” Fran Lebowitz
There was an interesting article in yesterday’s New York Times discussing the developing spat/misunderstanding between the U.S. and India about responsibility for the rise in food prices. The whole to-do started a couple of weeks ago with some comments by Condoleezza Rice and was exacerbated by President Bush a couple of days later (shocking).
I’ve looked over a number of articles discussing this issue and, as usual, most of them just pick and choose which quotes to offer or simply paraphrase what Rice and Bush (hereafter referred to as Brice) said. To paraphrase the paraphrasing, a good portion of the commentary has gone something like, “Brice blames rising food prices exclusively on the irresponsible growth in India and China and their lack of willingness to continue starving for the benefit of the West. To address this travesty, the U.S. is now developing a secret program to sterilize all of the women in both countries to ensure a continued orgy of steak, ale, Oreos, and Hummers for the best, brightest, sexiest, most shaved, and most smiled-upon people ever to grace the face of the planet – Americans.”
Let’s actually take a look at exactly what our beloved leaders said. First off, Rice was offered the following question at a recent Peace Corps Conference:
Many of us are in countries where the predominant source of food is grain, rice, et cetera. And I’m wondering about your thoughts about the US government’s thoughts about the skyrocketing prices of grain worldwide?Her reply
We obviously have to look at places where production seems to be declining and declining to the point that people are actually putting export caps on the amount of food. Now, some of that is not so much declining production as apparently improvement in the diets of people, for instance, in China and India, and then pressures to keep food inside the country. So, that’s another element that we have to look at.
Worldwide there is increasing demand. There turns out to be prosperity in developing world, which is good. It's going to be good for you because you'll be selling products in the countries, you know, big countries perhaps, and it's hard to sell products into countries that aren't prosperous. In other words, the more prosperous the world is, the more opportunity there is.
It also, however, increases demand. So, for example, just as an interesting thought for you, there are 350 million people in India who are classified as middle class. That's bigger than America. Their middle class is larger than our entire population. And when you start getting wealth, you start demanding better nutrition and better food, and so demand is high, and that causes the price to go up.
Because of this, we’ve seen an outpouring of hostility and disbelief from a portion of the developing world, most notably India, which is screaming that the U.S. is the real culprit behind rising food prices. Here’s an example from the NYT article,
…Pradeep S. Mehta, secretary general of the center for international trade, economics and the environment of CUTS International, an independent research institute based here, said that if Americans slimmed down to the weight of middle-class Indians, “many hungry people in sub-Saharan Africa would find food on their plates.”
He added, archly, that the money spent in the United States on liposuction to get rid of fat from excess consumption could be funneled to feed famine victims.
Explaining the food price increases, Indian politicians and academics cite consumption in the United States; the West’s diversion of arable land into the production of ethanol and other biofuels; agricultural subsidies and trade barriers from Washington and the European Union; and finally the decline in the exchange rate of the dollar.
Ok. Now let’s look at who has the upper hand in this argument. I’ve thought short and soft about this, and the winner is………..well, it’s a tie. We can debate the relative importance of each factor, but most of the points that both sides are making are valid.
• As wealth in India and China increases, demand for more and better food increases. This higher demand is one factor leading to rising food prices.
• The average American has enough fat to live off of for two entire years (note: this statistic has not been scientifically proven and was pulled from the author’s nether-region in the interest of editorial expeditiousness).
• Export barriers and tariffs may temporarily limit price increases internally, but they exacerbate global supply problems, lead to higher prices globally, and will likely result in lower domestic supply.
• Americans are the largest per-capita consumers of many things: oil, food, liposuction, therapy, fatuous TV programming, lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, etc.
• Some farm land has indeed been converted from food production to feed the ethically-bankrupt subsidized beast of ethanol.
What are the key points from all of this?
• The economies of China and India are growing quickly. It’s reasonable to expect them to want to improve their diets. Given that they’re moving from the starvation level to one of mere malnutrition, we Americans should take care not to speak too indelicately with our mouths so full.
• We’re never going to out-run the Indians and Chinese if they ever invade us. It’s in our own best interest to fatten them up.
• It’s hard to get the full story from the press. They write with the short attention span of the average American in mind and therefore feel the need…………….what were we talking about?
• YoGurth – Saturate Your Diet with the Taste of America!
• The fertilizer stocks are still looking good. Still a buyer of POT, AGU, and MOS.
