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 |  4088351 | Oct 31, 2007 3:22pm | "Affects food aid":
The rise in prices is being felt not only at the grocery store, but also in international food policy, as the costs of corn, cooking oil, and other items commonly purchased for U.S. food aid programs have increased sharply. The United States is the largest single donor of food worldwide, but the volume of aid provided through its leading assistance program, Food for Peace, dropped by more than half between 2000 and 2007, to 2.4 million metric tons, in response to a 35-percent increase in the cost of agricultural commodities in the last two years.
According to the Wall Street Journal, reasons for the price climb include growing demand for grain in China, Russia, Latin America, and South America, which has reduced global stockpiles, as well as increased interest in the use of corn and other food crops to produce biofuels, particularly ethanol. At the same time, rising transportation costs have made it more expensive to ship U.S. agricultural products to countries in need, pushing the price of food aid upward.
worldwatch.org/node/5408 [worldwatch.org/node/5408]
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"When you talk about Mexico, when you talk about culture and societal roots, when you talk about the economy, you talk about the tortilla."
Mexico is in the grip of the worst tortilla crisis in its modern history. Dramatically rising international corn prices, spurred by demand for the grain-based fuel ethanol, have led to expensive tortillas.
An uproar is exposing this country's outsize dependence on tortillas in its diet -- especially among the poor -- and testing the acumen of the new president, Felipe Calderón. It is also raising questions about the powerful businesses that dominate the Mexican corn market and are suspected by some lawmakers and regulators of unfair speculation and monopoly practices.
Tortilla prices have tripled or quadrupled in some parts of Mexico since last summer. On Jan. 18, Calderón announced an agreement with business leaders capping tortilla prices at 78 cents per kilogram, or 2.2 pounds, less than half the highest reported prices. The president's move was a throwback to a previous era when Mexico controlled prices -- the government subsidized tortillas until 1999, at which point cheap corn imports were rising under the NAFTA trade agreement.
washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/26/ [washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/26/]
AR2007012601896_pf.html |
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Sponsor |  berrypicker | Feb 8, 2:59pm | more bad news for bio-fuel. from the page: studies for the first time take a comprehensive look at the emissions effects of the huge amount of land that is being converted to cropland globally to support biofuels development. The destruction of natural ecosystems - whether rain forest in the tropics or grasslands in South America - increases the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere because the ecosystems are the planet's natural sponge for carbon emissions.
"When you take this into account, most of the biofuel that people are using or planning to use would probably increase greenhouse gasses substantially," said Timothy Searchinger, the lead author of one of the studies and a researcher on the environment and economics at Princeton University. "Previously, there's been an accounting error: Land use change has been left out of prior analysis. iht.com/articles/2008/02/07/healthscience/biofuel.php [iht.com/articles/2008/02/07/healthscience/biofuel.php] |
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