Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
Tuesday, June 02, 2020
Food Inflation Predates the Supply-Chain Disruptions of COVID-19
Europe was awash in protests
on a scale seen neither before nor, arguably, since. The year was 1848.
“A specter is haunting Europe,” Marx wrote. “The specter of communism.”
Others saw it as the “springtime of the nations,” a surge of liberal
nationalist rebellion. Many of his contemporaries, however, perceived something else at work. Contemporary economists
now see it too. Beginning in 1845, a series of supply disruptions had
sent retail food prices across Europe surging. Food inflation, for
neither its first nor the last time, was at least a co-conspirator in a
bout of political upheaval. As no country is immune to COVID-19’s disruptions in the food-supply
chain, food inflation is now again on the prowl. In the United States,
grocery prices last month rose 2.6 percent (month-on-month), their
fastest pace since 1974. Yet that rate may be mild compared with what’s
in store — or out of stock — for consumers in countries that, like
Lebanon, entered the 2020 pandemic in weak economic positions. “Many
Lebanese have already stopped buying meats, fruits and vegetables, and
may soon find it difficult to afford even bread,” Lebanon’s prime minister, Hassan Diab, warned last week. Food prices were a cause for concern even before 2020’s COVID-19
supply-chain disruptions. By December 2019, world food prices had
already climbed to a five-year high. This appears to be due to a
combination of long-term trends, such as growth in demand for certain
agricultural products, and acute afflictions, including a 2019 swine flu
that wiped out much would-be pork...MORE
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment