Prices don't just randomly increase. In fact, a few quotes from your own article explain why these prices increased, and it's grain shortages:

You're right, kwikdriver. What I should have said was that this is more of an adjustment in supply and demand, and an economic problem, than a "mass starvation, out-of-control overpopulation, end of the world" scenario, as that article and some responses in this thread seem to imply.

It *is* a grain shortage in some areas. Africa, Haiti and the Philippines import a lot of rice from India and Vietnam and both of those have cut their exports sharply. There have been food riots in some places. The shortage is caused by lower yield (weather and insects), higher demand, higher prices for pesticides and fertilizers, higher transport costs. Nitrogen and potassium prices have skyrocketed.

The consequences for not being able to feed the populations of countries is really awful, yes even to those of us who think we're insulated. It could start a mass migration, food riots even here among poor people. The IMF is in serious trouble right now and can't meet its commitments to supplying food to poor nations because even it can't afford the higher prices.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/...toryId=89521900

This is true, we (Old and New World people) haven't really had to worry about it for two hundred years. We see and try to help the starving countries elsewhere, but it isn't our first and last thought every day like for some folks.

Fortunately, Global Warming, if we can ever really get some, might bring more rain to the equatorial deserts and open up the northern plains to more economical farming.

In the final analysis, a policy of Freedom, Education and Technology is the best answer, IMHO. The only other answer is to kill every third baby. I would be against that.

Or prevent their conception.

I remember the terrible famine in Bangladesh in 1974.

Some of our UK members will know a lot more about this than I do, but I know people who were children living in England during WWII who are shorter than their parents and shorter than their children. They dealt with starvation during the war. My father spoke exactly once about the most horrific thing he saw in WWII. It was not the violence, it was being stationed at an airbase in England and the starving children who were on the other side of the fence. He and most of the soldiers there would eat a few bites of food then take their meals over and feed the children through the fence.

I hope the world doesn't re-learn the heartbreak of famine. I'm afraid it will.

That would be part of that Freedom, Education and Technology solution I mentioned.

All I could think was "Oh good I'm helping the relief of this shortage"

How much are you paying for your grass-fed beef? Or are you eating locally-foraged game or some such?

Right, because it takes at least 3 lbs of fodder to make one lb of beef.

I have been wondering if the rising prices for things like high fructose corn syrup and wheat might encourage people to buy more produce, meat, fish and eggs instead of grains, sugar, and corn.

Here's an interesting couple of quotes from an article I came across in the New York Times:





from: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/02/d...&pagewanted=all

I'm paying < $5/lb for grass-finished free-range beef. If I ordered all cheap cuts I could probably get it down to $2.50/lb, but I order a variety including t-bone, New York steaks and rib roasts.

It's a bit under $5/pound here if you buy a mixed quarter. If you buy it through a CSA program where you are getting it once a month it costs $5/pound. In that case you are paying for storage and extra transportation cost.

In every case that doesn't involve fraud, what ever you pay for anything boils down to energy-dollars. Even if you buy organic spinach from a local grower, you are paying him so he can buy more shovels which are trucked in from a supplier who made them by running machines and paying employees who drove to work and to buy groceries from guys who had them trucked in... etc, etc.

A five dollar steak of any type equals about 1.5 gallons of gas that someone burned. When you see it that way, you realize that our personal habits are just a variation in the path energy takes.

Our options are to find more energy or abandon technology. Unless we decrease the number of people to pre-technology levels, we can't live in a pre-technology world. I vote to find more energy.

Grain fed beef becomes more expensive, so grass fed producers lower their prices? They finally have the market where they want it, so they can trade their product for less money?
Lately I'm eating mostly grain-fed pork and chicken. I've been able to afford better for going on twenty years now, but the twenty years before that left a pretty big impression. (Not that I spent much time worrying about the price of food when I was a baby.) I figure I'll get away with it as long as I skip the organic double fudge cookies with all local ingredients grown without a hundred mile radius of my home. Can you even grow cocoa beans that close to Toronto? And if I did cave and have a cookie, guess I couldn't dip it in fair trade coffee from Kenya. So much for that independent Kenyan Coffee Farmer (or better yet that Kenyan Coffee Collective.) I guess those people's livelihood is no longer the flavour of the week.
Seriously, (Yes, that's right, those were the jokes...) I think a pretty good way to gauge how much energy goes into a foodstuff, once you get past branding, is the price. The margins on more or less generic foodstuffs are pretty tight.

I wonder how much lower grain stocks have to do with modern management practices. In manufacturing, production to demand has been fairly popular in recent years. Instead of stockpiling goods, companies wait for orders, and then quickly fill them. It amounts to spending resources for increased manufacturing capacity rather than for storage. I make my living in a small family business, and our biggest customer worked on this model of business with greeting cards. They were ready to take over the world, until an American company mistook them for a life preservor and dragged them down with them. People might start thinking that the ability to ship massive loads of grain all over the world is all the insurance we need--no need to worry about local stockpiles. Might as well turn all that extra grain into ethanol.