Food price inflation is running at a faster rate in Britain than in the rest of Europe – and supermarkets, which control around three quarters of grocery sales, are accused of driving prices up faster than is justified by rising costs, to protect their profits.
According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, food prices rose 6.3% in the year to the end of January, compared with an average of 2.8% for the EU and 2.6% across the 34 countries that make up the OECD.
Strangely enough, investment bank UBS says UK consumers are suffering most from the pressures of food inflation. "Prices are rising in excess of justifiable cost increases," said Paul Donovan and Larry Hatheway, co-authors of a recent report. "The UK stands out as having the broadest range of food price increases."
World prices are also soaring. The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation's (FAO's) food price index averaged 236 points in February, a record, up 2.2% from January and rising for the eighth month in a row. The index highlights how food prices have taken off in alarming fashion in the last three years. In 2000 the index stood at 90 and did not break through 100 until 2004.
As one analyst put it: “What is extraordinary about this trend is that for more than two decades before 2008, there were no spikes of this magnitude. To be entering a second such spike within three years suggests that something has fundamentally changed in the global food situation.”
It was a more than doubling in the price of bread that put food beyond reach for many that helped trigger the wave of revolts in the Middle East and North Africa. Fearful that they will spread, governments around the world are assessing the likely political impact of food prices.
Campaigning organisations like the World Development Movement have joined the simplistic “blame the bankers” chorus, accusing them and hedge funds of speculating in food. But this is just one of the many interacting factors involved in the global crisis which can be summarised as peak soil and peak oil:
- thirty years of credit-financed rapid growth of global corporations have transformed much of agriculture into a destructive industrial process. Land, seed, machinery, oil-based fertilisers and pesticides are now subject to transnational corporate ownership and control
- exhaustion of the soil intensifies the demand for fossil-fuel based inputs and has accelerated the depletion of resources
- rapid depletion of the world’s supply of oil combined with concerns for the climate change it has produced has increased demand for alternatives. Profits from the production of biofuels now outcompetes the production of food
- crop losses associated with weather extremes are increasing because of climate change
- the constant demand for consumption to absorb the products of economic growth has increased the standard of living in places like India and China
- capital’s need for unlimited quantities of cheap labour has driven population levels to rise to an estimated 9 billion in 2050-60.
The FAO is organising a series of seminars in an attempt to keep the lid on the rising anger. “FAO feels it is essential that countries consider their policy options and steer away from decisions that might exacerbate the situation," said deputy director-general Changchui He. "During the last food crisis, the situation was aggravated when some countries imposed export restrictions or engaged in panic buying."
But their solution is for more of the same. "Governments should focus on mitigating the impact of high food prices on the poor and at the same time need to take steps that favour investment in agriculture," he added.
But the present framework is clearly unsustainable. A global network of farmers, processors, and distributors, planning the sustainable production of food according to the needs of the population and not profit has to be the way forward.
Gerry Gold
Economics editor
www.aworldtowin.net
Showing posts with label climate change. Show all posts
Showing posts with label climate change. Show all posts
Thursday, 10 March 2011
Thursday, 24 February 2011
Teachi-n this Saturday. Birkbeck College London
Capitalism isn't sustainable. Spending cuts, climate change, unemployment and soaring prices. What's the alternative? Teach-in this Saturday, Birkbeck College, London.
Details http://tinyurl.com/6x8fk43
Details http://tinyurl.com/6x8fk43
Thursday, 17 February 2011
Climate change will 'overwhelm governments'
Anger over soaring food prices was a major factor in the Egyptian uprising and the United Nations’ top climate official warned this week that without action on climate change, more governments will fall and the danger of military conflict will grow.
Christiana Figueres told a top-level meeting of defence chiefs and strategists in Spain that climate change-driven drought, falling crop yields and competition for water were fuelling conflict and without aggressive action to reduce emissions causing global warming they would increase. Ms Figueres said:
It is alarming to admit that if the community of nations is unable to fully stabilise climate change, it will threaten where we can live, where and how we grow food and where we can find water... In other words, it will threaten the basic foundation – the very stability on which humanity has built its existence...
All these factors taken together mean that climate change, especially if left unabated, threatens to increase poverty and overwhelm the capacity of governments to meet the basic needs of their people, which could well contribute to the emergence, spread and longevity of conflict.
The world’s food supply is already increasingly fragile, as a result of extreme weather events affecting crop yields. In January world prices rose for the seventh successive month, up 3.4% from December, to the highest level since the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) began measurements in 1990.
And more increases are on the way. The FAO issued a special alert this week that provinces of northern China, the country’s main wheat producing area, are suffering a drought that could destroy up to one third of the summer wheat crop. The absence of snow cover and ferociously low temperatures, means dormant wheat will be killed by frost. Not only crops but 2.57 million people and 3 million livestock animals are affected by a shortage of drinking water.
The weather is the same in the US Great Plains and Midwest. Kansas and Oklahoma have had has less than half of normal rainfall in January and there is intense cold. China is the world’s biggest wheat producer but also its biggest consumer. If China starts buying wheat in the world market, prices will be pushed even higher.
FAO economist and grains expert Abdolreza Abbassian warned:
But for capitalist agri-business, including companies whose activities are financed by Chinese and Saudi sovereign wealth funds and by investment funds launched by the likes of Goldman Sachs, high food prices are good news.
Delegates attending the World Social Forum at Dakar in Senegal, cheered wildly at news of the fall of Mubarak. The global land grab was their main focus with representatives of peasant and worker movements from across the world reporting on their struggle to hold on to land and livelihoods.
Veteran food campaigner Susan George highlighted the situation in Europe, where unemployment is rising along with food price inflation. Europeans, she said, are beginning to learn what it is to live with an IMF structural adjustment programme.
Of course whilst the UN may find toppling governments a terrifying prospect, the majority of the world’s people would be delighted to get rid of rulers whose ruthless support for the financial system overwhelms any concern for their populations.
People know the priority is neither climate change nor hunger, but kick-starting growth and restoring profitability. The market in food offers one of the best opportunities to do that, since the onset of the global economic crisis. The price of restarting the global capitalist economy by expanding the globalisation of land and farming will be hunger affecting more and more of the world’s population. So help work out alternatives at our “Beyond Resistance” teach-in Kicking capitalism's growth habit - building a sustainable economy on February 26.
Penny Cole
Environment editor
www.aworldtowin.net
Christiana Figueres told a top-level meeting of defence chiefs and strategists in Spain that climate change-driven drought, falling crop yields and competition for water were fuelling conflict and without aggressive action to reduce emissions causing global warming they would increase. Ms Figueres said:
It is alarming to admit that if the community of nations is unable to fully stabilise climate change, it will threaten where we can live, where and how we grow food and where we can find water... In other words, it will threaten the basic foundation – the very stability on which humanity has built its existence...
All these factors taken together mean that climate change, especially if left unabated, threatens to increase poverty and overwhelm the capacity of governments to meet the basic needs of their people, which could well contribute to the emergence, spread and longevity of conflict.
The world’s food supply is already increasingly fragile, as a result of extreme weather events affecting crop yields. In January world prices rose for the seventh successive month, up 3.4% from December, to the highest level since the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) began measurements in 1990.
And more increases are on the way. The FAO issued a special alert this week that provinces of northern China, the country’s main wheat producing area, are suffering a drought that could destroy up to one third of the summer wheat crop. The absence of snow cover and ferociously low temperatures, means dormant wheat will be killed by frost. Not only crops but 2.57 million people and 3 million livestock animals are affected by a shortage of drinking water.
The weather is the same in the US Great Plains and Midwest. Kansas and Oklahoma have had has less than half of normal rainfall in January and there is intense cold. China is the world’s biggest wheat producer but also its biggest consumer. If China starts buying wheat in the world market, prices will be pushed even higher.
FAO economist and grains expert Abdolreza Abbassian warned:
High food prices are of major concern especially for low-income food deficit countries that may face problems in financing food imports and for poor households which spend a large share of their income on food.
But for capitalist agri-business, including companies whose activities are financed by Chinese and Saudi sovereign wealth funds and by investment funds launched by the likes of Goldman Sachs, high food prices are good news.
Delegates attending the World Social Forum at Dakar in Senegal, cheered wildly at news of the fall of Mubarak. The global land grab was their main focus with representatives of peasant and worker movements from across the world reporting on their struggle to hold on to land and livelihoods.
Veteran food campaigner Susan George highlighted the situation in Europe, where unemployment is rising along with food price inflation. Europeans, she said, are beginning to learn what it is to live with an IMF structural adjustment programme.
Of course whilst the UN may find toppling governments a terrifying prospect, the majority of the world’s people would be delighted to get rid of rulers whose ruthless support for the financial system overwhelms any concern for their populations.
People know the priority is neither climate change nor hunger, but kick-starting growth and restoring profitability. The market in food offers one of the best opportunities to do that, since the onset of the global economic crisis. The price of restarting the global capitalist economy by expanding the globalisation of land and farming will be hunger affecting more and more of the world’s population. So help work out alternatives at our “Beyond Resistance” teach-in Kicking capitalism's growth habit - building a sustainable economy on February 26.
Penny Cole
Environment editor
www.aworldtowin.net
Wednesday, 26 January 2011
Workers must sacrifice so capitalists can profit
The Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King has assured us that unemployment will rise and the value of wages will fall as inflation lets rip, leading to the most dramatic assault on living standards since the 1920s.
What’s more, you’ll be pleased to know, it’s absolutely necessary. This is the price we are obliged to pay, says King, to smooth the path to growth and economic recovery.
In actuality, it’s the consequence of failed attempts to stave off the deepening recession and confirms that they don’t have a clue what to do, apart from the usual capitalist remedy of increasing exploitation and the share of national wealth that goes to the ruling classes.
It’s a similar story across the Atlantic as the rate of repossessions accelerates, driving millions of families from their homes and unemployment touches 10%. President Obama used his annual State of the Union address to warn that the US must mobilise to meet the “mortal threat of foreign competition from China and India”.
He is proposing to reduce government spending to the lowest share of the US economy since the 1950s. Despite renewed attempts to rehabilitate the policies of Keynes – who favoured higher spending in a recession – the crash of 2007-8 means that, for capitalism, the era of high levels of government spending is over.
Are these programmes of slashing cuts “ideological”? Yes indeed, they manifest the ideology of those whose job it is to sustain a society devoted to profit at the expense of the majority of people on the planet, and the planet itself.
Throughout the relatively short period in which capitalist production spread across the world, its inner dynamic forced its human agents to find ways to counteract the relentless tendency for the rate of profit to fall.
Investing in technology to increase productivity is one. Forcing wages down another. Together they lead to increases in productive capacity and the volume of goods and services. They call it “growth”.
Pretty soon production expands beyond the available marketplace of consumers. And then credit comes into play, stretching things beyond their “natural” limits – for a while. Then comes the crash. Surplus productive capacity is eliminated, and the process starts up, once again.
This time there’s a difference.
The period of growth called “globalisation” consumed the world’s natural resources at an exponential rate. Corporations spread production throughout the world by recklessly burning fossil fuels, unlocking energy and releasing it into the atmosphere and so intensifying weather patterns.
Early snow in Britain helped to reduce national output by an estimated 0.5% in the last three months of 2010. Floods in Pakistan and Queensland, Australia wiped out crops. Nature mocked capital as the floodwaters wrecked the extraction of coal.
But capital’s human agents are blind to these effects. They are tied into the historic logic of profit from which they cannot escape. Sir Richard Lambert, outgoing chief of the Confederation of British Industry accused the Coalition of having no strategy for growth.
But the Cameron-Clegg branch better reflects the needs of capital at this point in history. They are hell-bent on cutting the deficit, reducing capacity, shrinking incomes, eliminating jobs and services – every action aimed at facilitating the contraction without which “recovery” is impossible.
Rather than allow the destruction of the valuable results of a couple of centuries of human endeavour, it falls to the rest of us to bring the destructive system to an end before it threatens to end the conditions for life on the planet.
In the process of building a global network of people’s assemblies we can establish democratic stewardship of the world’s resources, utilising and advancing the science and technology for sustainable production, and setting ourselves the task of converting it to satisfy the needs of the majority.
Gerry Gold
Economics editor
26 January 2011
A World to Win Blogs Workers must sacrifice so capitalists can profit
What’s more, you’ll be pleased to know, it’s absolutely necessary. This is the price we are obliged to pay, says King, to smooth the path to growth and economic recovery.
In actuality, it’s the consequence of failed attempts to stave off the deepening recession and confirms that they don’t have a clue what to do, apart from the usual capitalist remedy of increasing exploitation and the share of national wealth that goes to the ruling classes.
It’s a similar story across the Atlantic as the rate of repossessions accelerates, driving millions of families from their homes and unemployment touches 10%. President Obama used his annual State of the Union address to warn that the US must mobilise to meet the “mortal threat of foreign competition from China and India”.
He is proposing to reduce government spending to the lowest share of the US economy since the 1950s. Despite renewed attempts to rehabilitate the policies of Keynes – who favoured higher spending in a recession – the crash of 2007-8 means that, for capitalism, the era of high levels of government spending is over.
Are these programmes of slashing cuts “ideological”? Yes indeed, they manifest the ideology of those whose job it is to sustain a society devoted to profit at the expense of the majority of people on the planet, and the planet itself.
Throughout the relatively short period in which capitalist production spread across the world, its inner dynamic forced its human agents to find ways to counteract the relentless tendency for the rate of profit to fall.
Investing in technology to increase productivity is one. Forcing wages down another. Together they lead to increases in productive capacity and the volume of goods and services. They call it “growth”.
Pretty soon production expands beyond the available marketplace of consumers. And then credit comes into play, stretching things beyond their “natural” limits – for a while. Then comes the crash. Surplus productive capacity is eliminated, and the process starts up, once again.
This time there’s a difference.
The period of growth called “globalisation” consumed the world’s natural resources at an exponential rate. Corporations spread production throughout the world by recklessly burning fossil fuels, unlocking energy and releasing it into the atmosphere and so intensifying weather patterns.
Early snow in Britain helped to reduce national output by an estimated 0.5% in the last three months of 2010. Floods in Pakistan and Queensland, Australia wiped out crops. Nature mocked capital as the floodwaters wrecked the extraction of coal.
But capital’s human agents are blind to these effects. They are tied into the historic logic of profit from which they cannot escape. Sir Richard Lambert, outgoing chief of the Confederation of British Industry accused the Coalition of having no strategy for growth.
But the Cameron-Clegg branch better reflects the needs of capital at this point in history. They are hell-bent on cutting the deficit, reducing capacity, shrinking incomes, eliminating jobs and services – every action aimed at facilitating the contraction without which “recovery” is impossible.
Rather than allow the destruction of the valuable results of a couple of centuries of human endeavour, it falls to the rest of us to bring the destructive system to an end before it threatens to end the conditions for life on the planet.
In the process of building a global network of people’s assemblies we can establish democratic stewardship of the world’s resources, utilising and advancing the science and technology for sustainable production, and setting ourselves the task of converting it to satisfy the needs of the majority.
Gerry Gold
Economics editor
26 January 2011
A World to Win Blogs Workers must sacrifice so capitalists can profit
Sunday, 17 October 2010
One Million Climate Jobs
Earlier this week I went to the launch of the new and expanded 'One Million Climate Jobs' pamphlet, which sets out a strategy to solved both the economic and environmental crises.
In 50 pages it sets out a comprehensive argument for funding one million climate jobs now. It argues that the jobs and investment can be funded by the reduced unemployment and extra tax revenue from getting one million people back into work, and from addressing the tax gap. The investment required is just £18 billion - a fraction of the £1.3 trillion that bailed out the banking system. As Jonathan Neale, the pamphlet's editor, said at the launch,
"if the planet was a bank they would save it"
It argues that the dangers of abrupt climate change require us to act now to reduce our polluting ways. It is estimated that the one million climate jobs, costing just £18 billion could cut UK emissions by 80% in just 20 years, but the pamphlet is realistic: "of course cuts in the UK on their own will make little difference to global climate change. But if we campaign for a million new jobs, and win them, people all over the world will see what we have done".
The jobs themselves cover our electricity and energy production; refitting homes, public buildings and businesses, and building new homes to strict environmental regulations; building new transport infrastructure; as well as other industries. As Philip Pearson from the TUC pointed out, we have lost over one million manufacturing jobs in the last decade. This is the industrial strategy we need.
The pamphlet concludes with a chapter on what you can do. As John McDonnell MP, speaking at the launch, said:
"we need greens and trade unionists campaigning alongside each other, and to become one another"
The pamphlet is produced by the Campaign against climate change trade union group and is sponsored by the CWU, PCS, TSSA and UCU trade unions. Free download here or order from Bookmarks (£2.50)
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