Krugman: Soaring Food Prices
Feb. 6th, 2011 07:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bemused_leftistKrugman:
February 5, 2011, 12:05 PM
Soaring Food Prices
What’s behind the surge in food prices? The usual suspects have made the usual claims — it’s all about the Fed, or it’s all about speculators. But I’ve been looking at the USDA World supply and demand estimates, and what stands out from the data is mainly that we’ve had a huge global harvest failure.
[....]
Why is production down? Most of the decline in world wheat production, and about half of the total decline in grain production, has taken place in the former Soviet Union — mainly Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. And we know what that’s about: an incredible, unprecedented heat wave.
[ links to http://climateprogress.org/2010/08/09/russia-heat-wave-one-thousand-years-global-warming/ ]
February 5, 2011, 12:05 PM
Soaring Food Prices
What’s behind the surge in food prices? The usual suspects have made the usual claims — it’s all about the Fed, or it’s all about speculators. But I’ve been looking at the USDA World supply and demand estimates, and what stands out from the data is mainly that we’ve had a huge global harvest failure.
[....]
Why is production down? Most of the decline in world wheat production, and about half of the total decline in grain production, has taken place in the former Soviet Union — mainly Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. And we know what that’s about: an incredible, unprecedented heat wave.
[ links to http://climateprogress.org/2010/08/09/russia-heat-wave-one-thousand-years-global-warming/ ]
