World food prices at record high

ampersand

Cleaver wrote: »

.......You can chose to buy one loaf for £1.50 or you can buy yeast and flour for about £2 and make five loaves. ..........

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Remember yeast is GRATUIT from Mr T's in-store bakery.
There is also much gained, laid down as family template, when these things are seen, shared, done at home.

Sorry cleaver, just caught up on your similar subsequent comment, but I'm surprised you baked only one loaf....?

Slicing and freezing the cooled loaves is excellent - makes the best toast and if used as sandwiches, defrosts freshly.

lostinrates

blueboy43 wrote: »

you are simply wrong.

http://www.defra.gov.uk/foodfarm/growing/organic/standards/index.html

Now, no doubt there is plenty of fraud & I'm dubious of the benefits but if you sell food labelled as organic then it must have been produced under certain conditions and carry a certified label.

However prosecutions are pretty rare.

I can't understand people buying organic kenyan beans - which are then air-freighted to the UK. Vanity buying at its worst.

I have just moved from one organic valley to living next to another organic farm. My (non organic) land runs in a strip through the organic fields. I can merily spray (with in spraying restrictions of course) and nothng keeps it of my neighbours thin strip. (My strips of course, I don't mean old fashioned style farming, I mean a field, a couple of fields width.) Farmer on the north side of the organic farm is also non organic. Organic farmer has ONE filed boundary than is not thus compromised that I can think of.

I am a strong advocate of minimising chemicals, and indeed, though we are not certified organic here, we might make a decision to start that in the future....BUT I am under no illusion that organic means...organic-ish in many situations. (and quite possibly thats what we should really be aiming for...)

smeagold

Press attention has again focused this past month on rising food prices. As Financial Times journalist Javier Blas tells us, panic buying has now reared its head, completing the already present factors of crop failures, export restrictions and food riots that were the trademarks of the 2007-08 food price crisis. Last week, Algeria added 800,000 tons to its January imports, bringing the monthly total to 1.7 million tons-that is already roughly a third of the normal annual purchases for a country that is one of the world's biggest wheat importers. Saudi Arabia has announced it will double its wheat purchases in 2011, to create a stockpile equivalent to a year's demand.

Wheat was already on the food crisis watch list-it's a heavily traded commodity (around 18 percent of the world's wheat crosses an international border) that's in relatively short supply after some bad harvests in some of the regions that supply world markets. Rice is the other big food crop. There, the market is much thinner (about 7 percent of total production is traded internationally). Rice is in relatively plentiful supply, but prices are also rising because importers such as Indonesia and Bangladesh have placed much larger orders than usual on the world market

http://www.tcdailyplanet.net/blog/iatp/ounce-prevention

chucky

Graham_Devon wrote: »

World food prices rose to a record high in January, according to the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO).

let's increase interest rates in every country - that will reduce inflation. no wait

polka_purpura

blueboy43 wrote: »

I can't understand people buying organic kenyan beans - which are then air-freighted to the UK. Vanity buying at its worst.

hi,

Agree.

I think the idea is, or was, to demonstrate there is a market for organic and that it is worth doing in the long term to encourage more farmers to grow organic. If this was anywhere near successful I think we would see local shops selling more and more organic produce.

I don't see organic making it's way into local shops.

Rationally the price of airfreighting food needs increasing so as to give domestic producers a fairer market. Any attempt at this results in lobbying to prevent additional costs even though UK farmers would be able to provide them, or substitutes, at least at certain times of the year.

polka purpura