28 ms·

Food Prices Are Soaring Faster Than Inflation and Incomes

514 points by prostoalex 6y ago

johbjo 6y ago
Overall production/consumption has probably decreased. This means that food has has higher relative share of consumption. Therefore food prices shift right?
- gremlinsinc 6y ago
  Production has decreased, or at least ability to ship it has. Consumption is probably the same for most families, albeit they may buy 10% more to make sure certain staples are good in case of a shortage.. more so during the ebb/flow of covid-19 waves and lockdowns. So a family might end up wasting more food just to be sure they have enough for planned meals or alternatives. A lot of people are having mental health issues from lockdown, that can affect eating behaviors as well - depression can cause gain or loss of appetite so that's up in the air - could also make you plan to eat in but then decide to get take out because you're too depressed to cook. (Source: I've done this as my anxiety/depression has been really bad this year and my wife who's never been depressed is barely functional this year). I think the biggest thing is just everything's shifting. We're not just dealing with covid-19 but also fires and other natural disasters. Unfortunately, I think climate change could keep this the norm even if covid-19 is completely normalized (i.e. we return to some semblance of normal). Covid-19 variants could also keep things an issue. I'm going to get flagged for fear-mongering but I don't see how the next decade gets any better than it is right now, except for fleeting relief cycles as we come out of the pandemic ... but there's a lot of shifting global strife. You can almost feel the change from day to day everything's changing faster and faster and it's getting harder to predict the future. Kind of like the singularity when technology speeds up.
  - swiley 6y ago
    I remember seeing an article about how some container ship crews haven't been able to leave their ships and see other people for crazy periods of time because of lockdowns. That can't be good for retention and shipping.
xbmcuser 6y ago
As someone that is the food mostly spice trade prices have started going up in the last 2-3 weeks though prices have not even reached pre pandemic levels. Black Pepper prices have jumped 20+% in the last 20day that price is still 50% cheaper than what it was 4-5 years ago. The largest problem is not availablity of goods rather shipping. I would advise investing in shipping companies if you are active in the stock market. As now days they are charging 3-4 times the freight and still hard to get space so they probably rare raking it in
- H8crilA 6y ago
  Surely you're familiar with the Baltic Dry Index, an index of shipping costs: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/baltic https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/baltic Also, in case anyone thinks the current environment is crazy then check out the commodities bubble period of 2008 for that index.
  - propertymagnate 6y ago
    Woah. For anyone interested, go to stats and click 25yrs - it's pretty clear what the above comment is referring to.
  - adventured 6y ago
    Which was all caused by an extremely large drop in the dollar. Anytime there is such a drop, you get global food chaos from a big spike in the price of commodities that destabilizes markets until they're able to adjust. And then you get civil wars out of that inevitably, it helped to cause the Arab Spring as one example. The US Dollar Index was at 120 in early 2002, and then proceeded to fall persistently until the middle of 2008 when it rested at around 71. An epic collapse by the dollar that triggered all sorts of nasty global effects. Fortunately this time around the dollar drop hasn't been so bad, most major currencies are debasing at the same time. The dollar is merely back to where it was in 2015 and 2018, so far.
    - ragnot 6y ago
      I'm just beginning to learn about investing...Is there any book and/or website to learn about how the dollar can affect commodities that you would recommend?
nelsonmandela 6y ago
Closed borders, no students/backpackers, farmers unprepared to pay minimum wages to Australians is resulting in a lot of produce being plowed back into the ground. I just don't know how this economy keeps rolling. How can farmers meet the payments on their loans? Reading 'The great depression: A diary' and looking at the world today just shocks the hell out of me. We are following it step for step and the crash is going to be devastating.
- tryonenow 6y ago
  Wouldn't prices go up anyway if farmers were forced to pay higher wages for picking? I imagine the margin on vegetables is quite tiny...
- Cederfjard 6y ago
  Am I interpreting this correctly that there’s a minimum wage that applies to Australians but not foreigners, and farmers thus rely on foreign labor? Edit: In Sweden we have/have had similar situations with temporary immigrants that for example pick berries for exploitative wages, but that’s because there’s no actual minimum wage per se - in the rest of society decent wages are ensured by strong unions (except in areas where demand is high anyway, like say for software developers).
  - dbetteridge 6y ago
    More like. I'll pay you minimum wage, but charge you exorbitant amounts for board and lodging and you have no choice because it's the middle of nowhere. Or for the extra dodgy types, cash payments below minimum wage because they know international workers are less likely to know their rights and be aware of what the minimum wage is.
    - rapnie 6y ago
      The first happens in The Netherlands on large scale, since they deregulated job agencies. There are 1,000's of shady ones, where administratively all is fine and dandy, but in practice foreign labour is paid far below minimum wage + they are often threatened to not speak up, passport taken, etc. This, btw, happens all across the EU is my impression. Modern-day slavery very much alive globally even!
tinus_hn 6y ago
Turns out lockdowns aren’t free, even if you just don’t compensate businesses.
- ketzu 6y ago
  Was "lockdowns are free" a serious position held by a relevant number of people?
  - adav 6y ago
    I've not heard any British politicians say that lockdowns are free but I have heard the Chancellor say that any borrowing at the moment is cheap due to low interest rates.
    - pjc50 6y ago
      That is literally true though: https://www.bloomberg.com/markets/rates-bonds/government-bonds/uk https://www.bloomberg.com/markets/rates-bonds/government-bon... Thirty year rates at 1.28%!
      - iso1631 6y ago
        Shame I can't get a 30 year mortgage at 1.28%
  - Guthur 6y ago
    No, but no one could truly quantify the cost. The same was true for Covid at the beginning, no one could quantify how bad it actually would be with wild figures in the 5%+ mortality rate. So we screamed for shutdown. Problem though is that now it's very much clear that Covid was nowhere near that level of mortality, still bad but not the doomsday scenario. Now we we'll have to see what the cost of maintaining the reaction to the initial Covid doomsday estimation; with lockdowns and short term shoring of the economy through fiat currency production.
  - mrfusion 6y ago
    Lives over stock market was a big thing on the media.
wideareanetwork 6y ago
This sort of news makes me want to panic.
- KirillPanov 6y ago
  donut panic
- brink 6y ago
  It's panicking that caused the issue in the first place.
hellbannedguy 6y ago
The article blames transportation cost due to Covid, and an increase in raw food prices for the rise in food cost. In my little bubble, in the Bay Area, it feels like plain old greed, and opportunity, but not price gouging. When the government tells me where I can shop, along with my fear of how certain stores have dealt with Covid precautions, my buying habits don’t take price into account like before. The first few months; I bought transportation, and raw costs, but now I’m not so sure. My local Safeway has raised prices on everything. At first, they looked like they were trying to be fair. Now——it looks like they know people can basically shop fir food, so why not raise prices on everything while they have you there? Same goes for Homedepot. Yea, raw wood prices, and appliances have gone up, but it looks like everything they sell went up. I haven’t been into Whole food because my local store has had too many sick employees. (While we are on prices, Mercury Insurance refunded me $6.46 on a $600 policy, and that was last year. Why hasn’t my insurance gone way down? It just seems like accidents would be down? My policy is minimum I can legally get away with. I was going to switch to an insurance company that bills per mile, but my old car does not have a computer that Tye “honesty” devise can plug into. I would be happy to send the company a picture of my odometer monthly, but that is not an option.)
- jhayward 6y ago
  > When the government tells me where I can shop, Which government is telling you where you can shop? In what way do they do that?
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    With regards to satisfying hunger, if the government has closed bars and sit-down restaurants in an area, that shifts food procurement towards grocers. Pre-pandemic, I suspect I purchased over half of my caloric intake from a food vendor other than a grocer. 15 years ago, that would have been 90+% (as so I expect the younger cohorts today would be similar)
    - amanaplanacanal 6y ago
      Where I am restaurants have been available throughout the pandemic at least for take out, and most have setup ways to have outdoor seating which is still allowed. There are a few which have closed permanently, but not as many as I expected, thankfully.
fiftyacorn 6y ago
You can see how it's going when the super rich are buying agricultural land
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
known 6y ago
India Is Letting Grain Go To Rot—While Thousands Of Indians Die Of Malnutrition Every Day https://www.businessinsider.com/india-malnutrition-a-story-of-rotting-crops-and-rotten-bureaucracy-2012-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/india-malnutrition-a-story-o...
- Clewza313 6y ago
  Nothing to do with COVID though, food production and distribution in India has always been horrendously inefficient. Crops rotting in trucks stuck in multi-day customs queues at interstate borders, etc.
netdur 6y ago
fuck you... I came here to escape from disturbing news, focus on tech and building things, now you ruined my day... fuck you
- atomashpolskiy 6y ago
  Gotta contact the suicide hotline, man
- newsbinator 6y ago
  It sounds like you’re feeling on edge after a very tough year. HN isn’t only for tech and building things. > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. I’m guessing under normal circumstances you wouldn’t curse at somebody who shared a worrisome story you didn’t want to see. This pandemic has us all a little feral, doesn’t it?
tokenmonster 6y ago
If food prices are soaring, and there's a bubble in all kinds of other assets like stocks and bitcoin, why aren't we calling it inflation - can anyone explain why policymakers aren't really concerned?
- aww_dang 6y ago
  There's little choice but to rationalize this state of affairs. Continuing to inflat the money supply is the politically expedient option. Price inflation is a related phenomenon. The Fed is unable to decrease it's balance sheet in a meaningful way. Some politicians are critical of central bank monetary policy. They are frequently maligned.
bigpoppa 6y ago
zerohedge.ycombinator.com
Havoc 6y ago
Everyone expected toilet paper and mask shortages. Ends up being Food and semi conductors.
xyst 6y ago
Rising food costs. Rising housing costs. Rising unemployment and stagnating wages. Another crash coming in the next couple of years?
- dijit 6y ago
  Are you kidding. There will be an insane recession, if not a depression. Capitalist economies have a short boom bust cycle and a long one. Short ones cause recessions every 10-20 years. Long ones cause depressions every 100~ years. It was clearly stated that Covid (if nothing else) could easily cause a recession, with other factors played in as well then it could easily trigger a depression.
  - gambiting 6y ago
    Can you explain the difference between those, for those of us who are not well versed in economics terms?
    - tony0x02 6y ago
      Not OP, but I recommend watching the "Economic machine" by Dalio.
    - Hammershaft 6y ago
      A recession is an actual economic term, a depression is a cultural term with no economic definition that basically means "a massive terrible recession".
    - hedora 6y ago
      They differ in magnitude, and (according to some) duration. Roughly speaking, a depression is a loss of more than 10% of economic output: https://www.thoughtco.com/difference-between-a-recession-and-depression-1145900 https://www.thoughtco.com/difference-between-a-recession-and...
  - luxuryballs 6y ago
    These boom bust cycles are caused by fiat money, inflationary debt/spending, government stimulus and over regulation that causes false market signals and creates bubbles, it’s not a capitalism problem, capitalism would be the solution.
babesh 6y ago
I have been buying GSG for the last few weeks as a hedge. Beyond transient effects of COVID-19, more chaotic weather due to climate change seems to be wreaking havoc. Beyond that, our economy seems to be increasingly reliant of raw materials that are increasingly harder to extract or that we demand more and more of. For examples of climate havoc, look at the drought in Taiwan and the deep cold in Texas. For examples of resource contention, look at oil and even at nickel. Those batteries meant to replace oil in turn require cobalt or nickel (at least for certain applications). The climate havoc and resource contention have much greater than linear effects. I don’t think most people realize this. Food shortages lead not only to higher prices but to civil unrest.
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  lithium Iron Phosphate batteries have improved to the point they’re good enough for entry level long-range electric cars (Tesla uses them sometimes), and iron is super duper common. Lithium and phosphate nearly so, as well. So I don’t really agree there.
- vlovich123 6y ago
  What’s GSG?
  - bifftastic 6y ago
    Probably this: https://www.ishares.com/us/products/239757/ishares-sp-gsci-commodityindexed-trust-fund https://www.ishares.com/us/products/239757/ishares-sp-gsci-c... In other words a commodity ETF.
Wolfenstein98k 6y ago
"Food Prices Are Soaring Faster Than Inflation and Incomes" ...Food price rises ARE inflation!
- 0x008 6y ago
  We should say "food prices are soaring faster than the average price of the consumer price index basket."
  - Wolfenstein98k 6y ago
    I agree. I may be being pedantic, but I think food prices are (or should be) the first and most important component of what we measure inflation with. It's much clearer to say "the rest of the basket hasn't risen above normal yet, but I am concerned the headline I quoted will mislead people who don't understand inflation.
    - EGreg 6y ago
      You are making a lot of assumptions here. Chief among them is that the price of food must always be strongly tied to the prices of other things in the consumer price index. But clearly, that does not need to be the case. Especially after how unsustainably humans use farmland: https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/02/arable-land-soil-food-security-shortage https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/02/arable-l...
    - KptMarchewa 6y ago
      Why? Food prices are usually few percent (6-18% in the western countries) of total household expenses. If you want to look at something that impacts people way more, look at rent or house prices.
      - dwighttk 6y ago
        Pretty sure (couldn’t read most of the article, paywall) this is talking about worldwide though. (First word of the article is “Global”)
DoingIsLearning 6y ago
"thanks to a combination of poor weather, increased demand and virus-mangled global supply chains." Seems like a lost opportunity to create so much anxiety with a long piece like this, to then only have this single line to hint at a reason for the rise. Can anybody more economically minded clarify if this is just post-covid rebound supply chain prices or is this food prices adjusting closer to their 'real' cost? Also what events do they refer to regarding 'poor weather'?
- a_bonobo 6y ago
  Here in Australia, some food prizes are up because the farming industry relies on cheap backpacker labor. Borders are shut so no backpackers come in, so a lot of fruit died on the field. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/02/world/australia/agriculture-backpackers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/02/world/australia/agricultu... It should be noted that the entire industry is notorious for doing every dodgy thing they can get away with, wage theft, rent theft, extreme conditions, so local workers stay as far away from these jobs as they can. Other industries have done OK though. Wheat grain, for example, is predicted to be pretty average: https://research.csiro.au/graincast/wheat-yield-forecasts/ https://research.csiro.au/graincast/wheat-yield-forecasts/
  - Uberphallus 6y ago
    Most cereal, corn, and even some fruit harvest is highly mechanized, whereas many other types of produce require manual labor, so it's really not surprising. In Europe, there are seasonal harvests that require surges of workers, who are sometimes legal and sometimes not. For example loads of foreign workers flock to the vineyards in France, Italy or Spain to collect the grapes for winemaking. It's around 3 weeks of work, obviously not worth a permanent contract. There were very few restrictions in those countries by the time of harvest (September) so wine prices, to my knowledge, have remained largely unaffected, but if it happened otherwise, winemakers would have been, without doubt, lobbying against the restrictions.
    - babesh 6y ago
cyberpsybin 6y ago
Here it comes. Cost of running money printer too hard.
- aww_dang 6y ago
  If only they could print productivity to match.
  - chii 6y ago
    That's what automation is - it's one of the leading causes of increased productivity in the last half century.
    - jeofken 6y ago
      Money printing became decoupled from anything real in 1971. See here what happened to the correlation between productivity and labour income after this https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
      - faet 6y ago
        Purchasing power has been consistent. https://i.redd.it/7qqhlk5i48l61.png https://i.redd.it/7qqhlk5i48l61.png The graph uses average hourly wages which does not include overtime, bonuses, shift premiums, and employer benefits. It also doesn't account for all workers. https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/es/07/ES0707.pdf https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/es/07... total compensation tracks pretty well.
        jeofken 6y ago
        Thanks for the interesting data point regarding purchasing power. I think we would agree that you’d expect purchasing power to increase when efficiency increases, rather than staying constant. And as efficiency (as measured by value i.e. usefulness/efficiency of capital) has continued to increase while purchasing power stayed mostly stagnant since 1971, those earning their income from labour are drawing the short stick, while those earning their income from capital gains (ie efficiency of productive stuff) are doing much better. If I misinterpreted your comment (I think we agree), I welcome your explanation of why purchasing power stays the same when efficiency increases since 1971.
DecoPerson 6y ago
After reading this article, I want to stock up on more food for myself and my five dependents. Double our reserves of biscuits, cereals, frozen meat, frozen bread, canned food, preserves, long-life milk, honey, multivitamins, MREs, etc etc. Is this panic buying? Is it OK? Does it hurt other people? I’d be interested to hear some different points of view.
- globular-toast 6y ago
  You know it's panic buying and you know it will harm other people. That's why you want to do it yourself. You know that if others do it and you don't that it will harm you. So you take the "can't beat 'em, join 'em" approach and do it yourself. Is it wrong for an individual to "join 'em"? No. Is it wrong that individuals feel the only way to be safe is to "join 'em"? Yes. But that's not a problem you can solve by yourself. The tragedy is that much of the food being stocked up in people's homes will go to waste as they don't have the facilities or knowledge to store it properly. Food suppliers have way better storage facilities than you do at home. They know how to keep food available all year round. There's also plenty of food to go around as should be blindingly obvious by observing the waistlines of people around you and that's including the fact that the food supply chain already has a ton of waste built in. Tragedy of the commons.
- rightbyte 6y ago
  As long as you eventually eat it, it is fine I guess. It is like energy and power demand on the electical grid. You lower the peak power demand.
- OscarCunningham 6y ago
  I don't think many other people are panic buying at the moment, so doing it now won't hurt other people by creating a localised shortage.
- sneak 6y ago
  It is indeed "panic buying" by the definition, but it need not be panicked. It is prudent to have a few months of supplies on hand if you know you're going to need them.
- 6y ago
z92 6y ago
I don't get how food consumption can increase in a pandemic. Should be constant in or outside a pandemic situation. Possibly somewhere crops are getting rotten because of newly imposed export restrictions, or for some other things.
- melomal 6y ago
  > I don't get how food consumption can increase in a pandemic There are a lot of people comfort eating and generally grazing out of boredom. I'm sure I've been eating a little more than I should with the crappy foods. Plus, people are saving so they are probably buying more foods to stock up on and thus throwing it all away.
- Broken_Hippo 6y ago
  Food consumption changes: Pre-pandemic, a good amount of meals would be eaten out of the house. School lunches, breakfast on the way to work, lunch break at the work cafeteria or a fast food place (sure, some folks bring lunch, but many places don't offer a break room that is adequate). All of this - and things like toilet paper - shifts to consumer goods instead of bulk goods, which takes different equipment and processing in factories, often at different times. A portion of school lunches in the US are the result of government subsidy foods: Cheeses, potatoes, and so on are very low cost to public schools. In short: Consumer foodstuff demand has increased. Additionally, more folks are spending a bit of time with food, changing the demands. Plus, home and slightly depressed/anxious with newly found free time means you have more time to eat - and many have taken up eating more. And then you do have crops that couldn't be picked, disruption in shipping (food travels far), and disruptions in factories that complicates things.
  - mnw21cam 6y ago
    In the UK, last year we had a terrible shortage of bread flour in the supermarkets. Actually, what we had was a sudden reduction in the amount of flour being used by bakeries, and an increase in the amount of flour being used at home. There wasn't a shortage of flour - there was a shortage of small bags to put it in for selling at a supermarket. The industry was all set up for selling a decent proportion of flour in really large bags. Likewise, for simple goods like vegetables, dairy, and beer, some suppliers have suddenly had their customers disappear, because they normally sold to restaurants, pubs, and caterers, where other suppliers have not been able to keep up with demand, because they sold to supermarkets. The obvious solution is for the suppliers who previously sold to caterers to sell to supermarkets instead, but it takes a while for these contracts and logistics to be sorted out.
mouzogu 6y ago
After just finishing reading Griftopia; I would not be surprised if Goldman Sachs had something to do with this or at least speculation of perishable commodities.
- DrBazza 6y ago
  Speculation in commodities reminded me of the onion futures act [0] """ The Onion Futures Act is a United States law banning the trading of futures contracts on onions as well as "motion picture box office receipts".[1] In 1955, two onion traders, Sam Siegel and Vincent Kosuga, cornered the onion futures market on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. The resulting regulatory actions led to the passing of the act on August 28, 1958. As of January 2021, it remains in effect.[1] The law was amended in 2010 to add motion picture box office futures to the list of banned futures contracts, in response to lobbying efforts by the Motion Picture Association of America.[2] """ 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act
bobitsaboy 6y ago
Prior to the pandemic, I always advocated for a couple weeks worth of non-perishables to be at the ready. Storms can cause issues getting to stores (or shipments arriving), and illness can make it a pain to make a weekly run. Now my significant other is entirely on board. When normal ingredients we used became unavailable, it caused us to continually try new things. I have to admit I was pretty surprised to see today's customers buy up the basic scratch ingredients like rabid consumers early in the pandemic. Flour, sugar, etc. were all a real pain to get a hold of. I thought prices were increasing pretty steadily before the pandemic and now it's even worse. I can remember so many items being as cheap as 25 cents each during the 90s and into the 00s... now most of them at $1.50 each. Meanwhile, our state minimum wage has increased not nearly as much (but employers are having to offer closer and closer to double to rope in anyone).
- NullPrefix 6y ago
  >Flour, sugar, etc. were all a real pain to get a hold of I see that as a win. Neither flour nor sugar is essential or healthy.
  - bobitsaboy 6y ago
    That's great, they're just two items and a lot of people didn't routinely buy flour (or something like yeast). Meanwhile, everything else has gone up in addition. A number of produce items have increased 25-50% in the last year here. Gotta love some of the people on HN. Maybe it's just the late night crowd?
  - atomashpolskiy 6y ago
    Yeah, let them eat kinoa and avocado
- Aachen 6y ago
  > prices were increasing pretty steadily during the pandemic and now it's even worse. I can remember so many items being as cheap as 25 cents each during the 90s and into the 00s... How long have you been having a pandemic for? Joking aside (that sentence read a bit weirdly), I don't think you should compare what happened in the 90s with what happened since 2020-02. If inflation surpasses minimum wage in the long term, that's not the same as prices soaring because of supply chain changes. And for what it's worth, I've not noticed any price increases here between 2020-02 and last week. This is way too anecdotal and conflating different situations to be useful.
layoutIfNeeded 6y ago
Good. Maybe we’ll waste less now.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 6y ago
  The most wasteful are the richest though.
  - pmlnr 6y ago
    "The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.” < https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-rich-were-so-rich-vimes-reasoned https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-r... > So in short: no. Everyone is wasting.
    - chii 6y ago
      So why did't the poorer man buy the more expensive boots using a loan, and then pay it off over the life time of the boots? That would've prevented him from spending hundred dollars on bad boots over and over again. So i argue that it's poor planning.
      - ceejayoz 6y ago
        To be clear, your question is "why don't poor people just get loans"?
mrkramer 6y ago
If domestic production is enough to satisfy domestic demand no worries but that's not always the case.
throwawaymanbot 6y ago
Hedge funds ...
TheButlerian 6y ago
Cuckdowncels, you can eat my dick if you are hungry.
OscarCunningham 6y ago
Which prices are increasing slower than inflation to counteract this? EDIT: It's energy. https://www.bls.gov/cpi/ https://www.bls.gov/cpi/
- maxerickson 6y ago
  Inflation indexes don't give a lot of weight to short term price changes. So there doesn't necessarily have to be anything offsetting it. If prices stay high it should show up in inflation.
- lupire 6y ago
  Also clothing, medical care commodities, and transportation services. Meanwhile used cars are up more than food in the US. That graph has bizzare rollups you need to click through. But the article is really about 40% spike in global basic commodities for the global poor, not 3% US bump.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
whoisninja 6y ago
CPI is a joke, they do something called hedonic adjustments to things like tech products etc. It's completely subjective and BS. Technology is deflationary, things should get cheaper because we go after producing them in creative ways one demand is high. CPI is absurd, it only perpetuates consumerism and punishes savers. We product 2x the food society consumes - mostly wasted away, just with some supply chain efficiency - there's a lot more room for food not to be expensive though.
- ErikAugust 6y ago
  Real question that nobody has yet answered: With what data CPI is even calculated? The data sources are all hidden. Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26259279 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26259279
  - whoisninja 6y ago
    Keynesian economics kool-aid, all the Phd Econ guys worship guy who had done some really shady stuff in his life. Nobel prize in economics was started by Sveriges riksbank in 1968, just to perpetuate same ideaologies. Shady af.
    - seibelj 6y ago
      Keynes was also a child sex tourist who frequently preyed on boys, sometimes with friends https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/2802/was-john-maynard-keynes-a-child-molester https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/2802/was-john-m... Edit: not sure why I’m being downvoted. He admitted in his diaries as a 30 year old man he would pay for sex from 16 year olds, and referenced others as “boys” without ages. By modern standards he would be a sex offender for life. We seem to hold all historical figures by modern standards now, not sure why we give this pedophile a pass.
      - finolex1 6y ago
        Irrelevant to the topic at hand.
bfrog 6y ago
So housing and food has gone up dramatically, but still "inflation is low" is the story. Doesn't and hasn't passed the smell test in a decade.
- QuadmasterXLII 6y ago
  Its probably being cancelled out in the basket by healthcare and education prices skyrocketing. Oh wait.
  - hedora 6y ago
    Don’t forget utilities (also skyrocketing here).
  - SilasX 6y ago
    No joke, back in 2011, a Fed executive insisted that iPad deflation was canceling out higher food prices. Not even that iPads were getting cheaper, just, new ones had faster CPUs, so their effective price was lower. (Which somehow frees up more money for food?) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fed-dudley-ipad-idUSTRE72A4AC20110311 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fed-dudley-ipad-idUST...
    - fennecfoxen 6y ago
      The official was correct, from the perspective of economy-wide price stability. The problem wasn't inflation, the problem was expensive food. Obviously, this particular exchange was of no comfort to those who suffer from high food prices, but why should monetary policy be the remedy for high food prices (to the exclusion of its current goals) instead of looking for remedies in fiscal policy, trade policy, regulatory policy, or other instruments better suited to a more targeted redress?
      - SilasX 6y ago
        Well, there's technically correct, and substantively correct. Most people would take away the lesson that "hey, the current definition of inflation doesn't quite capture the reality of normal people's cost of living", not "computer says no suffering, sorry bro". But I don't think it's even technically correct from the perspective of price stability. The inflation the central bank cares about is the kind that is the result of (to simplify) "too much money chasing too few goods". Technological deflation is totally orthogonal to that, and should be ignored to the extent possible. Furthermore, even on its on terms, the calculation isn't correct. A fifty percent faster CPU doesn't mean the effective price has fallen fifty percent, because the CPU is only occasionally the bottleneck. (And do they ever adjust inflation upward for quality reductions?)
j_m_b 6y ago
Fiat Money! Quantitative easing! Stimulus Checks! Next it will be UBI. Unrestrained monetary policies were the piper to save us from financial crisis after financial crisis. Now his pal inflation is coming for all of our free lunches.
deleted 6y ago
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williesleg 6y ago
Of course, we need to eat bugs, that's the only way out. Fresh water shortages and the climate crisis will only make it worse.
marshmallow_12 6y ago
Haven't read the article, but i'm sure the problem could be greatly alleviated, or even entirely eradicated, by cutting down on food waste. I understand an absurd amount of food goes to waste, something like a third. All around us, obscene amounts of food is going to the bin.
nashashmi 6y ago
I had a dream recently on this topic. Price of food inflating. And clothing too. And inversely housing prices dropping. And then it made sense to me. When the cost of everyday goods go up, there is more money flowing in meager industries. That means more money for the average joe. (Or it used to be before robot corporations overtook farming.) And that means more concentration of resources for the normal guy. Which means smaller housing compared to McMansions. And smaller cost of living all around. The problem is that today’s large rich population become not so well off. And poor people hit a better standard of living. Higher food prices may be a good thing.
devilduck 6y ago
it's almost time to eat the rich
fredfoobar 6y ago
Global food shortages are coming, I'm just worried that not enough people are taking this seriously. Inflation may come right after. This is not good.
elzbardico 6y ago
Jeebus folks! This is not about the USA. This is about the vast majority of the mankind that lives on developing countries, vast armies of people already under the threat of food insecurity in the best of times, now unemployed and facing the threat of food inflation. This is the stuff that create coup d'etats, dictatorships, rampant crime and wars. Meanwhile you're working on automating work to make this people even more unemployable, and have the nerve to complain about a small food price increase in the frigging US of A.
- phendrenad2 6y ago
  Who's making it about the USA? The article is clearly about the world. Food scarcity hits people in developed countries too, especially the US where there's no safety net against homelessness if you're unfit to work. That "small price increase in the friggin US of A" is a big deal to people below the poverty line. There's always someone poorer in the world, it's just weird to draw a line in the sand and say "you must be this malnourished to speak up". As for automating work, how far back should we go? Should people be forced to abandon their cars because having horse-drawn chariots employed more people?
  - elzbardico 6y ago
    I was talking about the comments.
cs702 6y ago
...due to TEMPORARY restrictions, such as border closures, that will be lifted once the pandemic is history. -- On a related topic, quite a few commenters here have made uninformed or intentionally misleading comments about the relationship between inflation indexes and food/energy prices. Let me quote this explanation posted 10 years ago by a PhD student of economics at MIT: "Food and energy are not excluded from the Consumer Price Index. The standard CPI, which is used to make cost of living adjustments to Social Security (among other things), reflects a full consumption basket, including food and energy. The index that excludes food and energy is the core CPI, which is used for a very different purpose -- namely, the U.S. Federal Reserve's decisions about U.S. Monetary Policy. A few observers seem to believe that excluding food and energy from the core CPI reflects either deep ignorance or conspiratorial neglect on the part of monetary authorities. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, core CPI (along with some alternatives like mean-trimmed price indices) is a very sensible reaction to the dilemmas facing monetary policymakers. Suppose that the Federal Reserve had a mandate to stabilize the full Consumer Price Index, and that food prices suddenly doubled. To keep the CPI at a stable level, other prices would need to decrease. The problem, however, is that many prices are sticky, meaning that they do not instantaneously respond to changes in monetary and macroeconomic conditions. This is especially true in the service industry (which comprises the bulk of both Gross Domestic Product and the CPI). To create these compensating price changes within a relatively short timespan, the Fed would have to impose extremely tight monetary policy, with sky-high nominal interest rates. And as we saw in the early 1980s, a large increase in nominal interest rates is extremely destructive to the real economy, leading to a massive increase in unemployment. Given our already weak economic conditions, such a policy would be even more damaging today. Core CPI is a way to prevent this kind of needless suffering and unemployment. By targeting a stabler set of prices, the Fed avoids the wild swings in monetary policy that would inevitably arise from targeting an index that includes commodity prices. In other words, the demagogues who assail core CPI have it all wrong: the average American would be much, much worse off if the Fed targeted a volatile measure like headline CPI." Source: https://www.quora.com/Why-are-food-and-energy-costs-excluded-from-the-core-CPI?share=1 https://www.quora.com/Why-are-food-and-energy-costs-excluded...
jackfoxy 6y ago
This is the result of the central banks embracing Modern Monetary Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory as the policy to leave no hedge fund behind and lay the groundwork for UBI. In plain English this is the fractional reserve banking system providing a cornucopia for all. It's really using debt to finance not capital creation, but current consumption. This cannot possibly end well.
- koboll 6y ago
  >to finance not capital creation, but current consumption I don't understand the distinction here. Capital creation results from meeting the needs of current consumption, no?
  - large 6y ago
    Something has to be produced before it can be consumed.
- bpodgursky 6y ago
  Or, as I like to call it, Magic Monetary Theory.
- loveistheanswer 6y ago
  >this is the fractional reserve banking system Seems like we may need a new technical term to replace "fractional reserve banking", because the Fed reduced reserve requirement ratios to zero percent a year ago. https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/reservereq.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/reservereq.htm
- certnlyuncertn 6y ago
  IMO it's more likely a result of a global pandemic disrupting labor and supply chains combined with some unlucky weather events hurting crop yields.
- jcfrei 6y ago
  That's not true at all. Central banks have tried to stoke inflation for close to a decade now without success. The reason behind the current rise is just what the article mentions: "poor weather, increased demand and virus-mangled global supply chains". Or maybe you are confusing the actions by the federal government (stimulus checks) with those of the central banks (QE). The former most likely does have inflationary effects - the latter hasn't had an effect for well over 10 years by now.
Robotbeat 6y ago
Cars are much safer and (for the same given size) go a lot farther for the same amount of fuel. They’re also faster, more reliable, last longer between maintenance (used to be 3000 miles between oil changes, now it’s... 7500 miles or so), more comfortable, and with more useful features (navigation, phone integration, etc). As far as homes, there HAS been real estate inflation, but homes are now better insulated, have much more efficient heating and cooling (and now have actual cooling whereas in the past were often uncooled), have more bathrooms, and have much more efficient and cheaper lighting (which doesn’t need to be replaced as often and has lower fire risk). Clothing is so plentiful and cheap it’s a bit silly (and this used to be a major practical purchase and highly labor intensive to mend your clothes, so I’m not talking just fashion). A lot of things people actually need really are much better than in the past. I hope we fix the housing price issues, though. This is really bad.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  > As far as homes, there HAS been real estate inflation, but homes are now better insulated, have much more efficient heating and cooling (and now have actual cooling whereas in the past were often uncooled), have more bathrooms, and have much more efficient and cheaper lighting (which doesn’t need to be replaced as often and has lower fire risk). That all matters less than the location of the house.
- thebean11 6y ago
  > As far as homes, there HAS been real estate inflation, but homes are now better insulated, have much more efficient heating and cooling (and now have actual cooling whereas in the past were often uncooled), have more bathrooms, and have much more efficient and cheaper lighting (which doesn’t need to be replaced as often and has lower fire risk). None of that really makes a dent price-wise in the more expensive real estate markets.
- asdff 6y ago
  Ha! Please look at the average housing stock in a city like LA or SF. Better insulated/efficient/bigger/new/21st century home it is not. The exact same 2 bedroom bungalow they built for returning GIs that probably cost $6000 back then costs north of $1.5m now. New construction only gets a slight bump of maybe another $200-400k or so (the cost of construction). The value isn't in how nice the house is, it's in the dirt below and where it sits on earth. The same $1.6m house in LA might go for $20k if you put it on a trailer and stuck it on some land in Nowhere, Louisiana instead. And don't get me started with the rental stock.
carapace 6y ago
It's Spring, plant a garden. Dig up your lawn and plant some potatoes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden
coltons 6y ago
Isnt food prices soaring the definition of inflation... haha
- gruez 6y ago
  food prices is a part of cpi, which is what people typically mean by "inflation". the cpi is also composed of other items (eg. rents, transport), which means it's possible for inflation to be down even though food prices are up.
adamc 6y ago
Bloomberg is an expensive paywall. Unhelpful.
Florence9899 6y ago
Я здесь Голая https://vk.cc/bZoVGs https://vk.cc/bZoVGs
foobarbaz33 6y ago
It makes sense. There's more people than ever and less food produced after 2020 flooding in China.
thehappypm 6y ago
"Soaring" is 3% now?
- BitwiseFool 6y ago
  Hackernews user slams journalists using cliche headline vocabulary. The full-throated criticism was not met with a response, the silence is deafening.
kristopolous 6y ago
Grain prices caused the arab spring. Expensive food has been toppling governments since the beginning of civilization
LockAndLol 6y ago
Maybe if we didn't throw up to 50% of our food away in "developed nations" there'd be: A. More left for the rest B. No need to produce the amount produced right now C. Reduced impact on the environment But yeah, let's think about that ,once we do actually have a crisis, as a last resort. Keep stuffing your bins with food you didn't eat and wondering why prices soar.

514 points by prostoalex 6y ago

Overall production/consumption has probably decreased. This means that food has has higher relative share of consumption. Therefore food prices shift right?

gremlinsinc 6y ago
Production has decreased, or at least ability to ship it has. Consumption is probably the same for most families, albeit they may buy 10% more to make sure certain staples are good in case of a shortage.. more so during the ebb/flow of covid-19 waves and lockdowns. So a family might end up wasting more food just to be sure they have enough for planned meals or alternatives. A lot of people are having mental health issues from lockdown, that can affect eating behaviors as well - depression can cause gain or loss of appetite so that's up in the air - could also make you plan to eat in but then decide to get take out because you're too depressed to cook. (Source: I've done this as my anxiety/depression has been really bad this year and my wife who's never been depressed is barely functional this year). I think the biggest thing is just everything's shifting. We're not just dealing with covid-19 but also fires and other natural disasters. Unfortunately, I think climate change could keep this the norm even if covid-19 is completely normalized (i.e. we return to some semblance of normal). Covid-19 variants could also keep things an issue. I'm going to get flagged for fear-mongering but I don't see how the next decade gets any better than it is right now, except for fleeting relief cycles as we come out of the pandemic ... but there's a lot of shifting global strife. You can almost feel the change from day to day everything's changing faster and faster and it's getting harder to predict the future. Kind of like the singularity when technology speeds up.
- swiley 6y ago
  I remember seeing an article about how some container ship crews haven't been able to leave their ships and see other people for crazy periods of time because of lockdowns. That can't be good for retention and shipping.

xbmcuser 6y ago

As someone that is the food mostly spice trade prices have started going up in the last 2-3 weeks though prices have not even reached pre pandemic levels. Black Pepper prices have jumped 20+% in the last 20day that price is still 50% cheaper than what it was 4-5 years ago. The largest problem is not availablity of goods rather shipping. I would advise investing in shipping companies if you are active in the stock market. As now days they are charging 3-4 times the freight and still hard to get space so they probably rare raking it in

H8crilA 6y ago
Surely you're familiar with the Baltic Dry Index, an index of shipping costs: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/baltic https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/baltic Also, in case anyone thinks the current environment is crazy then check out the commodities bubble period of 2008 for that index.
- propertymagnate 6y ago
  Woah. For anyone interested, go to stats and click 25yrs - it's pretty clear what the above comment is referring to.
- adventured 6y ago
  Which was all caused by an extremely large drop in the dollar. Anytime there is such a drop, you get global food chaos from a big spike in the price of commodities that destabilizes markets until they're able to adjust. And then you get civil wars out of that inevitably, it helped to cause the Arab Spring as one example. The US Dollar Index was at 120 in early 2002, and then proceeded to fall persistently until the middle of 2008 when it rested at around 71. An epic collapse by the dollar that triggered all sorts of nasty global effects. Fortunately this time around the dollar drop hasn't been so bad, most major currencies are debasing at the same time. The dollar is merely back to where it was in 2015 and 2018, so far.
  - ragnot 6y ago
    I'm just beginning to learn about investing...Is there any book and/or website to learn about how the dollar can affect commodities that you would recommend?

nelsonmandela 6y ago

Closed borders, no students/backpackers, farmers unprepared to pay minimum wages to Australians is resulting in a lot of produce being plowed back into the ground. I just don't know how this economy keeps rolling. How can farmers meet the payments on their loans? Reading 'The great depression: A diary' and looking at the world today just shocks the hell out of me. We are following it step for step and the crash is going to be devastating.

tryonenow 6y ago
Wouldn't prices go up anyway if farmers were forced to pay higher wages for picking? I imagine the margin on vegetables is quite tiny...
Cederfjard 6y ago
Am I interpreting this correctly that there’s a minimum wage that applies to Australians but not foreigners, and farmers thus rely on foreign labor? Edit: In Sweden we have/have had similar situations with temporary immigrants that for example pick berries for exploitative wages, but that’s because there’s no actual minimum wage per se - in the rest of society decent wages are ensured by strong unions (except in areas where demand is high anyway, like say for software developers).
- dbetteridge 6y ago
  More like. I'll pay you minimum wage, but charge you exorbitant amounts for board and lodging and you have no choice because it's the middle of nowhere. Or for the extra dodgy types, cash payments below minimum wage because they know international workers are less likely to know their rights and be aware of what the minimum wage is.
  - rapnie 6y ago
    The first happens in The Netherlands on large scale, since they deregulated job agencies. There are 1,000's of shady ones, where administratively all is fine and dandy, but in practice foreign labour is paid far below minimum wage + they are often threatened to not speak up, passport taken, etc. This, btw, happens all across the EU is my impression. Modern-day slavery very much alive globally even!

tinus_hn 6y ago

Turns out lockdowns aren’t free, even if you just don’t compensate businesses.

ketzu 6y ago
Was "lockdowns are free" a serious position held by a relevant number of people?
- adav 6y ago
  I've not heard any British politicians say that lockdowns are free but I have heard the Chancellor say that any borrowing at the moment is cheap due to low interest rates.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    That is literally true though: https://www.bloomberg.com/markets/rates-bonds/government-bonds/uk https://www.bloomberg.com/markets/rates-bonds/government-bon... Thirty year rates at 1.28%!
    - iso1631 6y ago
      Shame I can't get a 30 year mortgage at 1.28%
- Guthur 6y ago
  No, but no one could truly quantify the cost. The same was true for Covid at the beginning, no one could quantify how bad it actually would be with wild figures in the 5%+ mortality rate. So we screamed for shutdown. Problem though is that now it's very much clear that Covid was nowhere near that level of mortality, still bad but not the doomsday scenario. Now we we'll have to see what the cost of maintaining the reaction to the initial Covid doomsday estimation; with lockdowns and short term shoring of the economy through fiat currency production.
- mrfusion 6y ago
  Lives over stock market was a big thing on the media.

wideareanetwork 6y ago

This sort of news makes me want to panic.

KirillPanov 6y ago
donut panic
brink 6y ago
It's panicking that caused the issue in the first place.

hellbannedguy 6y ago

The article blames transportation cost due to Covid, and an increase in raw food prices for the rise in food cost. In my little bubble, in the Bay Area, it feels like plain old greed, and opportunity, but not price gouging. When the government tells me where I can shop, along with my fear of how certain stores have dealt with Covid precautions, my buying habits don’t take price into account like before. The first few months; I bought transportation, and raw costs, but now I’m not so sure. My local Safeway has raised prices on everything. At first, they looked like they were trying to be fair. Now——it looks like they know people can basically shop fir food, so why not raise prices on everything while they have you there? Same goes for Homedepot. Yea, raw wood prices, and appliances have gone up, but it looks like everything they sell went up. I haven’t been into Whole food because my local store has had too many sick employees. (While we are on prices, Mercury Insurance refunded me $6.46 on a $600 policy, and that was last year. Why hasn’t my insurance gone way down? It just seems like accidents would be down? My policy is minimum I can legally get away with. I was going to switch to an insurance company that bills per mile, but my old car does not have a computer that Tye “honesty” devise can plug into. I would be happy to send the company a picture of my odometer monthly, but that is not an option.)

jhayward 6y ago
> When the government tells me where I can shop, Which government is telling you where you can shop? In what way do they do that?
- sokoloff 6y ago
  With regards to satisfying hunger, if the government has closed bars and sit-down restaurants in an area, that shifts food procurement towards grocers. Pre-pandemic, I suspect I purchased over half of my caloric intake from a food vendor other than a grocer. 15 years ago, that would have been 90+% (as so I expect the younger cohorts today would be similar)
  - amanaplanacanal 6y ago
    Where I am restaurants have been available throughout the pandemic at least for take out, and most have setup ways to have outdoor seating which is still allowed. There are a few which have closed permanently, but not as many as I expected, thankfully.

fiftyacorn 6y ago

You can see how it's going when the super rich are buying agricultural land

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

known 6y ago

India Is Letting Grain Go To Rot—While Thousands Of Indians Die Of Malnutrition Every Day https://www.businessinsider.com/india-malnutrition-a-story-of-rotting-crops-and-rotten-bureaucracy-2012-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/india-malnutrition-a-story-o...

Clewza313 6y ago
Nothing to do with COVID though, food production and distribution in India has always been horrendously inefficient. Crops rotting in trucks stuck in multi-day customs queues at interstate borders, etc.

netdur 6y ago

fuck you... I came here to escape from disturbing news, focus on tech and building things, now you ruined my day... fuck you

atomashpolskiy 6y ago
Gotta contact the suicide hotline, man
newsbinator 6y ago
It sounds like you’re feeling on edge after a very tough year. HN isn’t only for tech and building things. > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. I’m guessing under normal circumstances you wouldn’t curse at somebody who shared a worrisome story you didn’t want to see. This pandemic has us all a little feral, doesn’t it?

tokenmonster 6y ago

If food prices are soaring, and there's a bubble in all kinds of other assets like stocks and bitcoin, why aren't we calling it inflation - can anyone explain why policymakers aren't really concerned?

aww_dang 6y ago
There's little choice but to rationalize this state of affairs. Continuing to inflat the money supply is the politically expedient option. Price inflation is a related phenomenon. The Fed is unable to decrease it's balance sheet in a meaningful way. Some politicians are critical of central bank monetary policy. They are frequently maligned.

bigpoppa 6y ago

zerohedge.ycombinator.com

Havoc 6y ago

Everyone expected toilet paper and mask shortages. Ends up being Food and semi conductors.

xyst 6y ago

Rising food costs. Rising housing costs. Rising unemployment and stagnating wages. Another crash coming in the next couple of years?

dijit 6y ago
Are you kidding. There will be an insane recession, if not a depression. Capitalist economies have a short boom bust cycle and a long one. Short ones cause recessions every 10-20 years. Long ones cause depressions every 100~ years. It was clearly stated that Covid (if nothing else) could easily cause a recession, with other factors played in as well then it could easily trigger a depression.
- gambiting 6y ago
  Can you explain the difference between those, for those of us who are not well versed in economics terms?
  - tony0x02 6y ago
    Not OP, but I recommend watching the "Economic machine" by Dalio.
  - Hammershaft 6y ago
    A recession is an actual economic term, a depression is a cultural term with no economic definition that basically means "a massive terrible recession".
  - hedora 6y ago
    They differ in magnitude, and (according to some) duration. Roughly speaking, a depression is a loss of more than 10% of economic output: https://www.thoughtco.com/difference-between-a-recession-and-depression-1145900 https://www.thoughtco.com/difference-between-a-recession-and...
- luxuryballs 6y ago
  These boom bust cycles are caused by fiat money, inflationary debt/spending, government stimulus and over regulation that causes false market signals and creates bubbles, it’s not a capitalism problem, capitalism would be the solution.

babesh 6y ago

I have been buying GSG for the last few weeks as a hedge. Beyond transient effects of COVID-19, more chaotic weather due to climate change seems to be wreaking havoc. Beyond that, our economy seems to be increasingly reliant of raw materials that are increasingly harder to extract or that we demand more and more of. For examples of climate havoc, look at the drought in Taiwan and the deep cold in Texas. For examples of resource contention, look at oil and even at nickel. Those batteries meant to replace oil in turn require cobalt or nickel (at least for certain applications). The climate havoc and resource contention have much greater than linear effects. I don’t think most people realize this. Food shortages lead not only to higher prices but to civil unrest.

Robotbeat 6y ago
lithium Iron Phosphate batteries have improved to the point they’re good enough for entry level long-range electric cars (Tesla uses them sometimes), and iron is super duper common. Lithium and phosphate nearly so, as well. So I don’t really agree there.
vlovich123 6y ago
What’s GSG?
- bifftastic 6y ago
  Probably this: https://www.ishares.com/us/products/239757/ishares-sp-gsci-commodityindexed-trust-fund https://www.ishares.com/us/products/239757/ishares-sp-gsci-c... In other words a commodity ETF.

Wolfenstein98k 6y ago

"Food Prices Are Soaring Faster Than Inflation and Incomes" ...Food price rises ARE inflation!

0x008 6y ago
We should say "food prices are soaring faster than the average price of the consumer price index basket."
- Wolfenstein98k 6y ago
  I agree. I may be being pedantic, but I think food prices are (or should be) the first and most important component of what we measure inflation with. It's much clearer to say "the rest of the basket hasn't risen above normal yet, but I am concerned the headline I quoted will mislead people who don't understand inflation.
  - EGreg 6y ago
    You are making a lot of assumptions here. Chief among them is that the price of food must always be strongly tied to the prices of other things in the consumer price index. But clearly, that does not need to be the case. Especially after how unsustainably humans use farmland: https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/02/arable-land-soil-food-security-shortage https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/02/arable-l...
  - KptMarchewa 6y ago
    Why? Food prices are usually few percent (6-18% in the western countries) of total household expenses. If you want to look at something that impacts people way more, look at rent or house prices.
    - dwighttk 6y ago
      Pretty sure (couldn’t read most of the article, paywall) this is talking about worldwide though. (First word of the article is “Global”)

DoingIsLearning 6y ago

"thanks to a combination of poor weather, increased demand and virus-mangled global supply chains." Seems like a lost opportunity to create so much anxiety with a long piece like this, to then only have this single line to hint at a reason for the rise. Can anybody more economically minded clarify if this is just post-covid rebound supply chain prices or is this food prices adjusting closer to their 'real' cost? Also what events do they refer to regarding 'poor weather'?

a_bonobo 6y ago
Here in Australia, some food prizes are up because the farming industry relies on cheap backpacker labor. Borders are shut so no backpackers come in, so a lot of fruit died on the field. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/02/world/australia/agriculture-backpackers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/02/world/australia/agricultu... It should be noted that the entire industry is notorious for doing every dodgy thing they can get away with, wage theft, rent theft, extreme conditions, so local workers stay as far away from these jobs as they can. Other industries have done OK though. Wheat grain, for example, is predicted to be pretty average: https://research.csiro.au/graincast/wheat-yield-forecasts/ https://research.csiro.au/graincast/wheat-yield-forecasts/
- Uberphallus 6y ago
  Most cereal, corn, and even some fruit harvest is highly mechanized, whereas many other types of produce require manual labor, so it's really not surprising. In Europe, there are seasonal harvests that require surges of workers, who are sometimes legal and sometimes not. For example loads of foreign workers flock to the vineyards in France, Italy or Spain to collect the grapes for winemaking. It's around 3 weeks of work, obviously not worth a permanent contract. There were very few restrictions in those countries by the time of harvest (September) so wine prices, to my knowledge, have remained largely unaffected, but if it happened otherwise, winemakers would have been, without doubt, lobbying against the restrictions.
  - babesh 6y ago

cyberpsybin 6y ago

Here it comes. Cost of running money printer too hard.

aww_dang 6y ago
If only they could print productivity to match.
- chii 6y ago
  That's what automation is - it's one of the leading causes of increased productivity in the last half century.
  - jeofken 6y ago
    Money printing became decoupled from anything real in 1971. See here what happened to the correlation between productivity and labour income after this https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
    - faet 6y ago
      Purchasing power has been consistent. https://i.redd.it/7qqhlk5i48l61.png https://i.redd.it/7qqhlk5i48l61.png The graph uses average hourly wages which does not include overtime, bonuses, shift premiums, and employer benefits. It also doesn't account for all workers. https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/es/07/ES0707.pdf https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/es/07... total compensation tracks pretty well.
      - jeofken 6y ago
        Thanks for the interesting data point regarding purchasing power. I think we would agree that you’d expect purchasing power to increase when efficiency increases, rather than staying constant. And as efficiency (as measured by value i.e. usefulness/efficiency of capital) has continued to increase while purchasing power stayed mostly stagnant since 1971, those earning their income from labour are drawing the short stick, while those earning their income from capital gains (ie efficiency of productive stuff) are doing much better. If I misinterpreted your comment (I think we agree), I welcome your explanation of why purchasing power stays the same when efficiency increases since 1971.

DecoPerson 6y ago

After reading this article, I want to stock up on more food for myself and my five dependents. Double our reserves of biscuits, cereals, frozen meat, frozen bread, canned food, preserves, long-life milk, honey, multivitamins, MREs, etc etc. Is this panic buying? Is it OK? Does it hurt other people? I’d be interested to hear some different points of view.

globular-toast 6y ago
You know it's panic buying and you know it will harm other people. That's why you want to do it yourself. You know that if others do it and you don't that it will harm you. So you take the "can't beat 'em, join 'em" approach and do it yourself. Is it wrong for an individual to "join 'em"? No. Is it wrong that individuals feel the only way to be safe is to "join 'em"? Yes. But that's not a problem you can solve by yourself. The tragedy is that much of the food being stocked up in people's homes will go to waste as they don't have the facilities or knowledge to store it properly. Food suppliers have way better storage facilities than you do at home. They know how to keep food available all year round. There's also plenty of food to go around as should be blindingly obvious by observing the waistlines of people around you and that's including the fact that the food supply chain already has a ton of waste built in. Tragedy of the commons.
rightbyte 6y ago
As long as you eventually eat it, it is fine I guess. It is like energy and power demand on the electical grid. You lower the peak power demand.
OscarCunningham 6y ago
I don't think many other people are panic buying at the moment, so doing it now won't hurt other people by creating a localised shortage.
sneak 6y ago
It is indeed "panic buying" by the definition, but it need not be panicked. It is prudent to have a few months of supplies on hand if you know you're going to need them.
6y ago

z92 6y ago

I don't get how food consumption can increase in a pandemic. Should be constant in or outside a pandemic situation. Possibly somewhere crops are getting rotten because of newly imposed export restrictions, or for some other things.

melomal 6y ago
> I don't get how food consumption can increase in a pandemic There are a lot of people comfort eating and generally grazing out of boredom. I'm sure I've been eating a little more than I should with the crappy foods. Plus, people are saving so they are probably buying more foods to stock up on and thus throwing it all away.
Broken_Hippo 6y ago
Food consumption changes: Pre-pandemic, a good amount of meals would be eaten out of the house. School lunches, breakfast on the way to work, lunch break at the work cafeteria or a fast food place (sure, some folks bring lunch, but many places don't offer a break room that is adequate). All of this - and things like toilet paper - shifts to consumer goods instead of bulk goods, which takes different equipment and processing in factories, often at different times. A portion of school lunches in the US are the result of government subsidy foods: Cheeses, potatoes, and so on are very low cost to public schools. In short: Consumer foodstuff demand has increased. Additionally, more folks are spending a bit of time with food, changing the demands. Plus, home and slightly depressed/anxious with newly found free time means you have more time to eat - and many have taken up eating more. And then you do have crops that couldn't be picked, disruption in shipping (food travels far), and disruptions in factories that complicates things.
- mnw21cam 6y ago
  In the UK, last year we had a terrible shortage of bread flour in the supermarkets. Actually, what we had was a sudden reduction in the amount of flour being used by bakeries, and an increase in the amount of flour being used at home. There wasn't a shortage of flour - there was a shortage of small bags to put it in for selling at a supermarket. The industry was all set up for selling a decent proportion of flour in really large bags. Likewise, for simple goods like vegetables, dairy, and beer, some suppliers have suddenly had their customers disappear, because they normally sold to restaurants, pubs, and caterers, where other suppliers have not been able to keep up with demand, because they sold to supermarkets. The obvious solution is for the suppliers who previously sold to caterers to sell to supermarkets instead, but it takes a while for these contracts and logistics to be sorted out.

mouzogu 6y ago

After just finishing reading Griftopia; I would not be surprised if Goldman Sachs had something to do with this or at least speculation of perishable commodities.

DrBazza 6y ago
Speculation in commodities reminded me of the onion futures act [0] """ The Onion Futures Act is a United States law banning the trading of futures contracts on onions as well as "motion picture box office receipts".[1] In 1955, two onion traders, Sam Siegel and Vincent Kosuga, cornered the onion futures market on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. The resulting regulatory actions led to the passing of the act on August 28, 1958. As of January 2021, it remains in effect.[1] The law was amended in 2010 to add motion picture box office futures to the list of banned futures contracts, in response to lobbying efforts by the Motion Picture Association of America.[2] """ 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act

bobitsaboy 6y ago

Prior to the pandemic, I always advocated for a couple weeks worth of non-perishables to be at the ready. Storms can cause issues getting to stores (or shipments arriving), and illness can make it a pain to make a weekly run. Now my significant other is entirely on board. When normal ingredients we used became unavailable, it caused us to continually try new things. I have to admit I was pretty surprised to see today's customers buy up the basic scratch ingredients like rabid consumers early in the pandemic. Flour, sugar, etc. were all a real pain to get a hold of. I thought prices were increasing pretty steadily before the pandemic and now it's even worse. I can remember so many items being as cheap as 25 cents each during the 90s and into the 00s... now most of them at $1.50 each. Meanwhile, our state minimum wage has increased not nearly as much (but employers are having to offer closer and closer to double to rope in anyone).

NullPrefix 6y ago
>Flour, sugar, etc. were all a real pain to get a hold of I see that as a win. Neither flour nor sugar is essential or healthy.
- bobitsaboy 6y ago
  That's great, they're just two items and a lot of people didn't routinely buy flour (or something like yeast). Meanwhile, everything else has gone up in addition. A number of produce items have increased 25-50% in the last year here. Gotta love some of the people on HN. Maybe it's just the late night crowd?
- atomashpolskiy 6y ago
  Yeah, let them eat kinoa and avocado
Aachen 6y ago
> prices were increasing pretty steadily during the pandemic and now it's even worse. I can remember so many items being as cheap as 25 cents each during the 90s and into the 00s... How long have you been having a pandemic for? Joking aside (that sentence read a bit weirdly), I don't think you should compare what happened in the 90s with what happened since 2020-02. If inflation surpasses minimum wage in the long term, that's not the same as prices soaring because of supply chain changes. And for what it's worth, I've not noticed any price increases here between 2020-02 and last week. This is way too anecdotal and conflating different situations to be useful.

layoutIfNeeded 6y ago

Good. Maybe we’ll waste less now.

rcMgD2BwE72F 6y ago
The most wasteful are the richest though.
- pmlnr 6y ago
  "The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.” < https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-rich-were-so-rich-vimes-reasoned https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/72745-the-reason-that-the-r... > So in short: no. Everyone is wasting.
  - chii 6y ago
    So why did't the poorer man buy the more expensive boots using a loan, and then pay it off over the life time of the boots? That would've prevented him from spending hundred dollars on bad boots over and over again. So i argue that it's poor planning.
    - ceejayoz 6y ago
      To be clear, your question is "why don't poor people just get loans"?

mrkramer 6y ago

If domestic production is enough to satisfy domestic demand no worries but that's not always the case.

throwawaymanbot 6y ago

Hedge funds ...

TheButlerian 6y ago

Cuckdowncels, you can eat my dick if you are hungry.

OscarCunningham 6y ago

Which prices are increasing slower than inflation to counteract this? EDIT: It's energy. https://www.bls.gov/cpi/ https://www.bls.gov/cpi/

maxerickson 6y ago
Inflation indexes don't give a lot of weight to short term price changes. So there doesn't necessarily have to be anything offsetting it. If prices stay high it should show up in inflation.
lupire 6y ago
Also clothing, medical care commodities, and transportation services. Meanwhile used cars are up more than food in the US. That graph has bizzare rollups you need to click through. But the article is really about 40% spike in global basic commodities for the global poor, not 3% US bump.

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whoisninja 6y ago

CPI is a joke, they do something called hedonic adjustments to things like tech products etc. It's completely subjective and BS. Technology is deflationary, things should get cheaper because we go after producing them in creative ways one demand is high. CPI is absurd, it only perpetuates consumerism and punishes savers. We product 2x the food society consumes - mostly wasted away, just with some supply chain efficiency - there's a lot more room for food not to be expensive though.

ErikAugust 6y ago
Real question that nobody has yet answered: With what data CPI is even calculated? The data sources are all hidden. Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26259279 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26259279
- whoisninja 6y ago
  Keynesian economics kool-aid, all the Phd Econ guys worship guy who had done some really shady stuff in his life. Nobel prize in economics was started by Sveriges riksbank in 1968, just to perpetuate same ideaologies. Shady af.
  - seibelj 6y ago
    Keynes was also a child sex tourist who frequently preyed on boys, sometimes with friends https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/2802/was-john-maynard-keynes-a-child-molester https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/2802/was-john-m... Edit: not sure why I’m being downvoted. He admitted in his diaries as a 30 year old man he would pay for sex from 16 year olds, and referenced others as “boys” without ages. By modern standards he would be a sex offender for life. We seem to hold all historical figures by modern standards now, not sure why we give this pedophile a pass.
    - finolex1 6y ago
      Irrelevant to the topic at hand.

bfrog 6y ago

So housing and food has gone up dramatically, but still "inflation is low" is the story. Doesn't and hasn't passed the smell test in a decade.

QuadmasterXLII 6y ago
Its probably being cancelled out in the basket by healthcare and education prices skyrocketing. Oh wait.
- hedora 6y ago
  Don’t forget utilities (also skyrocketing here).
- SilasX 6y ago
  No joke, back in 2011, a Fed executive insisted that iPad deflation was canceling out higher food prices. Not even that iPads were getting cheaper, just, new ones had faster CPUs, so their effective price was lower. (Which somehow frees up more money for food?) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fed-dudley-ipad-idUSTRE72A4AC20110311 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fed-dudley-ipad-idUST...
  - fennecfoxen 6y ago
    The official was correct, from the perspective of economy-wide price stability. The problem wasn't inflation, the problem was expensive food. Obviously, this particular exchange was of no comfort to those who suffer from high food prices, but why should monetary policy be the remedy for high food prices (to the exclusion of its current goals) instead of looking for remedies in fiscal policy, trade policy, regulatory policy, or other instruments better suited to a more targeted redress?
    - SilasX 6y ago
      Well, there's technically correct, and substantively correct. Most people would take away the lesson that "hey, the current definition of inflation doesn't quite capture the reality of normal people's cost of living", not "computer says no suffering, sorry bro". But I don't think it's even technically correct from the perspective of price stability. The inflation the central bank cares about is the kind that is the result of (to simplify) "too much money chasing too few goods". Technological deflation is totally orthogonal to that, and should be ignored to the extent possible. Furthermore, even on its on terms, the calculation isn't correct. A fifty percent faster CPU doesn't mean the effective price has fallen fifty percent, because the CPU is only occasionally the bottleneck. (And do they ever adjust inflation upward for quality reductions?)

j_m_b 6y ago

Fiat Money! Quantitative easing! Stimulus Checks! Next it will be UBI. Unrestrained monetary policies were the piper to save us from financial crisis after financial crisis. Now his pal inflation is coming for all of our free lunches.

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williesleg 6y ago

Of course, we need to eat bugs, that's the only way out. Fresh water shortages and the climate crisis will only make it worse.

marshmallow_12 6y ago

Haven't read the article, but i'm sure the problem could be greatly alleviated, or even entirely eradicated, by cutting down on food waste. I understand an absurd amount of food goes to waste, something like a third. All around us, obscene amounts of food is going to the bin.

nashashmi 6y ago

I had a dream recently on this topic. Price of food inflating. And clothing too. And inversely housing prices dropping. And then it made sense to me. When the cost of everyday goods go up, there is more money flowing in meager industries. That means more money for the average joe. (Or it used to be before robot corporations overtook farming.) And that means more concentration of resources for the normal guy. Which means smaller housing compared to McMansions. And smaller cost of living all around. The problem is that today’s large rich population become not so well off. And poor people hit a better standard of living. Higher food prices may be a good thing.

devilduck 6y ago

it's almost time to eat the rich

fredfoobar 6y ago

Global food shortages are coming, I'm just worried that not enough people are taking this seriously. Inflation may come right after. This is not good.

elzbardico 6y ago

Jeebus folks! This is not about the USA. This is about the vast majority of the mankind that lives on developing countries, vast armies of people already under the threat of food insecurity in the best of times, now unemployed and facing the threat of food inflation. This is the stuff that create coup d'etats, dictatorships, rampant crime and wars. Meanwhile you're working on automating work to make this people even more unemployable, and have the nerve to complain about a small food price increase in the frigging US of A.

phendrenad2 6y ago
Who's making it about the USA? The article is clearly about the world. Food scarcity hits people in developed countries too, especially the US where there's no safety net against homelessness if you're unfit to work. That "small price increase in the friggin US of A" is a big deal to people below the poverty line. There's always someone poorer in the world, it's just weird to draw a line in the sand and say "you must be this malnourished to speak up". As for automating work, how far back should we go? Should people be forced to abandon their cars because having horse-drawn chariots employed more people?
- elzbardico 6y ago
  I was talking about the comments.

cs702 6y ago

...due to TEMPORARY restrictions, such as border closures, that will be lifted once the pandemic is history. -- On a related topic, quite a few commenters here have made uninformed or intentionally misleading comments about the relationship between inflation indexes and food/energy prices. Let me quote this explanation posted 10 years ago by a PhD student of economics at MIT: "Food and energy are not excluded from the Consumer Price Index. The standard CPI, which is used to make cost of living adjustments to Social Security (among other things), reflects a full consumption basket, including food and energy. The index that excludes food and energy is the core CPI, which is used for a very different purpose -- namely, the U.S. Federal Reserve's decisions about U.S. Monetary Policy. A few observers seem to believe that excluding food and energy from the core CPI reflects either deep ignorance or conspiratorial neglect on the part of monetary authorities. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, core CPI (along with some alternatives like mean-trimmed price indices) is a very sensible reaction to the dilemmas facing monetary policymakers. Suppose that the Federal Reserve had a mandate to stabilize the full Consumer Price Index, and that food prices suddenly doubled. To keep the CPI at a stable level, other prices would need to decrease. The problem, however, is that many prices are sticky, meaning that they do not instantaneously respond to changes in monetary and macroeconomic conditions. This is especially true in the service industry (which comprises the bulk of both Gross Domestic Product and the CPI). To create these compensating price changes within a relatively short timespan, the Fed would have to impose extremely tight monetary policy, with sky-high nominal interest rates. And as we saw in the early 1980s, a large increase in nominal interest rates is extremely destructive to the real economy, leading to a massive increase in unemployment. Given our already weak economic conditions, such a policy would be even more damaging today. Core CPI is a way to prevent this kind of needless suffering and unemployment. By targeting a stabler set of prices, the Fed avoids the wild swings in monetary policy that would inevitably arise from targeting an index that includes commodity prices. In other words, the demagogues who assail core CPI have it all wrong: the average American would be much, much worse off if the Fed targeted a volatile measure like headline CPI." Source: https://www.quora.com/Why-are-food-and-energy-costs-excluded-from-the-core-CPI?share=1 https://www.quora.com/Why-are-food-and-energy-costs-excluded...

jackfoxy 6y ago

This is the result of the central banks embracing Modern Monetary Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory as the policy to leave no hedge fund behind and lay the groundwork for UBI. In plain English this is the fractional reserve banking system providing a cornucopia for all. It's really using debt to finance not capital creation, but current consumption. This cannot possibly end well.

koboll 6y ago
>to finance not capital creation, but current consumption I don't understand the distinction here. Capital creation results from meeting the needs of current consumption, no?
- large 6y ago
  Something has to be produced before it can be consumed.
bpodgursky 6y ago
Or, as I like to call it, Magic Monetary Theory.
loveistheanswer 6y ago
>this is the fractional reserve banking system Seems like we may need a new technical term to replace "fractional reserve banking", because the Fed reduced reserve requirement ratios to zero percent a year ago. https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/reservereq.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/reservereq.htm
certnlyuncertn 6y ago
IMO it's more likely a result of a global pandemic disrupting labor and supply chains combined with some unlucky weather events hurting crop yields.
jcfrei 6y ago
That's not true at all. Central banks have tried to stoke inflation for close to a decade now without success. The reason behind the current rise is just what the article mentions: "poor weather, increased demand and virus-mangled global supply chains". Or maybe you are confusing the actions by the federal government (stimulus checks) with those of the central banks (QE). The former most likely does have inflationary effects - the latter hasn't had an effect for well over 10 years by now.

Robotbeat 6y ago

Cars are much safer and (for the same given size) go a lot farther for the same amount of fuel. They’re also faster, more reliable, last longer between maintenance (used to be 3000 miles between oil changes, now it’s... 7500 miles or so), more comfortable, and with more useful features (navigation, phone integration, etc). As far as homes, there HAS been real estate inflation, but homes are now better insulated, have much more efficient heating and cooling (and now have actual cooling whereas in the past were often uncooled), have more bathrooms, and have much more efficient and cheaper lighting (which doesn’t need to be replaced as often and has lower fire risk). Clothing is so plentiful and cheap it’s a bit silly (and this used to be a major practical purchase and highly labor intensive to mend your clothes, so I’m not talking just fashion). A lot of things people actually need really are much better than in the past. I hope we fix the housing price issues, though. This is really bad.

908B64B197 6y ago
> As far as homes, there HAS been real estate inflation, but homes are now better insulated, have much more efficient heating and cooling (and now have actual cooling whereas in the past were often uncooled), have more bathrooms, and have much more efficient and cheaper lighting (which doesn’t need to be replaced as often and has lower fire risk). That all matters less than the location of the house.
thebean11 6y ago
> As far as homes, there HAS been real estate inflation, but homes are now better insulated, have much more efficient heating and cooling (and now have actual cooling whereas in the past were often uncooled), have more bathrooms, and have much more efficient and cheaper lighting (which doesn’t need to be replaced as often and has lower fire risk). None of that really makes a dent price-wise in the more expensive real estate markets.
asdff 6y ago
Ha! Please look at the average housing stock in a city like LA or SF. Better insulated/efficient/bigger/new/21st century home it is not. The exact same 2 bedroom bungalow they built for returning GIs that probably cost $6000 back then costs north of $1.5m now. New construction only gets a slight bump of maybe another $200-400k or so (the cost of construction). The value isn't in how nice the house is, it's in the dirt below and where it sits on earth. The same $1.6m house in LA might go for $20k if you put it on a trailer and stuck it on some land in Nowhere, Louisiana instead. And don't get me started with the rental stock.

carapace 6y ago

It's Spring, plant a garden. Dig up your lawn and plant some potatoes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden

coltons 6y ago

Isnt food prices soaring the definition of inflation... haha

gruez 6y ago
food prices is a part of cpi, which is what people typically mean by "inflation". the cpi is also composed of other items (eg. rents, transport), which means it's possible for inflation to be down even though food prices are up.

adamc 6y ago

Bloomberg is an expensive paywall. Unhelpful.

Florence9899 6y ago

Я здесь Голая https://vk.cc/bZoVGs https://vk.cc/bZoVGs

foobarbaz33 6y ago

It makes sense. There's more people than ever and less food produced after 2020 flooding in China.

thehappypm 6y ago

"Soaring" is 3% now?

BitwiseFool 6y ago
Hackernews user slams journalists using cliche headline vocabulary. The full-throated criticism was not met with a response, the silence is deafening.

kristopolous 6y ago

Grain prices caused the arab spring. Expensive food has been toppling governments since the beginning of civilization

LockAndLol 6y ago

Maybe if we didn't throw up to 50% of our food away in "developed nations" there'd be: A. More left for the rest B. No need to produce the amount produced right now C. Reduced impact on the environment But yeah, let's think about that ,once we do actually have a crisis, as a last resort. Keep stuffing your bins with food you didn't eat and wondering why prices soar.