The Global Food Crisis: Too Much Water

Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, And Illinois have all been hit by massive flooding over the last week. Some heroic boyscouts have garnered all the press from this storm but there is another story with wider reaching implications. The flooding has caused damage to farmland across the nation's breadbasket, ruining thousands of acres of fields prior to harvest. These fields are primarily corn and as detailed in a prior posting, corn is the backbone of the U.S. comodoties market. Further, such a huge loss in corn will cause the prices of all foods to rise even more than the international food crisis has caused. The bottom line for you, expect to pay more for all kinds of meat, cerial, grains, milk, and of course, gasoline.

This all brings up the concept of inflation. The general rise in the price of goods as measured by the United States excludes the cost of comodities like food and energy(oil). The standard reason given for this is that even when the economy is stable the costs of oil and food fluctuate wildly and are thusly not directly pinned to the general economy. That reason turnes into a mere excuse to ignore bad news in times like these where inflation is being driven by world crisis level food prise increases and devistating growth in cost of oil. Yet economists will continue to use the old measure and more tellingly the old media will continue to parrot what they are told in their role of controling the public.