Posted on 07/10/2007 7:47:14 PM PDT by bruinbirdman
The humble plate of spaghetti, Italy's favourite dish, is set to soar in price, becoming the latest victim of the global rush on crops used for the biofuel industry.
The price of a packet of dried pasta in a supermarket will go up by a fifth from September, said Mario Rummo, the president of the Italian pasta-makers' union.
Currently, a half-kilogram (1.1lb) pack of pasta costs around 70 euro cents (50p) in Italy and 70p-£1.10 in the UK.
Mr Rummo said prices would have to rise because of a poor harvest, and because large numbers of demoralised farmers had started growing crops for the biofuel industry rather than for food.
"The biofuel industry is an important new client, Canada has declared it will not sell any more wheat to us until November and Syria has recently blocked the export of a large consignment of seeds," lamented Mr Rummo.
Durum wheat is very susceptible to damage if rain falls on the grain when it is ripe, and the recent poor weather across Europe has wiped out much of this year's harvest.
The International Grains Council said stocks in the US and Europe were at their lowest in a decade. Consequently, the price of durum wheat has risen by 50 per cent this year to £180 a ton. Since dried pasta only has two ingredients - durum wheat and water - producers said they had no option but to raise their prices too. "We hope, however, that the price rises will stop here," said Mr Rummo.
Massimo Menna, the head of Garofalo Pasta, said farmers had turned to the biofuel industry because they had not been making any money from selling their wheat to food manufacturers. He said a rise in the price of pasta "has been a long time coming".
Sainsbury's and Tesco said they had no idea whether they would also have to raise prices, while the British Retail Consortium said it had not considered the long-term effects of the biofuel industry.
Barilla, Italy's largest manufacturer, said it was looking closely at raising prices, and added that its exports were also suffering from the weakness of the dollar.
The same problems have already hit the price of bread. Hovis raised the price of a standard loaf from 93p to 99p in February and has said more increases are on the way.
Meanwhile, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization predicted this week that, if anything, the biofuel industry would soak up even more wheat in the years to come. It predicted the use of biofuels would grow by 170 per cent in the next three years, and that European demand for wheat would increase twelvefold by 2016.
The biofuel industry has been blamed for dramatic rises in the price of food around the world. The price of maize has doubled this year, the food price index in India has gone up 11 per cent, and there were riots in Mexico at the start of the year when the price of corn flour quadrupled.
Algore and friends need fuel for their vehicles. Who cares if the poor can’t afford a simple plate of spaghetti. Let them eat cake!
Tying Agriculture to Energy is insane
Yes, the rising price is definitely the fault of biofuel...
“Durum wheat is very susceptible to damage if rain falls on the grain
when it is ripe, and the recent poor weather across Europe has wiped
out much of this year’s harvest.”
Well, it costs a bit more, but there is a lower glycemic index pasta,
which uses seminola instead of durum.
My type-II diabetic mom uses this brand; makes lasagna and also
pasta dishes with their rotini.
http://www.dreamfieldsfoods.com/
Low stocks of wheat. Wonder what the stocks (stalks?) of record crop white sweet corn is (are?)?
Can you grow corn in wheat dirt?
yitbos
We are just seeing the beginning of this disastrous policy
Global warming isn’t going to cause global calamity -
but the reactionary policies of these environuts just might!
No! Spaghetti was the food I was planning to use to get me through grad school.
Corn, as in pone.
Burning our food; makes sense, doesn’t it?
Just another example of the Law of Unintended Consequences that morons like Al Gore ignore.
You can get 54 packages of spaghetti from a bushel of wheat. With wheat at $5.40/bushel or $3.93 euros/bushel there is $0.073 euros worth of wheat in each package. If wheat went up 100% to $10.80/bushel(in my dreams maybe) the price of the package of spaghetti should go up $0.073 euros. If the package is $0.70 to begin with that means a doubling in wheat prices only causes a 10% increase in the package price. Opportunistic spaghetti makers maybe?
It’s a whole new breed of moron that would consider putting food in a gas tank.
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