However...
If I were a younger person...I would be investing in farm land and associated industries.
Im sure there is some truth in the article but when I see UN.
I think liars.
50 million Americans do NOT require governemnt assistance to feed their families. That's the number of people on food stamps. It has no correlation to the need of the recipient. Not when we have a government working overtime to develope a constituency of dependence!
Not one to normally quote the bible, but it seems pertinent. I think there is more to it--quantitative easing and EPA meddling are going to drive the cost of basic consumables much higher while luxury consumables remain relatively affordable (based on their current price). I am of the school that in this modern era famine is affected more due to man made conditions (case in point: Zimbabwe) than natural phenomena.
Prices are able to rise BECAUSE of the food stamp distribution. The EBT card allowance is close to DOUBLE what it should be. So the supermarket industry has nothing to fear from higher prices.
There is no market conditions within the consumer and supermarkets. The market is drastically skewed by the unlimited source of govt funds thru the EBT waste.
Ping worthy?
This article gets things essentially backwards. Americans currenly spend less than 10 percent of our disposable incomes on food. The USDA figure for 2011 was 5.7 percent of disposable income on food at home, and 4.1 percent on food away from home. Note as well that food at home includes a lot of high convenience heat-and-serve foods. I personally haven’t killed a chicken in 45 years, and I get most of my vegetables in boxes from the freezer section.
The percentage of disposable income spent on food in the U.S. has been trending downward for decades and is now the lowest percentage figure in the world.
It’s also important to note that the commodity value of the foods eaten in the U.S. is about 14 percent. This too has been trending downward for years.
Calories are cheap.
Why then does food seem expensive? Glad you asked. It’s because as incomes rise, people choose to eat higher on the food chain, and we start buying many value added attributes: freshness, convenience, better taste, convenience, higher nutritional content, convenience, indulgence of superstition and food fetishism (organics), convenience, safety (and the perception of safety through branding), convenience, entertainment value and snob appeal (proliferating festival markets that become yuppie meccas on sunny Saturdays).
And did I mention that Americans pay a lot for convenience? I shop mostly in a plain-jane Safeway that has upgraded in recent years, but which is still fairly close to its utilitarian roots in a transitional neighborhood. This is a basic city grocery, not an upscale yuppie food palace (not even the famouss social Safeway in Georgetown...). Even so, I have access to a remarkably international cuisine at a price and quality point my grandparents could not have imagined. This means paying for a global logistics system and armies of clerks to stock the shelves. But I don’t mind this one bit. No siree; I remember canned asperagus, and I don’t begruge the modern grocery one bit.
Calories are cheap. But most of our food dollar is spent on other attributes. The same is true in Western Europe, Japan, and a few other places. But now a huge chunk of the developing world is climbing the food chain as well. That will affect pricing in a big way. It is hard to be a left-behind in a society that is fast developing a high value added food economy. That’s a transitional issue the emerging economies will have to tackle.
Maybe we will all be better off once the world ends on Friday.
Geesh, who ain’t sick of this crap?
Want to turn a large fortune into a small one?
Bet against the American farmer being able to over-produce any given commodity!