The Price of Feed is Soaring, and the Price of Food Will Follow

And what do you think the reaction is going to be? A reduction in ethanol or a reduction in the US consumption of meat? Farmers throughout the country face a Fourth of July where big decisions are going to be made--cut costs or go under.

“This used to be 50 bucks for the full barrel,” [David] Hale said, pointing to a barrel of chicken feed.

And now?

“Seventy-five dollars - a fifty-percent increase," he said.

“All these cattle will eat 40 lbs. of feed a day and it went from two cents to nine cents a pound for that feed, that's a big big difference," [Steve] Foglesong said.

Corn prices are at the highest levels they’ve ever been; and meat farmers are hit especially hard.

It takes 2.6 lbs of corn to make one pound of beef or chicken. It takes 3.6 lbs. of corn to make a single pound of pork.

“Chicken feed is supposed to be an idiom for 'cheap,' right?" Hale said.

But not any more. The mountains of corn it takes to feed Hale’s chickens and Foglesong’s cows are getting more expensive, because of increased domestic demand from ethanol plants, higher overseas demand thanks to a weak dollar, increased transportation costs - and let’s not forget tight supplies.

As feed prices soar, the question over how much ethanol we are going to manufacture in this country becomes a hot topic for discussion. Before Iowa came along in the Presidential primary process, you heard a lot of good things--now, you hear virtual silence. The scarcity of materials and the cost of making it make this a bad year for ethanol.

The recent floods in the Midwest wiped out an estimated two million acres of corn and soybean crops.

“The only thing a guy's got the opportunity to do is cut back on the number of cows he's carryin', because he doesn't have any feed for 'em,” Foglesong said. “So those cows go to market."

And that means sticker shock at the grocery stores, as farmers fold under pressure of high feed prices.

Now, if people are already facing a dilemma between food and gas for their car, how much do you want to bet they're going to cut down on expensive foods--and that means red meat and other high cost staples of the dinner table.

Big Business Agriculture Moves Against Family Farmers

Monsanto steps up a policy of harassing small farmers who end up with their products on their property due to pollination and wind drift:

The Runyons [David and Dawn] charge bio-tech giant Monsanto sent investigators to their home unannounced, demanded years of farming records, and later threatened to sue them for patent infringement. The Runyons say an anonymous tip led Monsanto to suspect that genetically modified soybeans were growing on their property.

"I wasn't using their products, but yet they were pounding on my door demanding information, demanding records," Dave said. "It was just plain harassment is what they were doing."

Today, Monsanto's patented "Round-up Ready" soy commands the lion's share of the genetically-modified soybean seed market, its genetic code manipulated to withstand the company's popular weed killer.

But the promise of fewer weeds and greater production comes with a hefty fee. Farmers must sign an iron-clad agreement not to re-plant the harvested seed, or face serious legal consequences - up to $3 million in damages.

"It's about protecting the patent, defending the patents, so farmers have the protection and can use these technologies over time," said Monsanto spokeswoman Tami Craig Schilling.

The Runyons say they signed no agreements, and if they were contaminated with the genetically modified seed, it blew over from a neighboring farm.

"Pollination occurs, wind drift occurs. There's just no way to keep their products from landing in our fields," David said.

This issue has been around for a while--and you can go back to this Mother Jones article from January/February 1997 to see what's at stake:

The only catch: Farmers using Roundup Ready seeds can only use Roundup, because any other broad-spectrum herbicide will kill their crops. So, with every Roundup Ready seed sale, Monsanto sells a season's worth of its weed killer as well. The company also keeps close tabs on the crops' progress: Farmers must sign a contract promising not to sell or give away any seeds or save them for next year's planting, and the company inspects its customers' farms for violations.

Monsanto says that the new technology will benefit the environment, arguing that the more farmers rely on Roundup, the less they will need harsher herbicides.

But studies show glyphosate, which has been described by the Environmental Defense Fund and by [former] Vice President Al Gore as safer than other herbicides, is not as benign as it is billed. Glyphosate is less toxic than many other herbicides, but it's still the third most commonly reported cause of illness among agricultural workers in California. For landscape maintenance workers, it ranks highest. And, according to the Journal of Pesticide Reform, the herbicide also damages the ability of bacteria to transform nitrogen into a usable form for plants, and it harms fungi that help plants absorb water and nutrients. Residues of the herbicide have been found in lettuce, carrots, and barley that were planted a year after the soil was sprayed.

Critics also contend that as farmers plant more Roundup Ready seeds and spray their fields with increased doses of Roundup, herbicide "drift" may increase significantly. If this happens, neighboring farms may be forced to switch to the Monsanto seeds in order to keep their crops from being destroyed by the airborne herbicide.

What is happening to the Runyons is obviously not new, but it could be the sign of a stepped up effort to intimidate farmers. As world food prices spin out of control, big agriculture has to step up and threaten people over the slightest infringement in order to keep their profit margins where they want them. Now is not the time to hand this country BACK to a Republican who is going to take Monsanto's money and keep the status quo.

Whoever wins this November should nominate a Secretary of Agriculture who will stand up to Monsanto and all the rest and help family farmers.

Biofuels, food prices, and you

I started noticing food prices creeping upward a little over a year ago. It was in the winter, and I started hearing on the BBC overnight that Mexico was in the grip of a tortilla panic, as corn prices, driven by ethanol demands, increased to the point that the food staple was priced out of reach of hundreds of thousands of Mexico's poor, and new price controls were put in place after people filled the streets in protest. I made a conscious effort to start noticing food prices.

I live an urban existence - I rarely shop in a supermarket or purchase processed foods, instead I shop at produce stands, specialty markets, the natural foods store, farmers markets, and Costco. Prices at the produce stands haven't changed all that much. What I have noticed most acutely have been increases in prices of staple food items at Costco. The price of 25-pound bags of flour, rice and pinto beans have either doubled or nearly doubled in the last year.

Across Africa, NGOs and scientists have joined their voices to form a chorus calling for a moratorium on converting food crops to fuel crops.

Wooed by the possibility of an emerging "green OPEC," struggling nations of sub-Saharan Africa have rushed to convert their farm land from food crops to fuel crops - and decreased food security for the people who live in those countries.

In Asia, skyrocketing prices of rice have fueled fears of social instability driven by food insecurity. In Pakistan, thousands of troops have been deployed in recent months to guard shipments of wheat and flour. Soybean shortages in Indonesia have sparked street protests and driven fears of social unrest. China has implemented stringent price controls on cooking oil, grains, meats, eggs and milk.

The universal increases in food prices prompted World Bank President Robert Zoellick to speak out about the looming crisis in food security yesterday.

Zoellick held up a bag of rice during a news conference Thursday to illustrate the severity of the food crisis.

"In Bangladesh a two-kilogram bag of rice ... now consumes about half of the daily income of a poor family," he said. "The price of a loaf of bread ... has more than doubled. Poor people in Yemen are now spending more than a quarter of their incomes just on bread."

And Zoellick says prices for basic staples will remain high for an extended period of time.

"I think you have a perfect storm of things coming together," he tells NPR's Steve Inskeep in an interview. "You have high energy prices. You have the increase in demand from some of the developing countries. ... As the Indian commerce minister said to me, going from one meal a day to two meals a day for 300 million people increases demand a lot.

Not only is food insecurity increasing; globally, diets are changing and becoming homogenized; more and more of the world's people rely on mass-produced, factory farmed food stuffs that are shipped all over the world. In this reality, that a Big Mac tastes exactly the same in Tokyo as it does in Topeka is a goal to be worked toward, rather than a fact that sets off creepy, sci-fi, spine-tingling like it ought to.

This trend toward dietary homogenization ought to spark rounds of worry, and panels of United Nations experts should be seated for brainstorming sessions to reverse this disturbing trend. The fact that dietary diversity is decreasing globally increases the vulnerability of vast numbers of people as reliance on external sources of food increases and self-sufficiency becomes a thing of the past, and cereal grains that could feed millions of hungry people end up in gas tanks of Ford Extinctions and Dodge Dinosaurs.