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Do you believe that you will always be able to run out to Wal-Mart or to the local supermarket and buy massive amounts of inexpensive food? If so, you might want to think again. During 2010, agricultural commodity prices have absolutely exploded. Nearly every single important agricultural commodity has seen a double digit percentage price increase. In fact, the S&P GSCI Agriculture Index recently surged to a fresh two year high. Now food producers and retailers are starting to pass those commodity price increases on to consumers. Today when I went to the supermarket I was absolutely startled by some of the price increases that I witnessed. On some of the items that I most commonly purchase, prices were up 20 or 30 percent. So just what in the world is going on here? Well, it turns out that there was a lot of bad weather around the world this year, so many harvests were worse than projected. In addition, the growing population of the world has an increasingly voracious appetite for food. When supply gets tighter as demand continues to go up that means that prices are going to increase.
Stocking up will only delay the crash, folks need to learn to produce as much as they can of what they need. Gardens, chickens, fishing, pigeons, tree fruit, whatever folks can produce for themselves, they need to get started. It's going to take several years before folks can produce much of what they need so by the time it gets to where they will need it, it will be too late.
Stocking up will only delay the crash, folks need to learn to produce as much as they can of what they need. Gardens, chickens, fishing, pigeons, tree fruit, whatever folks can produce for themselves, they need to get started. It's going to take several years before folks can produce much of what they need so by the time it gets to where they will need it, it will be too late.
very true, but stocking up for your families use while your crops are growing out back is prudent.
I also do not think that people have several years, at most 2-3 years.
I just pray that we'll make it to harvest in 2011.
^^^ This.
I am very uncomfortable with the positioning of this economic house of cards we seem to have built.
Noticed this week that a pint of half & half went up by $0.30 in one mark-up.
The good news is that junk food has been hiked so high combined with the downsizing of packaging and contents it has been gone from my grocery list for a year now.
The bad news is that buying just the essentials my grocery bill is still up higher than when I included "luxury items". With few exceptions like vegetables and milk I only buy items on sale or ones for which I have coupons.
Stocking up will only delay the crash, folks need to learn to produce as much as they can of what they need. Gardens, chickens, fishing, pigeons, tree fruit, whatever folks can produce for themselves, they need to get started. It's going to take several years before folks can produce much of what they need so by the time it gets to where they will need it, it will be too late.
You sound like my 6th grade teacher.
Proclaiming that in a few years the farmers in the US could not produce enough to feed the growing population in the US.
Marmac, darling, I didn't say the agricultural products were going to increase in price and decrease in availability, the article that Monkeywrenching provided the link to is the one who brought the subject up. I'm just mentioning that stockpiling as a means to survive the proposed crash will only delay the effect. One needs to be able to produce food to truly be able to avoid the price increase of whatever foods will be available. Food production isn't all that hard, either, but producing all of everything you eat is. Fortunately, we have neighbors to swap stuff with as well as are still able to afford to buy things at the farmer's markets as well as the grocery.
So what do you think about this, Marmac? Will there always be enough food at prices folks can afford? Is there enough food now? How secure is our food supply?
Hmm, your sixth grade teacher may have been correct about the U.S. not able to feed itself. Is the United States importing more food than it's exporting? We export some foodstuffs, but overall do we export more than we import? It does seem a lot of food is imported from other countries. In my particular state, about 90% of everything - including food - is imported although some of it is imported from the mainland as well as other countries.
Many small and local producers works just as well as a few large and distributed producers for meeting demand... better in some cases, like hard financial times, because higher transportation and distribution costs aren't added on to the sale price. The best way to mitigate price and availability risk on any product, but most especially necessities, is produce it yourself and eliminate the external dependencies outside your influence.
One reason for grain pices/food prices going up lately is cuz the govt was off in their predictions of the yield.
As the harvest grew nearer, they were adjusting their earlier predictions and thus grain prices started to raise.
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