Rising food costs and economic variables: relationships and models

Food Prices

Heading Towards a Future of Food Insecurity

We have all had the experience of going to the grocery store, picking up a box of cereal or a bunch of bananas, and finding ourselves surprised, or even shocked, at how much more it costs than it had just a week before. Most of us, after that initial surprise, will chalk that rise in prices down to inflation and either put the item back or sigh and put it into our cart, thinking that such increases in price are a natural part of life due to inflation.

However, there are a number of other reasons why food prices rise, and one in particular ensures that the prices for basic foodstuffs will continue to rise for the foreseeable future. This paper examines how the price of food will continue to rise in tandem with the rate and degree of climate change. This relationship is a tandem one in that the two conditions will rise together. That is, there is a direct relationship between the two. However, the relationship is rational rather than linear because the rate of increase in climate change and the increase in food costs is not the same.

Before beginning to examine the precise nature of the relationship because increasing food prices and climate change, it should be noted that in stressing the importance of this relationship, the underscoring of such a relationship is in no means meant to imply that there are no other factors that are responsible for current (and most likely future) increases in food costs. Rather, this paper argues that the most important of these relationships is the one between climate change and food costs. This relationship, it should also be noted, is an iterative food: As climate changes affect food production (and therefore cost), these agricultural costs in turn affect climate change in ways that cannot be separated from one another.

This relationship between climate change and food prices has been widely acknowledged, although there are still circles in which it is denied, the same circles in which climate change as a phenomenon is itself denied. However, given that all reputable sources acknowledge both the reality and peril of climate change, this writer shall assume that there is no defense to have to defend its legitimacy here.

The relationship between food costs and climate change is, nonetheless, a complex one, even as the consequences of climate change in general are complex and at times hard to assess in the current moment. The primary reason why it is (or at least remains) so hard to categorize the precise nature of the relationship between these two arises from the fact that it is still the fact that we cannot tell the difference between the direct effects of climate change and events that may have another cause and those that can be put down to simply coincidental.

Moreover, it is impossible to separate the consequences (for example) of military and civil unrest from climate change not only because these two things can happen at the same time but also because they can be (and often are) related in a causal way to each other. Starvation can certainly cause political upheaval, for example; this is true whatever the cause of starvation. Given that this cause is often climate change, such change can lead to political chaos that in turn leads to the kind of political and social conditions that cause increasing rates of climate change.

As Peters (2011) writes, in the past several years, however, unusual and for humans in general and food prices in particular ranging from unfortunate to disastrous weather and/or climatic conditions have occurred. These include in just the past year along a heat wave that held Russia hostage, thereby destroying its wheat crop and preventing that European wheat basket from feeding itself as usual or exporting its standard amount of grain to other European nations for a year.

Even as heat destroyed the wheat crop in northern Europe, catastrophic rain storms drowned the wheat crops in Australia, limiting both internal and external harvests, even as similar increases in the average rainfall as well as the severity of storms to cause similar damage in Pakistan. Unusually hot periods have also led to drought in China, which in turn will lead to a reduced wheat harvest in that country (Peters, 2011).

It should be noted here that the term "global warming" has been changed to "climate change" to reflect the fact that the changes in the world's climate brought about by the human use of fuels and processes that increase the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere increase both temperature itself as well as a plethora of consequences that follow directly from that rise in temperatures. These consequences increase both the frequency and severity of rainstorms as well as heat waves and droughts.

These conditions are felt in very different ways by those individuals who are directly affected by them; however, the results on food costs are very similar.

Peters (2011) summarizes this point: Whether these extreme weather events and others represent just random bad luck or are harbingers of more numerous such events in the future remains an open question, but considerable evidence falls on the side of more frequent severe weather events for planet Earth.

An assessment from the non-profit organization Oxfam (which focuses on the issue of food supply and costs) mirrors the above:

"The huge potential impact of extreme weather events on future food prices is missing from today's climate change debate. The world needs to wake up to the drastic consequences facing our food system of climate inaction." (The Telegraph, 2012).

The relationship between climate change and food prices can be seen to be a rational one, as graphed below and as described above. One might initially surmise that such a relationship would be a linear one because climate change and food costs both rise (or potentially fall) at the same time in ways that may seem linear because they occur at the same time.