The Price Of Ground Beef Has DOUBLED Since The Last Financial Crisis

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Michael Snyder

Since the depths of the last recession, the price of ground beef in the United States has doubled.  Has your paycheck doubled since then?  Even though the Federal Reserve insists that we are in a “low inflation” environment, the government’s own numbers show that the price of ground beef has been on an unprecedented run over the past six years.

In early 2009, the average price of a pound of ground beef was hovering near 2 dollars.  In February, it hit a brand new all-time record high of $4.238 per pound. Even just 12 months ago, the price of ground beef was sitting at $3.555 per pound.  So we are talking about a huge increase.  And this hits American families where they really live.

Each year, the average American consumes approximately 270 pounds of meat.  The only nation in the world that eats more meat than we do is Luxembourg.  If the paychecks of American workers were going up fast enough to deal with this increase, it wouldn’t be that big of a deal.  But of course that is not happening.  In an article just last week, I showed that real median household income is a couple thousand dollars lower now than it was during the depths of the last recession.  The middle class is being squeezed, and we are rapidly getting to the point where burgers are going to be considered a “luxury” item.

The Price of Milk To Double Without a Farm Bill

Eric Blair
Activist Post

Did you know milk, cheese, and other dairy products could double in January if the farm bill isn't passed before the new year? 

At first I thought this was a veiled threat from the farm lobby to get their subsidies, but it looks like it goes deeper than that.  In fact, farmers don't want the price to go up because they fear they'll be swimming in unsold milk.

"Few will buy milk the USDA will be forced to sell at prices consumers can’t afford, so Congress has no alternative but to stop the change," UW-Madison agriculture economist Bruce Jones told the Wisconsin State Journal. "We’ll be swimming in milk, with nobody to consume it."

10 Best Survival Foods At Your Local Supermarket

Activist Post

As food prices continue to skyrocket, having a bulk supply of food is a great investment. But it also provides security and peace of mind against potential emergencies.

By now most people should be aware that grocery stores only have about 3 days of food in stock when crises strike. So if anything was to disrupt the food supply chain for an extended period of time, there would be untold chaos in most communities.

Any number of events could trigger mass disruption to a fragile food system, many of which are well documented and even predicted. Even NASA has warned its staff to prepare for potential disasters with survival foods and other precautions with their "Family Preparedness Program."

Prepping for disasters can seem overwhelming with so many aspects to be considered. However, for those just beginning to recognize how perilous these times are and are new to prepping, you can find many great survival foods at your local grocery store.

How Seed Banks, Vaults and Exchanges Are Saving Our Food From Disaster

Seeds provide the kind of security to agriculture-oriented people that gold provides to the money-minded.

Seed Bank w/ instructions   on how to save seeds

Ari LeVaux
AlterNet

During the Nazi siege of Leningrad, a group of scientists at the world's oldest seed bank voluntarily starved to death rather than eat the wheat, potatoes, nuts and other seeds being stored at Leningrad's Vavilov Research Institute of Plant Industry. At the same time, courtesy of Stalin, the institute's founding visionary Nikolay Vavilov was starving to death in a Siberian prison -- but not before he'd gathered more than 50,000 samples from 40 different countries for his institute's collection.

Today the Russian government is attempting to sell Vavilov's land to private developers. The seeds can be moved, but not so easily transported are the hundreds of varieties of rare fruit trees planted in the institute's historic orchards.

Seeds are cheap these days, typically sold for fractions of a penny. But should supplies dry up, it will become difficult for a hungry populace to put a price on these tiny items, given the fact that they can produce infinite amounts of food. Seeds provide the kind of security to agriculture-oriented people that gold provides to the money-minded.

Food prices set to double by 2030, aid group says

"Now we have entered an age of growing crisis, of shock piled upon shock: vertiginous food price spikes and oil price hikes, devastating weather events, financial meltdowns and global contagion,"Oxfam said in a report.

MSNBC/Reuters

LONDON — Food prices could double in the next 20 years and demand in 2050 will be 70 percent higher than now, U.K. charity Oxfam said on Tuesday, warning of worsening hunger as the global food economy stumbles close to breakdown.

"The food system is pretty well bust in the world," Oxfam Chief Executive Barbara Stocking told reporters, announcing the launch of the Grow campaign as 925 million people go hungry every day.

"All the signs are that the number of people going hungry is going up," Stocking said.

Hunger was increasing due to rising food price inflation and oil price hikes, scrambles for land and water, and creeping climate change.

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Hedge Farm! The Doomsday Food Price Scenario Turning Hedgies into Survivalists

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Foster Kamer
New York Observer

On the rare occasion that New Yorkers talk about farming, it's usually something along the lines of what sort of organic kale to plant in the vanity garden at the second house in the Adirondacks. But on a recent afternoon,The Observer had a conversation of a different sort about agricultural pursuits with a hedge fund manager he'd met at one of the many dark-paneled private clubs in midtown a few weeks prior. "A friend of mine is actually the largest owner of agricultural land in Uruguay," said the hedge fund manager. "He's a year older than I am. We're somewhere [around] the 15th-largest farmers in America right now."

"We," as in, his hedge fund.

It may seem a little odd that in 2011 anyone's thinking of putting money into assets that would have seemed attractive in 1911, but there's something in the air-namely, fear. The hedge fund manager and others like him envision a doomsday scenario catalyzed by a weak dollar, higher-than-you-think inflation and an uncertain political climate here and abroad.

The pattern began to emerge sometime in 2008. "The Hedge Fund Manager Who Bought a Farm," read the headline on one February 2008 Times of London piece detailing a British hedge fund manager's attempt to play off the rising prices of grains in order to usurp local farmland. A Financial Times piece two months later began: "Hedge funds and investment banks are swapping their Gucci for gumboots." It detailed BlackRock's then-relatively new $420 million Agriculture Fund, which had already swept up 2,800 acres of land.

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5 Easy Ways to Prepare for Food Inflation

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Rising food costs spur massive US theft of produce, meat

Dees Illustration

Ethan A. Huff
Natural News

Forget diamonds and cash. Rapid inflation and the tanking US economy have birthed a whole new wave of organized crime involving food. The New York Times (NYT) reports that a group of highly-sophisticated scam artists recently pulled off a massive food heist involving eight tractor-trailer loads full of produce and meat, all worth roughly $300,000.

The food theft was no ordinary theft, either. According to reports, the mystery thieves carefully planned the hijacking to coincide with high-priced tomatoes and other produce items that have seen heavy inflation in recent months. And instead of merely stealing the truckloads, the masterminds actually sent their own imposter trucks to pick up the loads, and pretended to deliver them to various intended destinations.

"I've never experienced people targeting produce loads before," said Shaun Leiker, an assistant manager at Allen Lund, a trucking broker from Florida who has seen numerous cargo thefts, to NYT. "It's a little different than selling TVs off the back of your truck."

Rush to Use Crops as Fuel Raises Food Prices and Hunger Fears

rush to biofuel stressing markets?  - Wiki

The New York Times

The starchy cassava root has long been an important ingredient in everything from tapioca pudding and ice cream to paper and animal feed.

But last year, 98 percent of cassava chips exported fromThailand, the world’s largest cassava exporter, went to just one place and almost all for one purpose: to China to make biofuel. Driven by new demand, Thai exports of cassava chips have increased nearly fourfold since 2008, and the price of cassava has roughly doubled.

Each year, an ever larger portion of the world’s crops — cassava and corn, sugar and palm oil — is being diverted for biofuels as developed countries pass laws mandating greater use of nonfossil fuels and as emerging powerhouses like China seek new sources of energy to keep their cars and industries running. Cassava is a relatively new entrant in the biofuel stream.

But with food prices rising sharply in recent months, many experts are calling on countries to scale back their headlong rush into green fuel development, arguing that the combination of ambitious biofuel targets and mediocre harvests of some crucial crops is contributing to high prices, hunger and political instability.

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Long Term Food Storage Basics - How to Pack Rice, Wheat, Beans and Dry Goods (Video)

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5 Easy Ways to Prepare for Food Inflation

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Energy, food costs push up US consumer spending

Groceries Wikimedia Commons

AFP

WASHINGTON (AFP) - US consumer spending rose in February, outpacing income growth, as Americans faced higher costs for energy and food, official data showed Monday.

Consumer spending rose 0.7 percent from January, more than double the 0.3 percent increase in January, the Commerce Department reported.

It was the strongest increase since October and topped forecasts for a 0.5 percent rise.

"The problem isn't that consumers aren't spending, they are," RDQ Economics analysts told clients. "But spending gains are being soaked up in higher prices for food and energy."

Wholesale prices rise 1.6 pct. due to biggest jump in food costs in more than 36 years

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Yahoo/AP

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Wholesale prices jumped last month by the most in nearly two years due to higher energy costs and the steepest rise in food prices in 36 years. Excluding those volatile categories, inflation was tame.

The Labor Department said Wednesday that the Producer Price Index rose a seasonally adjusted 1.6 percent in February -- double the 0.8 percent rise in the previous month. Outside of food and energy costs, the core index ticked up 0.2 percent, less than January's 0.5 percent rise.

Food prices soared 3.9 percent last month, the biggest gain since November 1974. Most of that increase was due to a sharp rise in vegetable costs, which increased nearly 50 percent. That was the most in almost a year. Meat and dairy products also rose.

Energy prices rose 3.3 percent last month, led by a 3.7 percent increase in gasoline costs.

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RELATED ARTICLES:
5 Easy Ways to Prepare for Massive Food Inflation
7 Reasons Food Shortages will Become a Global Crisis

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Groundbreaking New UN Report on How to Feed the World's Hungry: Ditch Corporate-Controlled Agriculture

A new report from the UN advises ditching corporate-controlled and chemically intensive farming in favor of agroecology.

Wikimedia Commons

Jill Richardson
AlterNet

There are a billion hungry people in the world and that number could rise as food insecurity increases along with population growth, economic fallout and environmental crises. But a roadmap to defeating hunger exists, if we can follow the course -- and that course involves ditching corporate-controlled, chemical-intensive farming.

"To feed 9 billion people in 2050, we urgently need to adopt the most efficient farming techniques available. And today's scientific evidence demonstrates that agroecological methods outperform the use of chemical fertilizers in boosting food production in regions where the hungry live," says Olivier de Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. Agroecology is more or less what many Americans would simply call "organic agriculture," although important nuances separate the two terms.

Used successfully by peasant farmers worldwide, agroecology applies ecology to agriculture in order to optimize long-term food production, requiring few purchased inputs and increasing soil quality, carbon sequestration and biodiversity over time. Agroecology also values traditional and indigenous farming methods, studying the scientific principals underpinning them instead of merely seeking to replace them with new technologies. As such, agroecology is grounded in local (material, cultural and intellectual) resources.


A new report, presented today before the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, makes several important points along with its recommendation of agroecology. For example, it says, "We won't solve hunger and stop climate change with industrial farming on large plantations." Instead, it says the solution lies with smallholder farmers. The majority of the world's hungry are smallholder farmers, capable of growing food but currently not growing enough food to feed their families each year. A net global increase in food production alone will not guarantee the end of hunger (as the poor cannot access food even when it is available), an increase in productivity for poor farmers will make a dent in global hunger. Potentially, gains in productivity by smallholder farmers will provide an income to farmers as well, if they grow a surplus of food that they can sell.

With its potential to double crop yields, as the report notes, agroecology could help ensure smallholder farmers have enough to eat and perhaps provide a surplus to sell as well. The report calls for investment in extension services, storage facilities, and rural infrastructure like roads, electricity, and communication technologies, to help provide smallholders with access to markets, agricultural research and development, and education. Additionally, it notes the importance of providing farmers with credit and insurance against weather-related risks.

In the past, efforts to help the hungry involved developing high yielding seeds and providing them along with industrial inputs to farmers in poor countries. However, in poor countries, smallholder farmers who often live on less than $1 or $2 per day, cannot afford industrial inputs like hybrid or genetically engineered seeds, fertilizer, pesticides, or irrigation. Many work each year to make sure their crops go far enough to feed their families, with little left over to sell. And for those who live far from roads and cities, there might not be a market to sell to anyway.

Agroecology requires replacing chemical inputs with knowledge, often disseminated by farmers who work together with scientists and aid organizations to teach their fellow farmers. "Rather than treating smallholder farmers as beneficiaries of aid, they should be seen as experts with knowledge that is complementary to formalized expertise," the report notes. For example, in Kenya, researchers and farmers developed a successful "push-pull" strategy to control pests in corn, and using town meetings, national radio broadcasts, and farmer field schools, spread the system to over 10,000 households.

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4 Best Off-the-Grid Food Production Methods

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5 Simple Ways To Prepare For The Coming Food Crisis

Dees Illustration

Activist Post

Recently there has been an incredible flurry of news reporting about food shortages and the pending global food crisis. Everyone who looks at the indicators would agree that this crisis is only likely to worsen.  It is estimated that the Australia floods alone could cause a 30% jump in food prices. Although the average shopper already can feel the food inflation, it is difficult to recognize the severity of the looming food shortages.  After all, there are still 15 types of colorfully-boxed Cheerios packing the isles, which gives us the illusion of abundance.

The truth is that we are headed for large food production shortfalls, manipulated or not, while middle-class food demand grows massively in the developing world.  For decades the world's agriculture community produced more than enough food to feed the planet, yet some now believe we are reaching "Peak Food" production levels.  In turn, other experts believe the "food bubble" is about to burst, and not even the biotech companies can save us.

However, there are still vast unused stretches of fertile land that can be used around the globe, and the U.S. ethanol mandates that reportedly consume at least 25% of the corn harvest could be reduced to ease the burden. Therefore, it seems that despite the extreme weather and dwindling harvests, food production still has room to increase, but not without foresight and planning.


Additionally, the current systems for growing food are fully dependent on oil to achieve high levels of production, while livestock production is running at full concentration-camp capacity; the end product must then travel thousands of miles to get to store shelves.  Clearly we can see the fragile nature of this system, especially on human health and the environment.  Consequently, solving the so-called "food crisis" is far more complex than simply fixing statistical supply and demand issues.

Indeed, these are turbulent times where humanity appears to be nearing Peak Everything. Ultimately, solutions to the food crisis will begin at the local level.  There are cutting-edge farming techniques gaining popularity that produce a large variety of crops by mimicking nature, as well as innovative techniques for small-scale food production at home or in urban buildings.  These hold promise for easing local hunger.

Personal ways to protect yourself from food shortages may seem obvious to some, but many feel the task can be insurmountable.  To the contrary, here are 5 simple ways to protect yourself from the coming food crisis:

Source

1. Create a Food Bank: Everyone should have a back-up to the everyday food pantry.  In this environment, you should consider your personal food bank far more valuable than a dollar savings account.  Start by picking up extra canned goods, dried foods, and other essentials for storage each time you go to the store.  Also, hunt for coupons and shop for deals when they come up.  Devise a plan for FIFO (first in, first out) rotation for your food bank. It is advisable to acquire food-grade bins to store your bulk dried foods, and be sure to label and date everything. Besides the obvious store-able foods like rice and beans, or canned goods, some other important items to hoard are salt, peanut butter, cooking oils, sugar, coffee, and powdered milk.  If you don't believe the food crisis will be too severe, then buy items that you would eat on a normal daily basis.  But if you believe the crisis will be sustained for some time, purchasing a grain mill to refine bulk wheat or corn may prove to be the most economical way to stretch your food bank.  Some emergency MREs are also something to consider because they have a long shelf life.

2. Produce Your Own Food:  Having some capacity to produce your own food will simply become a necessity as the food system crumbles.  If you don't know much about gardening, then start small with a few garden boxes for tomatoes, herbs, or sprouting and keep expanding to the limits of your garden. And for goodness sakes, get some chickens.  They are a supremely easy animal to maintain and come with endless benefits from providing eggs and meat, to eating bugs and producing rich manure.  Five laying hens will ensure good cheap protein for the whole family.  If you have limited growing space, there are brilliant aquaculture systems that can produce an abundance of fish and vegetables in a small area.  Aquaponics is a contained organic hydroponic system where the fertilized waste water from the fish tank is pumped through the vegetable growing trays which absorb the nutrients before returning clean water to the fish tank.  Set high goals for independent food production, but start with what's manageable.

3. Learn Food Preservation: Food preservation comes in many forms such as canning, pickling, and dehydrating.  In every case some tools and materials are required along with a good deal of knowledge.  If you can afford a dehydrator, they all usually come with a preparation guide for most foods.  You can also purchase a vacuum sealer if you have the means.  A good vacuum sealershould come with thorough instructions and storage tips, and will add months if not years to many food items.  If you're a beginner at canning, start with tomatoes first.  It's easy and very valuable when all your tomatoes ripen at the same time and you want fresh pasta sauce in the winter.  A bigger ticket item that is nice to have for food preservation is a DC solar powered chest freezer.  It is the ultimate treasure chest.

4. Store Seeds: The government and the elite have seed banks and so should you.  Seeds have been a viable currency in many civilizations past and present.  They represent food when scarcity hits.  Before the rise of commercial seed giants like Monsanto, local gardeners were adept at selecting seeds from the healthiest plants, saving them, and introducing them to the harvest for the following year, thus strengthening the species. Through local adaptation to pests, genetic diversity was further ensured; it was long-term thinking at its finest. That is why it is important to find heirloom seed banks and learn to save seeds from each harvest.

5. Join or Start a Local Co-Op: Joining local cooperatives is very important, especially when food shortages occur. You may not be able to provide for yourself completely, especially in terms of variety, so having a community mechanism to spread the burden and share the spoils will be critical.  If you don't know if you have a local food cooperative in your area you can search the directory at LocalHarvest.org.  You may also be able to get information from your local farmers market.  If your area doesn't have a co-op, then start one.  These co-ops don't have to be big or elaborate.  In fact, it may be more optimal to organize it with friends, neighbors, or co-workers.  Whether you join or start a cooperative, work to expand the participants and products.

Please tell us how you're preparing by sharing your story in the comment section.

RELATED ARTICLES:
7 Reasons Food Shortages Will Become a Global Crisis
How to Survive the Collapse of America

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