Enough Basketball, More Food

The price of food is starting to hurt.  I've blogged about this before, but Paul Krugman has brought it up again in  his column in the NY Times (Grains Gone Wild), and the mainstream media is starting to pay attention to this.  If you travel to poorer countries it can't escape your attention -- my wife recently e-mailed me from southeast Asia and asked "Hey, mr. economist guy, me and my friends want to know why wheat is getting so expensive!" because it is a big story in that area of the world.  There are lots of reasons including the fall of the dollar and the rising cost of energy (read: oil), but as Krugman says (and I did in my previous post on this subject), it basically boils down to:

And meanwhile, land used to grow biofuel feedstock is land not available to grow food, so subsidies to biofuels are a major factor in the food crisis. You might put it this way: people are starving in Africa so that American politicians can court votes in farm states.

Again, Ethanol == EVIL.