If Egg Prices Boosted Shitstain, Wait Until Real Climate Impacts Begin. Actually, You Don't Have To . . .
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In India, Narendra Modi, widely assumed to enjoy a total dominance of domestic politics in the world’s fastest growing major economy, lost his parliamentary majority. Food price inflation in the country has been running at an average of 8% for months, with the price of rice soaring to its highest point in a decade, despite a government export ban in July (which has subsequently been lifted). A quarter of voters cited price rises as their main concern, the highest since the early 1980s, and well over half thought the government had handled inflation badly.
In Japan, the conservative coalition, led by the Liberal Democratic party, lost its majority in a snap election. The price of rice had risen by 63% over the previous 12 months, the biggest increase since official records began, the result of the falling value of the yen pushing up imported fertiliser prices – and, crucially, the “brutal summer heatwave” that affected rice quality and shrank harvests. After decades of low inflation and its associated low wage rises, the sharp increase in the price of staple foods has been a rude political shock.
It’s the same story across the world. The price of olive oil in British supermarkets has gone up by as much as 90% during the last two years, the direct result of drought and extreme heat throttling harvests across the Mediterranean. Butter prices have risen more than 80% across Europe, as climate change-linked bluetongue fever has hit cattle herds. Orange juice prices have doubled in a year in the US, as extreme heat, floods and droughts have knocked out fruit harvests in Brazil and Florida. Easter eggs were smaller and more expensive this year than last as a deadly flood-drought combination hammered cocoa production in west Africa, where 60% of the world’s beans are grown. Torrential rains and floods have hurt harvests across Europe, and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization has reported that world food prices reached an 18-month high in October.
The tools intended to combat inflation are worse than useless. Jamming up interest rates in London or Washington doesn’t make more olives grow in Spain or cocoa beans magically sprout in Ghana. Perhaps this disconnect between the policy levers and economic outcomes didn’t matter too much when price rises were limited. For two decades before Covid-19, a combination of rapid industrialisation in China and east Asia, improved farming productivity, falling transport costs, and (as we failed to appreciate at the time) a relatively stable global climate, delivered consistently falling prices of goods, both agricultural and manufactured, with global food prices reaching an all-time low in the early 2000s. Nor did it matter that interest rate changes would have little meaningful impact when inflation hovered fairly reliably around central banks’ target levels. The supply shocks of the 2020s have brought this period to an end. The world we live in now is one where geopolitical conflict intersects with the climate crisis to produce repeated, sometimes dramatic, shocks and shortages. Price rises on one side are all too often matched by outright profiteering on the other: the five agribusinesses that control 70% of the global trade made all-time high profits during 2020-22, while Oxfam reports that 62 new “food billionaires” were created.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/13/grocery-prices-donald-trump-climate-crisis-olive-oil-butter-extreme-weather-cost-of-living
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