News of the Weird has a depressing economics story this week about food prices in the poorer sections of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, which is perhaps the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.
The price of rice, the staple product, has doubled in the last year. This increase naturally has residents looking for substitutes for rice.
Apparently in the past they have baked “dirt cookies,” using salt and vegetable shortening along with clay from a nearby area. The clay has some nutrients in it, so it is not entirely filler. The problem, though, is that the supply curve of clay is not horizontal; so with this increased demand for the clay, its price has risen too — by 40 percent during the same period. One might say that the dirt is no longer dirt-cheap!
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Clay hamburger or no, what about the fact that Haiti is #36 out of 226 nations (according to mundi.com) with a 2.45% population growth rate. So we should subsidize a completely unsustainable situation and that is supposed to increase the quality of life there? Get real.
franken-
The promotion and purchase of “fair trade” foods such as coffee also contributes to this problem. Instead of farmers growing things that are needed in their area, they grow coffee because they can get an inflated price for it. If the prices weren’t inflated due to fair trade, the farmers might convert the land back to growing food.
Nice post Joe!!
Any program that distorts the market leads to inefficiencies. Note that most people blame the US gov’t for its crop programs and its push for ethanol, but for some reason we still want to create “fair” prices in developing countries. And, really, who decides what a “fair” price is?
In many cases producing food locally is very inefficient vis-a-vis importing it. Where would we (in the US) get tomatoes in winter, for example?
“… In US huge amount of wasted food…not just energy. What to do?”
- Posted by Magnolia
Maybe we can convince the religious right types that typical U.S. overconsumption is a sin? The pope tried it. That might be a more effective approach than using scientific arguments-Middle America distrusts science.
Thanks guys, somehow I knew it had to be the fault of the U.S. Everything is!
Dear John S.
Americans constitute five percent of the world’s population but consume 25 percent of the world’s energy. On average, one American consumes as much energy as 2 Japanese, 6 Mexicans, 13 Chinese, 31 Indians, 128 Bangladeshis, 307 Tanzanians, or 370 Ethiopians.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 1995 U.S. Statistical Abstract, p. 868
It’s not the fault of the U.S., it’s the fault of human nature. But as we in the U.S. consume a disproportionate share of the world’s resources, the responsibility for finding solutions weighs heavily upon us.
Cameron, why not look at it in terms of dollar per GDP instead of dollar per capita.
You are free to live like an Ethiopian if you choose to, and if you believe that their energy consumption produces a more desirable outcome. Why aren’t you?