Wednesday, August 1

So What?

There were little brownish black things, scurrying away from the sudden light, as i opened the flour container this morning. I tend to buy flour, rice etc. in bulk, on the market, not wrapped up. It's cheaper that way. Besides, you see what you buy (or so i thought).

The price of wheat flour, corn, soy beans and other basic food will be going up sharply all over the world, so the media informed me this morning.
Once upon a time 1+1=2, but that was in first grade.
On a global scale, things appear to work rather differently; 1+1=6, if you control the supply chain and it happens to please you.

True, droughts here and there, floods somewhere else and climate change all over. Petrol prices going up and the use of bio-fuel becoming more attractive, thus turning valuable agricultural areas, previously used for food production, into bio-fuel land.

Because isn't that what this is all about? Large conglomerates taking over control, investing where it serves them best, driving up the price here and lowering it there, so they can take over yet a little more.
Local farmers becoming (often underpayed) farm employees, working on the same land on which they previously grew their own communities' food, growing crops serving far away communities' needs for bio-fuel or animal feed, while creating local food shortages.
Logistics and transport fees drive up the price of foreign crops exported/imported world wide.

Global shortages are artificially created, on order to drive up the price, while large stocks wait in warehouses just for that moment, when the price is right (or wrong, depending on your point of view).
Agricultural subsidies are cut thus serving international conglomerates rather than the local farmers and local markets.

Perhaps it is much better to control the basic food market world wide, in order to promise adequate food supply for all. But the conglomerates and their political cronies wouldn't like that, would they?

And on a more local level, i expect the price of the basic controlled food (milk, eggs, bread, flour, rice, soy bean oil etc.) to go up. They are creating the "right" (=wrong) climate for the price hike, explaining it's a world wide trend. Of course the country's poor will receive a small subsidy in the form of 2 NIS or some such, to be slowly added over the next few years, as compensation.
It will be presented as a true victory for "social justice".
I just love the newspeak of those "PR" professionals employed by Elite Strauss, Tnuva etc. etc and the politicians. "we have no choice to blah blah blah". Yeah right.



1 comment:

Anonymous said...

We have had some talk too about the of prices of bread etc. because of bad weather and other reasons.
Last week there was a person on the radio who explained it to be impossible to give the price of bread an immense raise, because of the minimal content of flour in it!