Here's a few food related pieces from growing it to getting it to all the 'side' issues relating the the economy that surrounds it:
fair use http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/As Asia food prices bite, analysts warn of worse to come
By Sunil Jagtiani
Agence France-Presse
First Posted 11:24:00 02/10/2008
HONG KONG--Rising food prices have hit Asia's poor so hard that many have taken to the streets in protest, but experts see few signs of respite from the growing problem.
An array of factors, from rising food demand and high oil prices to global warming, could make high costs for essentials such as rice, wheat and milk a permanent fixture, they say.
"The indications are in general pointing to high prices," Abdolreza Abbassian, a senior grains analyst at the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome, told AFP.
The agency's figures show food prices globally soared nearly 40 percent in 2007, helping stoke protests in Myanmar, Pakistan, Indonesia and Malaysia.
Yet Asian economic growth is a key reason why prices rose, said Joachim von Braun, from the International Food Policy Research Institute.
"High growth in per capita income, especially in Asia, is driving demand for food," said von Braun, the Washington-based group's director general.
At the same time, Asia's growth has left many of its poor behind, he added. They spend between 50 and 70 percent of their meager incomes on food, making price rises especially debilitating.
"There was also a lack of investment in agriculture, particularly in science and technology and in irrigation," von Braun said.
Apart from overall higher food demand, changes in taste favoring meat are said to be pushing up prices, since farmed animals feed heavily on grain.
Drought and bad weather, high oil prices stoking transport costs, spiking biofuel demand and low reserves have also played their part, experts say.
"In Australia, we lost almost a year of wheat due to drought," said Katie Dean, an economist at ANZ Bank in Sydney.
Cold weather caused grain crops to fail in Europe and the United States, while bird flu culls and disease outbreaks hit Asian poultry and meat supply, she added, citing as an example pig diseases in China.
Climate change seen cutting grain yields
Elsewhere, Bangladesh is struggling to feed its poor after a 2007 cyclone destroyed $600 million worth of its rice crop.
The price of rice rose around 70 percent in Bangladesh last year. It now stands at around 50 cents per kilo (2.2 pounds), but many Bangladeshis live on less than a dollar per day.
More recently, unexpected snowstorms swept across rice growing areas in China, where rising food costs have already raised the fear of unrest.
Experts are still wary of pinning the blame for these events explicitly on the impact of global warming.
But a Stanford University study found that climate change could cut South Asian millet, maize and rice production by 10 percent or more by 2030.
Climate change, in particular the drive to cut greenhouse gas emissions from conventional fuels to curb global warming, has also driven demand for biofuels.
The high cost of crude oil, which hit record levels in January, has made biofuel production more commercially viable.
Farmers are switching to growing crops such as corn or jatropha, a weed, to feed the biofuel industry rather than crops destined for the dinner table.
"Ambitious government biofuel targets are leading to pressure on prices and probably to some sort of structural increase overall in trend food prices," said Dean.
Thailand, for instance, now requires that all its diesel fuel includes a component made from palm oil, which is also used for cooking. However, the new regulation has sent palm oil prices soaring, contributing to shortages amid shrinking supplies.
The UN food agency's figures show the amount of US maize used for biofuel has doubled since 2003, and predict European wheat use for ethanol could rise 12-fold by 2016.
Increasing food grain output a 'long-term fix'
Such trends have led worried Asian governments to address the rise in food prices following popular unrest.
Indonesia has cut tariffs on soybean imports, a staple food it gets mostly from the United States, and wants to curb its reliance on imports.
Malaysia is to establish a national food stockpile. It recently arrested dozens of activists protesting food price rises.
Vietnam said it would suspend rice exports, and India did so last year, said Duncan Macintosh, Manila-based development director for the International Rice Research Institute.
But while economists expect food supplies to rise somewhat in response to higher prices, Macintosh said others doubted it was that easy.
"Myanmar could increase rice production, Indonesia's got a bit of spare land, but there isn't some huge new area that could kick in quickly," he said.
Urbanization and industrialization in Asia were eliminating farmland and soaking up scarce water resources, he added.
Meanwhile, government policies were trying to push people out of subsistence agricultural lives into the industrial sector and urban jobs.
"The key is to increase the productivity per hectare right across Asia," he said. "But that is a very long-term fix."
The prospect of high food prices is a sharp break from the past, when the Green Revolution pushed up output but drove down prices in Asia from the late 1960s.
Financial speculators have even begun betting the price of items like wheat and rice will rise, making the picture still more volatile.
"Even if prices fall," cautioned Abbassian, "the chances they will come down substantially are perhaps not there."
fair use http://news.xinhuanet.com/Coldness causes damages to paddies, cattle in N Vietnam
www.chinaview.cn 2008-02-12 16:27:51
HANOI, Feb. 12 (Xinhua) -- Coldness caused heavy damages to Vietnam's agriculture, according to local newspaper Youth on Tuesday.
Of 125,000 hectares of newly-grown rice in Vietnam's northern region, half have died due to the prolonged spell of cold weather,
Most affected provinces were Thanh Hoa with 27,000 hectares, Nghe An with 10,000 hectares, Phu Tho with 7,500 hectares and Hoa Binh with 3,000 hectares. Local farmers were re-growing rice.
The month-long cold spell, the longest of this kind in the northern region over the past 20 years, has also killed thousands of cattle, the newspaper said.
In the last 29 days, nearly 400 buffaloes, cows and bulls in Lang Son province, and over 700 in Thanh Hoa province have died.
It is forecast that the weather is to become warmer after Feb. 20. During the current cold spell, the temperature has sometimes fallen to below 10 Celsius degrees in many northern localities.
fair use http://guardian.co.uk/Record rise in food prices fuels inflation
· Costs surge at factory gate and on supermarket shelf
· Figures are further setback for hopes of rate cut
Angela Balakrishnan The Guardian, Tuesday February 12 2008
The highest-ever recorded rise in the price of food and sharp increases in energy prices pushed up costs for British manufacturers last year, bringing into sharp focus the problem facing the British economy of rising costs amid slowing growth.
The Office for National Statistics said factory gate inflation rose at its fastest annual pace in more than 16 years, after the annual rate shot up to 5.7% last month from 5% in December.
The rise was driven by an all-time high annual inflation rate in ingredients for home-produced food of 36%, mainly due to soaring wheat costs. Bread prices rose by 7.5% last year, while milk, cheese and eggs surged by 15%.
Record oil prices which topped $100 a barrel pushed crude oil costs up by 70% over the year - the highest rate in nearly eight years. Even stripping out volatile items such as food, drink, tobacco and petrol, core output price inflation increased by the fastest monthly rate since records began in 1986.
The data gave scant hope of price pressures easing in the future, with the cost of raw materials rising by 18.9% from a year ago - the strongest rate since the reports began 22 years ago.
Howard Archer, an economist at Global Insight, said: "[The figures] are really horrible and will likely send blood pressures higher at the Bank of England. The data reinforce concerns about upside inflation risks and further limit the scope of the Bank of England to cut interest rates aggressively to try and reduce the danger of a sharp economic downturn."
The Bank's monetary policy committee cut borrowing costs last week by a quarter-point to 5.25%. However, policymakers are much more cautious than the US Federal Reserve about cutting interest rates aggressively.
Yesterday's figures will disappoint many industry groups and homeowners who are relying on lower interest rates to ease the struggle of a slowing economy, a weakening housing market and tighter lending conditions.
Philip Hammond, shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, said: "These figures make a mockery of Gordon Brown's boast of low inflation. Thanks to his economic incompetence, ordinary families are now faced with soaring food and fuel costs. With real take-home pay falling, they will be more squeezed than ever."
Figures revealing the cost of living are due out today, ahead of the Bank's quarterly inflation forecasts on Wednesday. Analysts are already expecting consumer price inflation to rise to 2.3% - above the Bank's 2% target. Mervyn King, the Bank governor, has said there is a risk inflation could spike above 3% again.
Paul Dales, of Capital Economics, said: "The MPC will have to let activity slow fairly sharply in order to prevent pipeline price pressures from finding their way into the high street."
Fears over where the UK economy is heading were strengthened by worse-than-expected trade figures yesterday. December's deficit with the rest of the world was £7.57bn, against a forecast of £7.35bn, the ONS said. For the year, Britain's shortfall in goods trade with the rest of the world rose to a record high of £87.4bn, up £10bn from 2006.
Separately, the British Retail Consortium said that like-for-like sales on the high street rose by 2.6%, compared with a year before when sales were up 3.1%.
Competition on the high street claimed a new victim yesterday when the men's fashion chain Base called in administrators. Blaming cut-throat conditions, the fourth-generation family firm said it had appointed the corporate recovery firm Leonard Curtis to hunt for a buyer for its 21 shops. It employs more than 100 people.