At Stephen Fleishman's busy Bethesda shop, the era of the 95-cent bagel is coming to an end.
Breaking the dollar barrier "scares me," said the Bronx-born owner of Bethesda Bagels. But with 100-pound bags of North Dakota flour now above $50 -- more than double what they were a few months ago -- he sees no alternative to a hefty increase in the price of his signature product, a bagel made by hand in the back of the store.
"I've never seen anything like this in 20 years," he said. "It's a nightmare."
IT seems like a small thing, the price of a bagel breaking a dollar. But it is symbolic, and good fresh bagels are important in the Washington Jewish community. So perhaps it is appropriate that this is how the third of the Washington Post's series on the Global food crisis begins. Today's article in this important series is entitled Emptying the Breadbasket, and subtitled "For decades, wheat was king on the Great Plains and prices were low everywhere. Those days are over." This brings the crisis home to the U. S. and our role in helping to create it.
This is the third article of the series, and my third diary on the subject. On Sunday I wrote Hunger, and yesterday I posted Where Every Meal Is a Sacrifice. These examined the impact of the Global Food Crisis overseas. But one cannot talk about wheat without examining the United States, which traditionally has been a major wheat exporter to the rest of the world. The wheat markets around the world are in turmoil. One contributor to the turmoil is the spread of disease, about which I wrote on Saturday in Stem Rust - a major world threat. This has devastated parts of the world's wheat yield at the same time as the US has been cutting back on the wheat it produces. As today's article notes:
Half a continent away, in the North Dakota country that grows the high-quality wheats used in Fleishman's bagels, many farmers are cutting back on growing wheat in favor of more profitable, less disease-prone corn and soybeans for ethanol refineries and Asian consumers.
"Wheat was king once," said David Braaten, whose Norwegian immigrant grandparents built their Kindred, N.D., farm around wheat a century ago. "Now I just don't want to grow it. It's not a consistent crop."
In the 1980s, more than half the farm's acres were wheat. This year only one in 10 will be, and 40 percent will go to soybeans. Braaten and other farmers are considering investing in a $180 million plant to turn the beans into animal feed and cooking oil, both now in strong demand in China. And to stress his hopes for ethanol, his business card shows a sketch of a fuel pump.
Once considered the breadbasket of the world, the U. S. now provides only a quarter of the world's wheat exports, and at a time when the need for such exports is expanding, our production is dropping:
U.S. farmers are expected to plant about 64 million acres of wheat this year, down from a high of 88 million in 1981. In Kansas, wheat acreage has declined by a third since the mid-1980s, and nationwide, there is now less wheat in grain bins than at any time since World War II -- only about enough to supply the world for four days. This occurs as developing countries with some of the poorest populations are rapidly increasing their wheat imports.
So far all of my quotations are from the first of the four electronic pages of this article. As I did yesterday, I urge you to take the time to read the article as well as the accompanying sidebars and tables. For example, you can examine a map of state by state wheat production in Crop Drops, where you will find that Missouri has decreased wheat acreage by 2/3, and Kansas by 4 million acres.
There are multiple reasons for the drop in wheat acreage. Let me quote:
Science, weather, economics and farm policy have all played a part in the changes.
U.S. wheat yields per acre have increased little in two decades, partly because commercial seed companies have all but abandoned investments in improved varieties, preferring to focus on the more profitable corn and soybeans. Subtle warming changes in the climate and the recent availability of new plant varieties that thrive in cold, dry conditions have pushed the corn belt north and west.
Adding to this is a government policy which encourages such switches, including allowing wheat farmers to switch to more profitable crops and still collect wheat subsidies on a total of more than 15 million acres than were actually planted in wheat.
There are many more issues explored in this article. For example, U. S. grain mills have in some cases had to import wheat from Canada to say open. There is the issue of genetically modified seeds and the issues that come up with them (and yes, our old friend Monsanto is involved). We have as a matter of policy continued to allow other nations to buy from the U.S. even as our stocks have decreased, this happening at a time when a series of things have decreased the availability of wheat elsewhere. While the article does not discuss the problem of stem rust, it does offer the following:
Problems started last summer with poor European harvests and a disappointing winter wheat crop in the southern Great Plains. U.S. prices moved above $7 a bushel, then crossed $10 after Australia harvested yet another drought-damaged crop in December. As supplies of wheat ran low, foreign countries began grabbing limited stocks of premium wheat from the northern plains -- the variety used to make the flour for Fleishman's bagels. Morocco, its own harvest of wheat to make traditional couscous inadequate, jumped in with a purchase of 127,000 tons.
. And this has been at a time when three major wheat exporters, Ukraine, Argentina and Kazakhstan, blocked exports and as the dropping value of the dollar made purchase of our wheat more advantageous to other nations.
One might think the demand would lead to a rise in the price of wheat, and it has, hence the rise in the price of bagels in Bethesda. One might also think the rise would encourage farmers to return some fields to wheat production, but so far that does not seem to be happening:
The ethanol boom, in particular, is providing strong incentives to keep former wheat acres in corn. Within a year, Braaten will be able to truck his corn to three modern ethanol refineries, one already built and two others near completion. These huge distilleries will need corn from an area about the size of Rhode Island, and many of the acres will come at the expense of such traditional crops as wheat and sugar beets.
Corn has even begun to make inroads in the western part of the state, where sparse rainfall and the short growing season traditionally have ruled out most crops except wheat, barley and oats. Spurred by the availability of cheap coal for power and a local cattle industry that will buy the dry byproducts for feed, a new ethanol plant opened last year in Richardton, west of Bismarck, the capital.
The ethanol demand means an acre of corn can still produce more revenue than an acre of wheat, and one can therefore not blame the farmer for planting what yields him a greater profit. Further, the genetically modified corn and soybeans are less susceptible to disease than is wheat, and while stem rust has not had the impact in the U. S. it has had overseas, especially in Africa, other diseases caused major problems for American wheat farmers as recently as the past decade.
There is not that much analysis I can add to what the article offers. I am not a farmer, a plant biologist. It has been years since I planted anything, although given the world wide nature of the food crisis I may explore doing so next year. I will certainly consider signing up for Community Supported Agriculture, and last night my wife and I began a serious discussion of modifications we can make in our lifestyle so that we decrease our demand on the food supply, that is, we ensure that our diet does not require needed grain to be converted to other uses, such as grainfed meat - remember, in Sunda's article we read that a pound of grainfed pork takes 5-7 pounds of grains, and for beef the ratio is more like 7-8.5 / 1. Buying locally where possible also helps decrease our carbon footprint.
But perhaps as well we need to reexamine things like our government's agriculture policies. On the one hand, we need to guarantee some economic stability to our farmers, on the other our policy should not be contributing to the Global Food Crisis the way that it does.
And certainly our increased emphasis on grain-based ethanol is having a major impact on the world crisis. Because of this I want to repeat a section from James Carroll's op ed yesterday, which I also quoted in my diary yesterday:
Compounding the profoundly physical problem of those who are deprived is the imprisoning moral problem of those who are well fed, for the culture of consumption, while it overfeeds appetite, starves the imagination. Here's where the divide between those who are hungry and those who eat enough is most manifest. Not only do the well fed fail to perceive the despair and fear that hunger breeds, until it explodes in riots of rage, but the well fed are equally incapable of seeing the causal link between their own privilege and the suffering of the dispossessed - although the substitution of bio-fuel corn production for the growing of edible wheat makes that link unusually apparent. Filling gas tanks of automobiles matters, in effect, more than filling bellies of children.
Let's reread that last line: Filling gas tanks of automobiles matters, in effect, more than filling bellies of children.
We do need to find ways to reduce our dependence upon petroleum, and there are real reasons to rapidly decrease our dependence upon foreign sources of that item - we do not want to keep borrowing money from China to buy oil from Saudis and others who then use some of the profits to fund the terrorists who we claim to be the reason that we spend billions weekly to have tens of thousands of troops in Iraq - to ensure that oil supply whose use pollutes the very air we breathe. But it makes little sense to address one problem - energy - by creating a problem that is every bit as severe - food. And we cannot solve our problems in isolation from those that exist around the world. Even before the recent patterns of globalization of trade, the world was already too interconnected for us to pretend that we could exist in isolation from the problems in other, perhaps less developed, nations.
I consider this a moral issue. During my lifetime I have seen the ability of this nation to change long-standing patterns fairly rapidly when it chose to address moral issues. I lived through a civil rights era that created more positive change in the lives of million in less than two decades than had been achieved in the previous nine decades since the emancipation of the slaves. I have seen recognition and some addressing of economic inequity for women and minorities other than African-Americans. There has been recognition of the need to address the educational imbalances that exist, although in this arena, in which I labor every day, our policies have been, to put it charitably, less than fully successful.
But economic equity, education, better housing, better transportion, access to medical care - none of these will matter if people are starving. And like it or not, America has for years been a primary source of food for much of the world. We cannot morally abandon that role at a time of increasing need.
At the same time, we need to do what we can to decrease inappropriate demands upon our ability to help feed the world. Farmers are entitled to some economic stability, but our approach to that should not result in our pulling back from our traditional role of helping feed the world. Full gas tanks are less important to me than hungry children, and hungry children are more susceptible to disease, do not learn as well, and thus perpetuate the kinds of inequity that in the long run lead to instability, both globally and at home.
We cannot address serious problems in isolation from one another. Democratic governments may be what we wish to see in nations overseas, but if they cannot feed their people they will be replaced by other governments perhaps less conducive to the kinds of world stability we claim to want.
And if we cannot address the issue of food, as critical as it is, what will be the fate of the world when the onrushing water crisis begins to bite?
Ultimately the world must address the population crisis, for continued growth, fueled ironically more than in part by our agricultural abundance, makes solving our problems less achievable - more people need more food and more energy, which contributes to global warming and climate change, which changes our ability to grow and distributed the necessities of life.
At some point we all need to recognize that the problems that concern us are all interconnected. And unless we are willing to step back and examine those interconnections, any actions we take have the real potential to seriously worsen some part of the situation even as they seem to ameliorate immediate crises in others.
For now, each of us can examine what differences we can make in our own activities, and to demand of those who would seek political leadership that they assume the responsibility to for ensuring that our individual actions not be in vain.
Peace.