Food Prices - July 4th, 2011

03/14/25 • 41 min

The Economics of Food: How Feeding and Fueling the Planet Affects Food Prices.

Transcript

Brady Deaton: Today my guest is Dr. Patrick Westhoff, and we will be discussing his book, The Economics of Food: How Feeding and Fueling the Planet Affects Food Prices. This book was published in 2010 by the FT Press. Dr. Westhoff is the Director of the Food Policy Research Institute at the University of Missouri in Colombia. He's had an active role in both academia, as well as in the legislative setting in the United States.

Welcome, Pat

Patrick W.: Hi. Thanks for the opportunity.

Brady: Pat, tell me a little bit about what inspired you to write this book.

Patrick W.: Well, during the summer of 2008, food prices were very much in the news. I was getting lots of calls from reporters around the country and around the world, trying to explain what was actually going on in those food markets. An editor gave me a call and asked if I wanted to try put those thoughts into a book, and I thought it might be a good opportunity, so I took advantage of it.

Brady: Now, your book focuses on the economics of food, but it orbits around the change in food prices between 2005 and 2009. Give me a little bit of background about food prices over the last little bit.

Patrick W.: Well, we've seen food prices increase in US over the last several decades at an average rate of about two and a half percent per year. For most of the last a couple of decades, food prices really weren't that much in the news. It was a relatively stable set of things going on in those food markets, and meant that food price inflation was very similar to overall inflation in the economy.

But then came 2007 and 2008. We had big run ups in the prices for a large number of American cultural commodities, and a sharp increase in the overall consumer food price index in the US, and concerns about food prices around the world. It definitely got lots of folks' attention and then just in time for everybody to get excited about the really high price of food in 2007 and 2008, we had the global recession that made things go the opposite direction a year later.

Brady: Talk to me a little bit about it. When we talk about food prices, where that information comes from, where the data on food prices and commodity prices how do ...? We talk a bit about this in your book but where is this information coming from?

Patrick W.: Well, in the US the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates consumer food price inflation by a variety of categories every month. We can find out what the average price of food was this month versus last month or versus a year ago. Every few weeks we get new information about that.

[inaudible 00:02:28] can be more of a challenge to get information about consumer food prices in particular countries but individual countries do have their own statistical services putting out this information.

In contract commodity markets are probably easier to follow. We have lot of information about futures markets for grains, oil, seeds, meat, sugar and a variety of other agricultural products where it's very easy to get information on a daily basis about what people think is going to happen to the price of those commodities.

Brady: I want to talk a little bit about why we are concerned, or the general public is concerned about these changes in food prices. I want to just back off a bit and talk about, economists usually look at changes in prices as really important to coordinating the market system. If prices go up then it may induce incentives to plant more corn if for example the corn price increases or, if price would go up we may conserve on food, or it may induce investments and importantly it will allow for local decision making. If a farmer wakes up, and he's learned that the price of soybeans is gone up then he may plant more soybeans. We are concerned about food prices. What are those concerns?

Patrick W.: You're absolutely right that the prices play a vital role in the agricultural economy, and the economy as a whole and helping folks decide what's the appropriate set of things to try to produce and what are the appropriate set of things to consume in any given point in time. Concerns of course come from the fact that food is such a vital part of people's standard of living. Consumers in some countries spend a very high proportion of their income in food each month. In some of the poor countries lower income folks can spend half or more of their income on food at any given time.

When there is a big change in the price of food it can very directly affect their standard of living. A higher price for food can make it much harder for a low income family to be able to meet their basic needs. Of course, you have [inaudible 00:04:26] food is also a very big source of income for lots of people around the world. Higher income countries in Europe and North America...

The Economics of Food: How Feeding and Fueling the Planet Affects Food Prices.

Transcript

Welcome, Pat

Patrick W.: Hi. Thanks for the opportunity.

Brady: Pat, tell me a little bit about what inspired you to write this book.

Previous Episode

Standards: Recipes for Reality - July 15th, 2011

Dr. Busch argues that standards play a central role in constructing reality.

Transcript

Brady Deaton: My guest today is Dr. Laurence Bush. He and I will be discussing his forthcoming book titled Standards: Recipes for Reality. The book will be published by MIT Press. Laurence Bush is university-distinguished professor in the Department of Sociology at Michigan State University and co-directs the Center for the Study of Standards in Society. Larry, thanks so much for joining us.

Laurence Bush: Good morning, Brady. It's a pleasure to do so.

Brady: Larry, after reading your book, I saw in every newspaper I picked up the issue of standards, and I found it was particularly relevant to the area of agriculture economics, but before I focus on those issues, I'd like to just start off broadly, and ask you about what you mean by the idea that standards are the way and the means by which we construct reality.

Laurence Bush: Yeah. The thing about standards is that they very, very quickly become taken for granted objects, whether they are texts, or they are physical objects, like for example, weights and measures. These things take on a taken for granted character, and as a result, become part of the reality that we expect. For example, if I get in a car that I've never seen, the cars are sufficiently standardized, and I can very quickly figure out how to drive that car. It doesn't require any special training. Once I've learned how to drive a car, I can drive any car.

Brady: In your book, you have a number of examples that are fascinating, and I wonder if you might just talk about some of the ways that we encounter standards that we might not think have found your discussion about time, and railroads, and the albino rats in the laboratory experiments particularly compelling. Could you pick a couple of those examples, and just discuss them?

Laurence Bush: Sure. Let's talk about the ones you mentioned, and maybe we'll move on to some others. If you take the example of railroads, obviously one realizes immediately that in order to have a system of railroads that crosses your entire country, you have to have the same track gauge. That part actually didn't occur in the United States until the 1880s, and was largely the result of building the transcontinental railroad, and deciding that a particular gauge was going to be used for that, and then gradually moving towards that being the standard gauge for all railroads. More complicated than that, and equally important, perhaps maybe even more important, was the fact that until something that used to be called railroad time, and that we today call standard time was developed, riding on trains was an extremely dangerous affair. Let me give you an example. Most railway tracks were single track lines, so that meant that if a train were to leave one end of the line, it had to arrive at a crossing somewhere, where there would be a siding.

It would pull off, and wait for a train coming the opposite direction to go past. Since you didn't have standard time, that is to say, every little town had its own time, what that meant was that it was very difficult to predict where those two trains were going to come to the crossing point, where they have to go past each other. The result was an enormous number of head-on collisions. There were several ways to solve that. The most obvious way to solve that was to build two tracks, but to build two tracks was quite an expensive proposition, especially if there wasn't sufficient freight on the line to justify a second track. The ultimate solution was the creation of standard time, which allowed a given train to leave at a particular time that would be immediately knowable to people on the other end of the line and thereby to ensure that the trains would manage to pass each other at a point where there was a siding, and wouldn't collide head-on.

I think that's just a few of the standards, but to that we would of course have to add that there needed to be standards for the track bed, so that trains that were heavier wouldn't sink into the mud. There had to be standards for bridges. There had to be just an enormous array of standards for the railways, and they had to be distributed across an entire nation, at the very least across an entire nation. In Europe, of course, they had to be distributed across many nations. Even today, there are several European nations that have standards that are not compatible with the most common standard, so Spain, for example, accepting its high-speed trains that have just recently been put in, all of the other lines in Spain are simply not compatible with the standards in the rest of Europe. You literally have to get off a train at the border, walk across, and get on another trainer. Obviously rather time-consuming and clumsy kind of thing to have to do.

One of the other cases where you find standards is in science itself, so for example, i...