After a looonggg time....

After taking the resolution to be a regular blogger as a part of my New Year Resolutions I finally found the time to update my blog now. I am not going to offer the usual excuses of work, or rather over-work, and insufficient time to pen down my thoughts. Instead, I would like to take the braver strategy of offense, being the better form of defense, and state that I was putting my thoughts into action where it matters more! Rather than penning them down, and eventually forgetting about it altogether.
But, truthfully, I think the reason would be that I was plain lazy. I found the time today to write this post, only because I was taking rest at home for the last two days, recovering from flu, and was getting bored to death.

OK, then! All the trivia aside, what am I going to ramble about. I didn't have the faintest idea when I started. There were numerous incidences since my last post... the roller coaster ride of the stock market, a few grisly murders in the upper echelon of the society and some lesser publicized ones at the lower end, a cricket tournament which reeked so much of cash and glamor that it was hard to make out as a gentleman's sport any longer and the Slap-gate saga that took place half way through it, political maneuvering in elections making king makers out of independent "rebel" candidates, movies that are far moved from reality filled with computer generated imagery, and yet some which still manages to touch our heart, the run-up to a presidential election that has threatened to overthrow gender or race discrimination, but not both, an Olympics which is throwing up a sand storm of protests which seems to politically divide, rather than unify the world, and which might still, hopefully, bring a totalitarian regime to end, without shedding any blood, Spiraling oil prices, Fluctuating dollar values, Threats of global recession... The list seems to be endless.

But I think I will write about a different incident this time. One that might not have been noticed by everyone, even though everyone must have seen it one time or the other. It is based on comments made by US president Bush regarding spiraling food prices at home. The gist of the explanation provided by him is this.

Third world nations like India and China are prospering, resulting in a higher number of people in the middle class. This translates to a higher food consumption, since you eat more when you have more money. The Indian middle class is more than the combined American population. So that is where your food is going, and that is why prices are increasing, since there is less to go around.

Right? Wrong! There were quite a few feathers ruffled in India over this. The Times of India published an article, listing the dietary practices of Americans and Indians and statistically proved that an average American eats roughly twice or more grains than Indians and much more of meat than Indians, besides that India is self sufficient in food and a net exporter of food and in no way causes food shortage.

Conveniently, many people play on the pride factor, anti-american rhetoric and forget about the main point here. WHY are food prices increasing then? Even in India, the food prices are increasing. My view is that there are multiple factors involved here. Let me take the domestic scene first.

At one hand we have farmer's committing suicide because they can't make a living out of agriculture. This implies that the rise in food prices does not seem to have created better living conditions for them. They are being denied the fruits of their labor. Where is the increase in price coming from then? There is only one place it could come from. On the way from the farm to the market shelves. In other words, the distribution system. The agriculture sector is suffering, not because we eat more, but because of the failure of the distribution system and the lack of incentives to the farmer, who, in turn, is turning away from food crops to more lucrative channels. The farmers who remain with food crops are not getting the returns that they need to survive.

In the international scene, the Americans, and for that matter most of the first world, consumes much more processed food, compared to the rest of the world. And they are mostly net importers of food. This results in additional processing cost as well as some wastage during processing of the primary raw materials. Compound this with the problems of rising transportation costs, additional processing cost, increasing labor cost, we get an additional spike in prices for them.

And all the while, the population of the world is increasing, never decreasing.

What is the solution for this?

I cannot claim to have any solution for this. But from a layman's point of view, the solution seem to lie in better distribution system, utilizing areas under cultivation optimally and providing better returns to the farmers, cutting out the middle men, and maybe a return to a more organic and natural, instead of processed food consumption.