by David Parkinson

Consider these facts: in the nineteen months between February 2006 and September 2007, the price of a bushel of wheat on the Kansas City exchange more than doubled. In the same time period, the price of soybeans on the Chicago exchange almost doubled. Global wheat stockpiles are at a 32-year low. 20% of the US corn crop is dedicated to the production of ethanol. The amount of land used for corn production in the US increased 18.5% in 2007. These numbers are echoed by similar trends in Canada. One of the factors leading to these unprecedented rises in staple food costs is the ethanol boom, which is rewarding farmers around the world for replacing food crops with fuel crops for vehicles.

The recently released report by the Dietitians of Canada, “The Cost of Eating in BC in 2007” points to high levels of poverty in British Columbia and lays out shocking facts about the degree to which rising costs are affecting people’s ability to eat well: “Food insecurity is higher in the lowest income families (48.3%), off-reserve Aboriginal families (33.3%), female lone-parent families (24.9%) and in families with more than 3 children (15.0%) especially when one of them is under 6 years of age.” Worse than that, “More than 76,500 British Columbians used food banks in 2007; almost 28,000 of those were children.”

Here’s what we can expect: food prices will continue to rise across the board, driven by the perverse nature of large-scale subsidized agribusiness and the ethanol craze, not to mention the increasing cost of fossil fuels, which are by now essential not only for the production of commercial fertilizers and the operation of farming equipment, but also for food processing and storage, packaging, refrigeration, and, obviously, transportation.

The question for us as individuals and as members of this community is this: how do we intend to respond to this potentially serious crisis in our ability to provide affordable food to everyone? I have no easy answers, but it’s clear that we need to move quickly. 2008 is the year for developing community-level strategies for moving towards regional self-reliance. See you there!