Wednesday, September 19, 2007, 03.

07 PM

Editorial: A shock of recognition

HARI RAYA will cost more this year, and Deepavali, too. The
significantly higher prices people will have to pay for their favourite
cakes and foods have turned out to be the first tangible economic
effects on individual households of global climate change.

Those who had thought of "global warming" as a distant threat of rising sea
levels and unusual weather patterns must stand informed: It's prices that are
rising first, and fast, in a tidal wave swamping the whole world. It's all about
causes and effects.

Your favourite kuih lapis will cost more to buy because it will cost more to
make, because wheat prices have risen in producing countries. Prices have
risen because harvests are down. And harvests are down because the
weather's changed everywhere: unusually wet in Canada and the United
States; unusually dry in Australia.

Other thoroughly modern pressures on food prices include the nascent

enthusiasm for "biofuels". Touted as a "greener" alternative to expensive,
polluting and steadily depleting fossil fuels, fuels extracted from corn, soya
bean and palm oil are seen as important potential substitutes.

This prophecy may owe more to hope than sense - producing such fuels
consumes energy, too - but it has driven up the cost of corn in the US and
China, Brazilian sugar cane and Malaysian palm oil. Corn is feed for
livestock, so meat also costs more. Palm oil trades at historic highs these
days, spelling flush coffers for producers but worries for the fledgling
biodiesel sector. The economics of food is changing, rapidly, radically and
worldwide, and consumers and governments alike have to anticipate these
changes.

No one's going to tell the wind which way to blow, but the ever-increasing
cost of a week's groceries demands all the more that stern measures be
taken against all unwarranted inflationary pressures, such as the middlemen
and opportunists who might now relish citing global climate change in
disingenuous justification for their greed.
Raising efficiencies of food production and distribution is much more
workable now, with hypermarkets having come to dominate the retail
landscape with their economies of scale. The problem of profiteering is more
tractable now, and surely the political will to cut waste, leakage and price-
gouging along the supply chain is easily mustered.

Indeed, now that the planet itself has become the greatest upward influence
on the price of fish - and everything else in the kitchen - the curbing of greed
should be job one.