Reasons for Escalating Food Prices

 

 I was at the SS2 food court in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia for dinner last evening.

Every food item there is so expensive now.  The price for every selection is to the tune of between RM 15 to RM 78 or higher per plate. (See photo of menu attached). Elsewhere in the country and outside the country food is also becoming increasingly expensive according to the BBC I heard over the last few days.

 

I forecasted an increase in food prices in this chat group over two years ago even before the covid. Check this out if you still have it on your phone. I was not wrong and off beam, was I?  

 

My dinner alone was RM 38, not counting my wife and daughter's dinner last evening. Theirs may have chalked up to nearly RM 80 

 

The evening previous at Jalan Peel, KL for dinner. The 3 of us, the total bill was RM 148 which was nearly RM 50 per head – just for dinner.

 

This morning on Monday, 11 July 2022 at Selayang for breakfast-lunch, my food alone was RM 20 for kuih tiow with 10 small prawns, plus RM 3 for a glass of coffee. Breakfast alone was RM 23. Perhaps Malay food around my place is tolerably cheaper around RM 10 per meal

Assuming a person eats sparingly only twice a day with each meal, let's say with nothing extra at RM 12 without even drinks. This works out at RM 720 per month on food alone.

Last evening my wife, daughter and I went to food stalls in Jalan Peel in Kuala Lumpur.  Among, 3 of us we spent RM 158 just for some simple dinner. Thankfully we can still afford although I feel the pinch.

I think escalating food prices is not a question we can dismiss casually. It is escalating in tandem with lessening land availability for agriculture and food production, subsequent diminishing food supply and a geometric increase in human population.

 

According to FAO, by 2050 the world’s population will reach 9.1 billion, 34 percent higher than today. Nearly all of this population increase will occur in developing countries. Urbanization will continue at an accelerated pace, and about 70 percent of the world’s population will be urban (compared to 49 percent today). Income levels will be many multiples of what they are now. In order to feed this larger, more urban and richer population, food production (net of food used for biofuels) must increase by 70 percent. Annual cereal production will need to rise to about 3 billion tonnes from 2.1 billion today and annual meat production will need to rise by over 200 million tonnes to reach 470 million tonnes. (Source: FAO).

 

Population increase is not an issue we should dismiss with a myopic vision and laugh over like an idiotic clown.  Since agriculture, domestication of animals and farming emerged around 12,000 years ago dubbed the “Neolithic Revolution” it has sharply changed the way we live.

 

Traditional hunter-gatherers, as the early part of human evolution and their lifestyle, were swept under the carpet in favor of permanent settlements. Globally land area suitable for agriculture is approximately 50,000,000 square km (five billion hectares) or 38 percent of the global land surface. About one-third of this is used as cropland, while the remaining two-thirds consist of meadows and pastures for grazing livestock.

 

This is just less than 10 % (9.8 %) of the earth surface area currently available for agriculture to feed the current 7.9 billion people teeming on the surface of this planet. However, this land availability for food production is not going to remain the same with increasing human population exploding exponentially.

 

Globally the average population density is 61 people per square km, but there are very large differences across countries. This population density will soon sharply increase as less and less land becomes available for agriculture and crucial food production. The growth of the human population increased exponentially in the 1950's, and since then it has climbed very sharply. It then started to compress agricultural land to accommodate human activities.

 

Humans started to replace valuable lands with their non-edible structures, all those concretes, bricks, stones, cement engineering stuff they call them as their “properties and material investments” and park them everywhere as if this planet belongs to them, each person wanting 10 houses to live in and 20 cars to drive around, causing less and less land available to grow food, and subsequent accelerating prices of food.

 

We cannot blame why human animals (biologically classified) raise their food prices. The natural laws of supply and demand merely obey their greed.  As the population increases exponentially, the supply of land and food decreases inversely as the nth power of its population surge. Sequentially the prices of food escalate directly in proportion to the demands and declining shortage. It merely obeys the nth power of the population increase and land usage for human animals to meet their physical and material gain for their “future investments” at the expense of future human existence.

 

Currently most of us can still afford an almost daily increase in food prices. It may not affect us in our lifetime, but the blunt of this shall befall on all our great-great grandchildren within 90 years, each generation about 30 years during which children are born and grow up, become adults, and begin to have children with their increasing demands mostly for unessential properties, except air, water and food in this order of vital priorities.

 

Then it shall finally catch up on everyone affecting even the upper-class income group, not that they cannot afford any food even with exorbitant price increase, but it shall be the problem of food shortage. They may be billionaires, yet they will not be able to buy anything, not even food as there will be no food for anyone. 

 

This is because all the available spaces meant for agriculture and farming have been replaced and occupied by billionaires and the very wealthy to build and park all their properties and possessions all over the places. So, there is just no place anymore to grow food for them or to grow them on their concrete properties.

 

Human animals among over 10 million other known animal species are the only animal creature ever evolved on the surface on Earth that requires bricks, concrete and walled- structures for their living. No other animal needs all these properties and material investments. They just roam and fly about in the open and wild 

 

“And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labour or spin.  Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendour was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not clothe you—with provisions naturally provided for them.

 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?  Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life^? you of little faith?"

 

(Matthew 6:26 – 30)

 

"And having food and clothing, with these we shall be content"

 

(1 Timothy 6:8).

 

Finally, this event of food unavailability becomes fatal, when this earth can no longer support food supply, not just from intolerable human growth and their unnecessary material activities, land and water shortage, but also, we depleted all natural resources due to our material greed. There shall be total exhaustion of gas, oils, petrochemicals critically needed for food production.

 

That time shall surely come and has to come – will come to pass for everyone within the next 3 generations even if we are a billionaire who shall be clamouring to buy just food, and only food, nothing else - the only ingredient needed by all living creatures on earth to further exist.

 

That time shall surely come when we begin to realize money is not everything we can buy or demand. It would be a problem when there is nothing left for us to buy especially critically needed food, and food only and nothing else we need for our continuing survival. But currently as always in the past, we are giving priority to building non-edible concrete structure like towers, shopping malls, expensive cars, super-fast trains and bridges instead of conserving limited land for food only, our only vital requirement our body and soul to exist and the need for our hearts to continue to pump for us.

 

It shall be a very fatal event when famine and starvation kill far more than any pandemic, wars, plagues combined in the entire history of the human race on earth. It shall be a total social and political disaster and total chaos. 

 

No government no matter how powerful and efficient on this planet by then will be able to handle such insurmountable disasters. The human race was last to emerge but shall also be the first to be wiped out, from this planet to give way once again to the meek and lower animals for their continuing existence to take over to inherit this earth. It shall be part of the undefeatable law of Natural Selection as prescribed by Nature our Intelligent Marker watching from above in an animal experiment.

 

“But Jesus turning unto them said, Daughters of Jerusalem, Weep NOT for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children for, behold, the days are coming, in the which they shall say, Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bare, and the paps which never gave suck. Then shall they begin to say to the mountains, fall on us; and to the hills, Cover us".

 

(Luke 23:28 – 30).

 

I have written on this some time ago in my blog on what shall befall onto the entire mankind using our observation as scientists on the growth of bacteria cultured on the limited space of a culture plate:

 

 

See, paragraph “A Lesson in Bacteriology and Cancer Biology”, Under “Our Life Purpose on Earth” here:

https://scientificlogic.blogspot.com/search?q=purpose+of+life

 

It is so vital for us to say grace and be thankful for every morsel of food we put into our mouth. See here:

  

https://scientificlogic.blogspot.com/search?q=why+do+we+give+grace

 

 

I am sorry for what I write here. It will be saner if we weep for our great, great grandchildren yet to be born