Sunday, April 30, 2006

A study on the real cost of food

The real cost of a bag of salad: You pay 99p. Africa pays 50 litres of fresh water goes into the real cost of cheap groceries shipped from halfway around the world. More and more every product, from groceries on upward, is shipped around a global free market. The high lord muckety mucks who make all the decisions seem to think free trade is the solution to all economic problems. But what of other problems it creates?

In this specific case the article discusses the issue of groceries. For example, a bag of lettuce, grown halfway across the world, and shipped to your grocery store, and hopefully you'll remember to eat it before it rots. Maybe that lettuce is grown, as the article suggests, in a farming region where water is a scarce commodity, like Kenya. It may cost you a dollar to buy that bag of lettuce, but it costs the farmer 50 liters of water, and then there's the transportation and preparation costs and resources expenditures.

The article focusses primarily on water resources. One of the growing worldwide problems is maintaining water supplies for everything people are doing. But one should remember as you look at the article, hand in hand with water supply issues is oil and energy supply problems.

For example ... In Egypt, vegetables have become such an important export that the government has threatened military action against any country upstream that dams the Nile or its tributaries. Maintaining water supply threatens world peace.

For example ... Almost everybody in Europe who has eaten Kenyan beans or Kenyan strawberries or gazed at Kenyan roses has bought Naivasha water. It is sucking the lake dry. Naivasha is a lake in Kenya that's beeing overutilized to provide water for a range of uses. Water abuse is causing environmental degradation.