Can you believe it!? Costco AND Wal Marts and Sam's Clubs are limiting the amount of rice customers can buy because of world-wide shortages.
Just a fluke of the market? Or is it a sign of things to come?
7 Comments:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
That's part of it. An ecionomic shortage, not a literal shortage.
This is the beloved free market at work!
All hail! Or, Aw hell!
More to come. Not less.
Interestingly enough, very little rice is actually exported from the nation that produces it... 90% of all rice consumed in the world is consumed in the country where it was grown, despite the hundreds of metric tonnes that get shipped willy-nilly around the world. Interesting, no?
Why are we subsidizing the production of ethanol when it is 1)an inferior product to gasoline, 2)costs more than gasoline to produce, 3)drives up the cost of everything else that uses corn, and 4)we have loads of oil of our own, on U.S. soil and off our coasts just waiting to be tapped? We could be drilling where we know the oil is and using that to sustain us while vigorously advancing fuel cell technology to replace oil BEFORE oil goes belly up. Hydrogen is the way to go.
Also, what is it about politicians that makes them so hopelessly unable to admit that ethanol is a bust? Better to have blown a few billion on a dead end, than to blow trillions on a dead end while inventing creative sleight-of-hand talking points to tout the dead end as the "end all, be all?"
2. Corn growers are a remarkably strong voting block in IOWA. Every presidential candidate has to pander to this group when they campaign in the first state to vote. That's why farm bills and ethanol subsidies are safe political bets.
3. Corn ethanol is not a complete bust ecologically. It is the first step in our transition to energy from renewable resources. What you may be thinking of when you say that it is more expensive than gasoline is a new study comparing the energy costs that go into creating a gallon of ethanol vs. a gallon of gas. Right now gas is cheaper to produce, but ethanol research is continuing, and incremental progress is always being made.
From Newsweek:
The Biofuel Follies
by George Will
And from the New York Times:
Bring on the Right Biofuels
by Roger Cohen
I have a couple more and will post them later today. But you are right, Ben, on Iowa. Corn is a very bad idea for ethanol. Sugarcane makes far more economic and ecological sense. And subsidies and tariffs give the recipients no incentive to improve their product or technique. I think Mr. Cohen is a little short sighted in regard to how ethanol production affects global food prices, but that's me.
For Bent: "Peak oil" is a myth. There is oil right here under my house, in a neighborhood built on an "exhausted" field 20 years ago. Could be the profits from the current energy boom that finances the research that lets technology find a way to get to it. Excessive personal wealth and waste is obscene. Corporate waste and largesse is obscene. Wealth itself, put to the use of furthering the common good -- even if such furtherance is led by the corprate wealthy -- is not obscene, although it's a fine line.
Dang it. I AM finding my Conservative Democrat self again. On bidness issues anyway.