The costs of your muesli

[Skybird]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/...530791,00.html

How can agriculture feed a world that grows by 80 million people each year? A world that is increasingly exposed to climatic extremes? And, most of all, a world that doesn't just need food for people and feed for livestock, but is increasingly consuming fuel derived from plants?

And at what costs. Last year, rises in food prices were to be felt for everybody, and sometimes drastically. I hope the rise will slow down considerably, else we are heading for food conditions that will remind us of problems that were considered to be successfully defeated in the first world. Not so rich families already have to reduce their energy consummation, because they cannot afford to live as headlessly as twenty years earlier. If the trend of 2007 does not change, we will see the same kind of change on the food sector - that many families cannot afford to buy certain types of food items that just years before still were taken for granted. Even for us rich boys and girls in the socalled first world, dry weather and crop shortfalls could become something with really dramatic consequences again.