Is the biofuel boogeyman to blame?
Andrew Leonard Sep. 04, 2007 | From Taiwan to Malta and everywhere in between, the price of baked goodness is going up. International wheat prices are spiking to record heights. Global inventories of wheat are predicted to drop next spring to the lowest levels in 26 years, says the USDA. Good news if you are a wheat farmer, bad news if you are craving bread, noodles, pastries or biscuits. The irresistible tendency for biofuel critics is to plug these new numbers into the familiar food vs. fuel debate. Even if wheat isn’t going directly into the ethanol hopper, some U.S. wheat farmers are indirectly contributing to the problem by switching to corn. But there’s more going on here than just biofuel bandwagoning. Two other reasons are cited for the rise in wheat prices: bad weather in key wheat-producing regions and increased demand for wheat-based products in the developing world. As the New York Times noted Tuesday in a story on rising milk prices, the emerging middle classes of China an
