An article in the New York Times last Sunday:
“Nationwide, the number of farmers’ markets has jumped to 7,175 as of August 5; of those, 1,043 were established this year, according to the federal Agriculture Department. In 2005, there were 4,093 markets across the country.
Here in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, where hand-painted signs for fresh vegetables dot winding roads and eating local has long been a way of life, some farmers and market managers are uttering something once unfathomable: there are too many farmers’ markets.”
Oh no! Heaven forbid that consumers — who, last I checked, still vastly outnumbered farmers — would actually have too much choice and pay too little for healthful foods, right?
Some Thoughts on Food Prices and Famine
Tom Murphy had an interesting post on food prices last week in which he discussed how food prices remain very high, but how they are not the only culprit behind the current famine in the Horn of Africa. At the end of his post, Tom wrote that he hoped I would comment on the role of food prices and agriculture.
Sadly, I have very little to add. In June, the price of food was 39 percent higher than a year earlier, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations.
But given that the FAO’s food price index encompasses five categories of food, this statistic masks a considerable amount of heterogeneity. Looking at the five categories that make up the food price index, we get the following price increases: