The problem of the food price is structural. The growth of demand cannot be checked in that it is coming from middle income countries demanding more quality and more quantity of food. High demand is here to stay.
I do believe that oil production globally has peaked at 85 million barrels. And I've been very vocal about it. And what happens? The demand continues to rise. The only way you can possibly kill demand is with price. So the price of oil, gasoline, has to go up to kill the demand. Otherwise, keep the price down, the demand rises.
The food delivery business has provided Singaporeans, especially the low-income and those who seek to supplement their income, with on-demand work.
Like any business, the oil industry runs on the basic premise of supply and demand. The more supply - the lower the price. The higher the demand - the higher price. In other words, the more people who can buy oil, the higher the price of oil.
But it is clear that the price of labour has no necessary connection with the price of food, since it depends entirely on the supply of labourers compared with the demand.
Right now you're seeing more and more families reporting that they are skipping meals. They're having to give up meat. Mothers are foregoing food so their kids can have something. People are growing their own vegetables, not because they've gone organic, but because it's one of the few assured sources of food they have. For low-income Americans food is costly right now. The price of food has been going up, and wages haven't. This puts working Americans in a real bind. The fact that the mainstream media hasn't reported it doesn't mean that it's not happening.
...we have got to deal with increased demand for energy, increased demand for food, increased demand for water, and we've got to do that while mitigating and adapting to climate change. And we have but 21 years to do it
You've got a global food problem. You've got a food problem in the United States. You've got a food problem in Africa... in Asia. And so the truth is, the U.S. is going to have to produce more, on not very many more acres, honestly. And so we're going to have to do a better job.
You want supply to always be full, and you use price to basically either bring more supply on or get more supply off, or get more demand in the system or get some demand out.
There are many countries in the world that when they reached the middle-income stage, they witnessed serious structural problems such as growth stagnation, a widening wealth gap and increasing social unrest.
About 75% of the price of gas is really dictated by crude oil. At the heart of the issue is increasing demand over a period of many years around the world. World crude oil consumption now is close to 90 million barrels a day. Most of the growth in demand is coming from China and the developing world.
High quality water is more than the dream of the conservationists, more than a political slogan; high quality water, in the right quantity at the right place at the right time, is essential to health, recreation, and economic growth.
Organic is something we can all partake of and benefit from. When we demand organic, we are demanding poison-free food. We are demanding clean air. We are demanding pure, fresh water. We are demanding soil that is free to do its job and seeds that are free of toxins. We are demanding that our children be protected from harm. We all need to bite the bullet and do what needs to be done—buy organic whenever we can, insist on organic, fight for organic and work to make it the norm. We must make organic the conventional choice and not the exception available only to the rich and educated.
The Asian nation's oil demand is expected to grow this year by 800,000 barrels per day and represents more than one-third of the total growth in global demand, according to the Energy Information Agency.
Is it just a coincidence that as the portion of our income spent on food has declined, spending on health care has soared? In 1960 Americans spent 17.5 percent of their income on food and 5.2 percent of national income on health care. Since then, those numbers have flipped: Spending on food has fallen to 9.9 percent, while spending on heath care has climbed to 16 percent of national income. I have to think that by spending a little more on healthier food we could reduce the amount we have to spend on heath care.
Perhaps more than any other, the food industry is very sensitive to consumer demand.
Poems not only demand patience, they demand a kind of surrender. You must give yourself up to them. This is the real food for a poet: other poems, not meat loaf.