The Arab world buys about one-third of all the world’s traded wheat, says the World Bank, and that’s due to rise by 40 per cent over the next decade.
“In the U.S., people eat a lot of bread,” says Rami Zurayk of American University of Beirut, an expert in land and water resources. “But imagine a country where they eat about three times that much.”
That would be Tunisia, where the Food and Agriculture Organization reports a total of 216 kilograms of wheat a year consumed by every person.
It is the world’s highest level of wheat consumption, and it far outstrips the U.S. and Canadian total of around 80 kilos a year.
And corn isn’t the answer because we’re putting that into our gasoline.
1 user commented in " Wheat prices spiking "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackCotton is WAY up, too…at least on the retail end. I know we don’t eat cotton, but my cotton material costs have doubled in the last 3 months.
Cosmic, you know all those cotton fields north of Shreveport? Drove through there the other day, and dang near all of ‘em are planted in corn. Don’t know if it’s the edible kind, or the kind we’re subsidizing to replace perfectly good gasoline.
We’re really screwing around with markets. The result is gonna be really bad.
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