Food Prices-Up, Up, and Away

Let's see. Unemployment is at its highest rate in years. Bad news, in and of itself. Now we get this gem:

U.S. food prices will rise by at least 7 percent in 2009 because of higher feed costs for chickens, hogs and cattle, said a group of food-industry economists on Thursday.

It would be the third year in a row that food prices rose faster than the overall U.S. inflation rate. Food inflation is the highest since 1990.

"The sizable increase in the cost of producing food has not been fully passed on to the consumer," said private consultant Bill Lapp. He foresaw food inflation of 7 percent-9 percent in 2009.

and...

"We've been losing money for more than a year," said Bill Roenigk, economist for the Chicken Council, who said producers intend to cut production by as much as 12 percent. "We need to recover these feed costs."

Thomas Elam, head of Farm Econ, said poultry, hog and cattle producers would cut production in coming months because of feed costs, meaning less meat on the retail market but at higher prices.

Now that stright-up politics will be moving to the back seat, something tells me I will be once again doing more posts on how much low-income and no-income folks are continuing to hurt, along with the food banks that exist to help them. And here is the rest of it.