Tuesday 8 April 2008

And to clay you will return.......

News today in economics circles about food prices in the poorest neighbourhoods of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, which is perhaps the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

The price of rice, the people's staple food, has doubled in the last year. This increase naturally has forced poverty-stricken residents to look for substitutes for rice.

Apparently in the past they have baked “dirt biscuits” using salt and vegetable shortening along with clay from a nearby area.  The clay has some nutrients in it, so it is not entirely filler. The problem tho is that the supply curve of clay is not horizontal; so with this increased demand for the clay, its price has risen too — by 40% during the same period. 

The dirt is no longer dirt-cheap - and the poor are just too poor to eat dirt. 

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

the idiocy of bio fuels and the chicago commodities market

Anonymous said...

Awww that is so sad. Laine x
http://journals.aol.co.uk/elainey2465/laines-world/

Anonymous said...

It's nothing that Capitalism and freedom can't fix.