“Ugly math
On her way to the market, Lingani explained the ugly math: A year ago, she could feed her entire family a nutritious meal of meat and vegetables and peanut sauce for about 75 cents. But now the family gets much lower-quality food for twice the price.

She said the cost of six pounds of cornmeal has risen from 75 cents to $1.50. A kilogram — 2.2 pounds — of rice cost 60 cents last year and costs a little more than $1 now. Other basics such as salt and cooking oil have also doubled in price.

Fuel costs have more than doubled for trucks that haul food to landlocked Burkina Faso, helping keep food prices high.

Beef or goat meat is now so expensive — about $1.20 for a tiny portion — that the family has given up meat completely, eating cheap dried fish instead. Rather than seasoning their sauces with vegetables and peanuts, they now use the tough leaves of baobab trees, the gnarly giants that flourish here in the dry lands south of the Sahara.

To soften the sour taste of the leaves, Lingani mixes in potash, a paste made by boiling down water strained through ashes from wood fires.

“In the past, our money would last the whole month. We might even have some left over,” Lingani said. “But now as soon as it arrives, we spend it.”

Dinner happens only if there is a bit of food left over from lunch. Even then, she said, there is rarely enough left for women.

“When the children ask for food, we have to give it to them,” she said. “We’re mothers.”

Thus the Washington Post on some of the weakest victims of food price inflation, poor mothers in Burkina Faso in Africa, where energy prices have doubled recently.

Comment:

Meanwhile, over in Zimbabwe, suffering from 2.2 million percent inflation, the 100 million…oops, billion... dollar note has just been injected into the national blood stream, for a little extra sugar high. That’s following on the heels of the 10 million dollar note this January and then in swift succession, the 100 million, 250 million, 5 billion, 25 billion and 50 billion notes, according to this report from AFP. Even then, economists say the inflation rate is grossly underreported.

And back here in the USA, GHQ, Globalization, the picture isn’t pretty either.

There are of course the poor. They may be always with us, as the Good Book says, but rarely in such numbers…..and rarer yet for such reasons – adjustable rate mortgages.

But the middle-class too is scrambling, raiding their IRA’s to pay the bills. That is, if they’ve managed to get them. And organic farmers who used to have to fight off insects and birds now have a new plague to deal with – diesel thieves who work round the clock to siphon of gas they can sell for half price to local truckers.

Too bad, trying to solve the energy problem seems only to have added..er…fuel to the crisis. A confidential World Bank Report tells us that about 75 percent of the 140 percent price rise between 2002 and 2008 was driven by the diversion of agriculture to biofuels….

If you got rich in the ethanol scam, try sleeping soundly on that number.