Rusted Sky

I've got a few posts that just never jelled to a publishable form - bits and clips pulled out and saved in the hopes of coming up wth the time or a completed idea...

But anyhow - I'm about to inflict a bunch of them on you. These have been stuck in the queue long enough - time to flush them out into the open, so to speak.

This particular one will be at the top of the heap for about a week - until we get back from spring break. Please feel free to check back - I've got stuff 'scheduled' to pop in, and it's anyone's guess whether I've got CRON jobs figured out enough to do so.

Now - on with the show!

Bakers lobby govt to help ease wheat crunch | Politics | Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. bakers lobbied the Bush administration and Congress on Wednesday to build up wheat supplies and take other measures to dampen wheat and flour prices.

Robb MacKie, head of the American Bakers Association, said booming prices for wheat has brought the U.S. food industry to a crossroads -- threatening profits, jobs, and potentially boosting prices by double digits for consumers when they buy everything from bread to pizza.
"It's going to get much worse," MacKie told a news conference with other members of the baking industry, who will meet Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer and other officials in Washington on Wednesday.

Commodity markets have been transformed in recent years by record prices and volatility, fueled in part by growing biofuel production, mounting demand and poor harvests.

The Law of Unintended Consequences hits - and is usually pretty nasty when it does. Here - you see what's happening when there's a crunch in a commodity we've taken for granted... wheat. Soon we're going to see a serious corn crunch, and prices of foods made with THAT should go up... since we're diverting a lot of it to biofuels, and a lot of land that was FORMERLY used for corn to wheat and soy... because the price is better.

The government hasn't learned yet that a simple decision (to concentrate on corn for ethanol) can end up having very wide ramifications. I think we're just seeing the tip of the iceberg here - and we're bearing down on it fast.

J.