Welcome to the Thin New World

Sunday, April 27, 2008

Find out how you can save money by living overseas in International Living Postcards—your daily escape

What does it mean when the U.S. warehouse-store giants, Sam’s Club and Costco, limit customers to buying only four 20-pound bags of rice at a time?

It means the rice pudding is hitting the fan.

These two titans have never put a limit on buying anything before. Restaurants use Sam’s Club and Costco as a supplier for most of the things they need…mustard, napkins, tomato paste, cleaning supplies, salt, cooking oil, and just about everything else bought in bulk.

But now there’s a run at the rice bank, and every Chinese, Indian, and Mexican restaurant owner in the U.S. is trying to stockpile the white stuff before the price goes any higher or the supply dries up completely.

Rice has been so cheap and plentiful in the U.S. up to now that most of us think it’s a garnish. But most of the rest of the world lives on rice, and the price of the world’s main foodstuff has gone from about $300 per ton to over $1,000 since the start of the year.

The scary thing is that there is nothing fundamentally different about the economics of wheat or corn.

Welcome to the Thin New World.

As oil prices rise, the costs of food production, processing, and transportation rise as well. Suddenly, the connection between what we eat and how it’s grown, packaged, and delivered becomes painfully real.

The number of mouths to feed on the planet keeps multiplying without check, but corporate farmers are now eyeing the higher profit margins that come from filling gas tanks instead of stomachs. After all, we desperately need alternative fuels…look what the price of oil is doing to the cost of food!

What is Corporate Farming’s answer? Quit growing food all together...plant biofuel crops instead. After all, what good is food if you can’t afford to drive your car to the store to get it?

As I write, food riots haven’t yet started in Asia, but parts of Africa and the Caribbean are already burning.

I watch all this from my little corner of Mexico, where there hasn’t been a ripple yet, although everyone here is very sensitive to the price of corn. Corn is one of the Three Sisters of Latin American nutrition…the other two are beans and squash. When you put these three things together with some avocado, tomato, chili pepper, and a bit of chicken or goat, you have the basis for advanced civilization…the Three Sisters have made it possible for this part of the world to eat well (despite largely marginal farmland) since the time of the Maya Empire.

I don’t eat any more corn than I used to, but even if the price of corn goes to the moon, I figure I can still live here for about half what I lived on in the U.S. when I add up my savings on health care, electricity, and taxes. And since I live in a neighborhood with shops, stores, and restaurants, I can get almost everything I need within walking distance, so I’m not sweating the price of gas too much, either.

And spending less on all these things means I have more left to spend on food, at whatever price.

For me, this makes my little corner of Mexico the perfect place from which to watch the modern world’s ongoing crackup…the war in the Middle East, the U.S. presidential election soap opera, the meltdown of the global credit shell game…and the coming of the Thin New World.

Dan Prescher
Publisher, International Living

Editor’s note: If you want to quit the “modern world’s ongoing crackup,” there are many options of beautiful places to which you can escape. At the Ultimate Event in Cancun next month, there will be speakers from all over the world to tell you about all the exciting opportunities they have found on their travels, from affordable real estate to what to do when you get there.

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