Since food, together with air and water, is one of the three basic items which all living things require without question, it is an ideal subject for economic discussion. Unfortunately, it is also almost ideal for normative economic judgments. “We should” or “they should” abound from intellectual forums to universities to television shows, often without [...]

MLB asks:
“Looking around, it seems to me as if one of the greatest economic problems is one of distribution: on the one hand a few own the majority of the resources, while on the other there are large numbers of people who do not have enough to get by. To read the newspapers, however, one [...]

Multi-national food chains are cropping up in poor countries, but no one is buying.
It sounds like a good idea in theory. Poor people require cheap food, and giant food chains can provide them. So why aren’t the poor lined up outside the doors to buy the goods?
In developed countries, consumers flock to these chains to [...]

Lately, every time I go to the grocery store, all of the most basic items I routinely purchase seem to have increased in price anywhere from a nickel or two to a dollar or more each. Milk, eggs, cereal products, rice, and fresh vegetables all cost more now than they did just a few weeks [...]

At the UN summit in Rome, which ended June 5, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FOA) appealed to governments to step up to the plate and provide at least $20 billion per year to help feed the world’s hungry.
On the agenda (at least for U.S. Agricultural Secretary Ed Schafer) was promoting the use of [...]