Just How Expensive is U.S. Food?

By ALAN GUEBERT

Nearly every autopsy of Vice President Kamala Harris’s stinging White House defeat begins with some variation of the phrase, “Voters pointed to the rising price of food as their chief concern …”

True or not – and more on that later – the Trump campaign tied that tin can so tightly to Harris that everywhere she went complaints like “the high price of eggs,” “failed Bidenomics,” and “wouldn’t change a thing” got there long before she did.

Try as she might, the Harris campaign didn’t mount an effective response – either in person or through its unprecedented $1.4 billion advertising budget – to counter the damaging claims.

And the complaints had traction; for a month they rolled right over Harris.

The Trump campaign wasn’t wrong about rising food costs in the Biden years; it was wrong, however, to blame it entirely on Biden Administration policies. The stage was set for higher prices – and not just in food – during the first Trump Administration's painfully slow initial response to the Covid-19 pandemic that took root in Jan. 2020.

At least that’s what the best food price analysts on the planet, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Economic Research Service (ERS), noted in their latest “Food Prices and Spending” report on Nov. 1.

According to ERS, “From 2019 to 2023, the all-food Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose by 25.0 percent–a higher increase than the all-items CPI, which grew at 19.2 percent over the same period.” While food prices increased less than transportation costs, “(T)hey rose faster than housing, medical care, and all other major categories.”

So, yes, food prices soared during the Biden Administration but the rise wasn’t because Democrats lived in the White House, the ERS report continues. Instead, “Food price increases in 2020-21 were largely driven by shifting consumption patterns and supply chain disruptions resulting from the Coronavirus pandemic,” explains ERS.

Recall the spring of 2020 when COVID hit the food market like a meteor. It knocked everything – production, delivery, sales, worker safety – miles from any semblance of normal. Hoarding then quickly undermined the food sector even more.

Then two big shocks, neither related to American politics, slammed the slowly recovering food sector in 2022: an outbreak of deadly avian influenza (which, to date, has killed 71 million egg-laying hens and 14 million turkeys in the U.S.) and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a global leader in food exports.

“In 2022, food prices increased faster than any year since 1979,” given the impact of both events, “which compounded other economy-wide inflationary pressures,” ERS says. Afterwards, however, “Food price growth slowed in 2023 and wholesale food prices and these other inflationary factors eased.”

So, according to ERS, food prices spiked 25% between President Trump’s second to last year, 2019, and President Biden’s second year, 2022, due to a human pandemic, a poultry pandemic, and a bloody regional war between a global food superpower, Ukraine, and a global nuclear superpower, Russia.

And that’s just one side – the grocery side – of a fluid, worldwide ag commodity market that “regularly rises or falls by more than 10% from one year to the next,” explains ERS’s food price report.

For example, “In 2023 the production-weighted price” of corn, soybeans, and wheat “fell by 12.1%, while food prices increased by 5.8%.”

In other words, food sellers boosted their prices by almost 6% while the collective price for “the top three U.S. field crops (that) comprise the majority of field crop inputs” in U.S. food dropped more than twice that amount.

If the Trump campaign knew these facts, they simply ignored them and, instead, wisely began stockpiling tin cans and string.

Alan Guebert is an agricultural journalist who was raised on an Illinois dairy farm and worked as a writer and senior editor at Professional Farmers of America and Successful Farming magazine and is now a contributing editor to Farm Journal magazine. Guebert and his daughter Mary Grace Foxwell co-wrote "The Land of Milk and Uncle Honey: Memories from the Farm of My Youth" [University of Illinois Press, 2015]. See past columns, supporting documents, and contact information at farmandfoodfile.com

From The Progressive Populist, December 15, 2024

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