hink of it all - of the life that is! Study your friends and foes!
Study the past! And answer this: "Are these times better than those?" The life-long quarrel, the paltry spite, the sting of your poisoned pride! No matter who fell it were better to fight as they did when the world was wide.
Rising food prices: is a lack of competition really to blame?
"COLES' and Safeway's stranglehold on grocery retailing is pushing food prices down rather than up, according to the head of the company that owns Coles.Wesfarmers chief executive Richard Goyder said big retailers charge lower prices by benefiting from economies of scale that smaller retailers cannot achieve.
[...]
Mr Goyder said higher food prices were here to stay as the powerhouse economies of Asia continued to Westernise, putting pressure on food supplies."
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While it is highly unlikely that two firms dominating the food retail industry in Australia is not pushing up food prices to some degree due to a lack of competition, Goyder is speaking some sense. China alone has over 1.3 billion individual people in it and is the world's most populated nation. India has over 1.1 billion people and is the world's second most populated nation. All the nations of Europe combined have a population, while itself a large number, of just 731 million people.
Significance? Well, when you consider that China and India by themselves, let alone all the other emerging nations around the world, are in the process of bringing 2.4 billion human beings up to consumption levels of the average Western man or woman, it does not require a large leap in imagination to conclude that humanity in general will be demanding a hell of a lot from the planet's food supply. And when demand rises faster than supply, prices rise.
The world's population is expected to rise from the current figure of 6.7 billion to around 9.5 billion by 2050, with no end in sight. Logically speaking this cannot be sustainable, and these higher food prices that we are all experiencing are but one initial signal that too many people are demanding too much from the planet. Other 'signals' include the rapid global rates of deforestation and extinction of animal species. Rising oil prices could very well be included here also.