Thursday, November 19, 2009

Food Insecurity

http://www.ers.usda.gov/Publications/ERR83/ERR83.pdf

There is something very ironic here. The purchasing power of food, at the farm level, amounts to little. By comparison, in 1939 8 hundredweight of milk would buy an acre of farmland in my county.

In 2008, 85.4 percent of U.S. households were food secure throughout the
year. Food-secure households had consistent access to enough food for active
healthy lives for all household members at all times during the year. The
remaining 14.6 percent (17 million households) were food insecure. These
households, at some time during the year, had difficulty providing enough
food for all their members due to a lack of resources. The prevalence of food
insecurity was up from 11.1 percent (13 million households) in 2007 and was
the highest observed since nationally representative food security surveys
were initiated in 1995.

2 comments:

  1. Hey John,
    Beyond ironic; its sad; some of the most food insecure households in the U.S. may be dairy farm houses... we drink a lot of milk and eat a lot of hamburger, and that's with Mother holding a good off-farm job...I shudder to think what families solely dependant on a milk check have to sit down to...if this damn old world starves to death it'll be because it starved its farmers off first. Nate Wilson

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  2. Less than a week from now most all in the country will sit down to a feast, give thanks to God for the great bounty he has provided for them. Yes, almost everyone will give thanks to The Creator, Divine Being, or God for the food they consume. But the farmers who actually worked with God and nature to produce this bounty will be forgotten.
    This so called market which refuses to pay us our worth and works hard to take all that we have for less than it took to produce it will one day have no one left in this country to steal from.
    It is a wonder that we can still provide so many with so much... but hungry many of these poor souls will go; soon the masses truly will have to look to God for the food they need because the farmers will be too few or too far away to feed them.
    JS

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