The Economics of Food: How Feeding and Fueling the Planet Affects Food Prices

Patrick Westhoff

Jan 2010 · FT Press

About this ebook

Over the past two years, food prices have soared -- and plummeted. As crops are increasingly shifted to biofuel production, will food prices soar again? Will people starve as a result? What are the hidden relationships between the food on your plate and the gas in your car? Will economic recovery lead directly to massive price inflation in both food and energy? In this book, one of the world's leading experts untangles the complex global relationships between food, energy, and economics and helps readers come to their own conclusions about the future of food. Pat Westhoff reveals what really causes large swings in food prices and what is likely to cause them to rise and fall in the future. Westhoff discusses all the factors that drive changes in the cost of food: not just biofuel production, but also weather, income growth, exchange rates, energy prices, government policies, market speculation, and more. Next, he walks through several of the most likely scenarios for the future, offering insights that will be indispensable to consumers, commodity speculators, and policymakers alike.

About the author

Patrick Westhoff grew up on a small dairy farm in Iowa, just a few miles from the “Field of Dreams.” He earned an undergraduate degree in political science from the University of Iowa and then spent two years in the Peace Corps in Guatemala, working with small-scale farmers. After getting a master’s degree in Latin American studies from the University of Texas, he moved back to Iowa and earned a Ph.D. in agricultural economics from Iowa State University in 1989.

From 1992-1996, he served as an economist with the U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry. He worked on several major pieces of legislation, including the 1996 farm bill.

Westhoff has spent most of his professional career studying agricultural markets and policies with the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute (FAPRI), first at Iowa State University and now at the University of Missouri. FAPRI analysis is used by the U.S. Congress, the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and national institutions in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In November 2007, he was named a codirector of the FAPRI unit at the University of Missouri (MU). The author also teaches and advises graduate students in the MU Department of Agricultural Economics.