I once again made the mistake of reading an article in New York Times. The article was entitled “Environmental Cost of Shipping Groceries Around the World.” I expected an overview of the growing cost of shipping food to and from distant places. But what I got was an elitist’s plea for higher food prices all over the world. In case you hadn’t noticed, according to the Wall Street Journal the cost of food is rising 4.5% each year. Some food prices are rising even faster. Cereal prices are rising by more than 8% a year. Both flour and rice are up more than 13%. Milk, cheese, bananas peanut butter are all up more than 10%. The price of eggs is up 30% in the past year. Ground beef prices are up 4.8% and chicken by 5.4%. The article I read even suggested that these rising prices may accelerate in the near future.

Now back to the New York Times article. The premise of this article was that even though the price of food is skyrocketing world wide, and even though the developing world is finally starting to get a steady supply of food from around the world, the real problem here is that feeding hungry people is POLLUTING THE ATMOSPHERE. That’s right. What we need is to raise the taxes on fuel that is used to ship food around the world. That way the price of food will raise and… and what? People will buy less food? They will have less variety and availability of nutritious food? What about the developing nations where much of the world’s food is processed? The companies that are employing thousands of impoverished workers in developing countries will be either forced out of business or forced to move closer to the markets that are the most profitable. That will force the unemployment rates of developing countries higher and push those countries back into the third world. That sounds like a fantastic idea.

This is a perfect example of the elitism that characterizes much of what I read in the New York Times. The author of this article is so caught up in the new McCarthyism that is global warming that he didn’t even stop to think that maybe its more important to feed developing nations than to reduce something that may or may not cause the average temperature of the earth to rise a couple of degrees over the next few decades! Global warming may or may not be occurring. If it is occurring we know that 50% of carbon emissions come from natural causes. That means that damaging the food supply of humanity may or may not affect 50% of some thing that may or may not be occurring! When did the world lose all sense of logic, right and wrong, or compassion?

The NYT article says that “ending these breaks could help ensure that producers and consumers pay the environmental cost of increasingly well-traveled food.” Raising food prices will obviously hurt the global economy. And lets not forget that right now the US is in the middle of an economic crisis the likes of which may not have been seen since WWII.

So let’s keep fuel that is used to transport food tax-free. Let’s keep people in developing nations fed and employed. For once, lets just let a little common sense slip into our economic policies.