>According to Levin and Lewontin ('The Dialectical Biologist', 1985), on
>the US situation:
>
>"The consumer has not benefited. The average price of food has risen more
>rapidly than the average of all prices. The ratio of food prices in 1970
>to that in 1930 was 2.48; the ratio for all purchased goods and services
>was 2.33. So food has become not cheaper but relatively more expensive,
>even though farm productivity has risen more rapidly."
As Lou Proyect might say, this is obsolete data. In the U.S., the 1970s were an anomalous period when retail food prices rose more rapidly than other prices, at least according to the consumer price indexes. From the inception of the CPI in 1913 through that 1970s spike, food prices moved pretty much in line with everything else. The spike was undone in the disinflation of the 1980s, and now food prices are moving along with everything else. Farm prices, according to the producer price indexes, are an exception; they were roughly steady (in relative terms) from 1913 through WW II; rose in relative terms during the war; fell in relative terms until the 1970s inflation, when they rose sharply. Then they fell again (in relative terms) during the 1980s disinflation, rose a bit in the late 1980s (when commodity traders were cheering "beans in the teens!"), stabilized in the early 1990s, only to fall pretty hard after the Asian crisis to their lowest price relative to the overall PPI in the 86-year history of the index.
The real action is in the relation between wholesale farm and retail food prices. If you divide the food CPI by the farm PPI for 1913, you get a relative price index of 6.7; if you do the same for 1999, you get 216.4. Looked at another way, retail food prices were up 1589% between 1913 and 1999, while farm prices fell by 49%; since 1980, retail food prices are up 97%, while farm prices are down 34%.
No wonder Cargill makes so much money.
Doug