by Oliver Milman
Large corporations have a range of motivations for price increases, cautioned Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at the Columbia University business school, but the underlying threat posed by climate change cannot be denied.
“Extreme weather is affecting food – a year ago it was avocados, now it’s sugar,” Wagner said. “Climate-flation is a thing and it’s getting worse. It’s convenient for the owner of Oreos to point to climate change for a price increase but it’s also understandable.”
The current price shock under way with sugar is a reminder that previous assumptions about food production will have to be jettisoned, Wagner warned.
“Our food crops are basically optimized for how the weather has been for the last 10,000 years – a relatively stable climate that we are now leaving,” he said. “We are leaving this Goldilocks temperature band and that is going to put pressure on the availability and price of food.
“Some of the major food crops won’t decline linearly as temperatures increase – they will fall off a cliff due to extreme weather days. I’m less worried about a big food conglomerate making Oreos more expensive than I am consumers living on the margins and the poor subsistence farmers who will have their lives and livelihoods wiped out.”
Quoted in: “Cookies and candy are latest victims of climate crisis as sugar prices surge” by Oliver Milman, The Guardian (5 January 2024).