More Than Living

The cost of running a car vs the cost of bread

I was struck by the con­trast between two news reports yes­ter­day morn­ing – the first on the cost of run­ning a car in the UK, the second on the price of a loaf of bread in Egypt. BBC Radio Five Live’s Nicky Camp­bell was giving the Busi­ness Sec­ret­ary, John Hutton a “hard time” (it is Nicky Camp­bell we’re talk­ing about here) about the pro­posed increases in road tax for older, more pol­lut­ing cars. Nicky was really, really cross about things. Surely, he blustered, when times are tough and there’s a credit crunch making itself felt, stuff like “being green” and “the envir­on­ment” have to take second place to eco­nomic concerns?

Mean­while, The Guardian’s lead story yes­ter­day was about the inter­na­tional crisis talks that are being held over the next couple of months in an attempt to tackle the huge food short­ages that many of the world’s urban poor are now facing. This report gave an example of a single-​​parent family in Cairo. They used to be able to rely on the help of their neigh­bours to make up for their lack of income – people would pick up some extra shop­ping for them and pass it on without a fuss. Appar­ently there used to be a saying: “nobody dies of hunger in Egypt”. This is because the Egyp­tian gov­ern­ment has been provid­ing heav­ily sub­sid­ised bread (96% of the cost) for the very poor now for years. But as food prices have gone up, it’s not just the “very poor” of Cairo who need the cheap bread to keep the wolf from the door.

In the UK, a sig­ni­fic­ant group of motor­ists who bought their car as recently as seven years ago will find their car tax going up by £200 a year. Add this to fuel prices which are run­ning at a record high, and it’s not much fun to be a motor­ist in the UK these days.

But let’s just con­sider the root causes of the food short­ages in Egypt:

• High oil and energy prices push up the cost of food production
• Increased demand for meat means that more grain goes to feed anim­als – leav­ing less to make bread
• Stocks of grain are at a crit­ical low due to droughts in grain-​​producing areas of the world
• The increased pop­ular­ity of bio­fuels (see point about high oil prices above) means less land to grow food on

Per­haps those people up in arms about the increas­ing cost of motor­ing in the UK should seek some per­spect­ive by con­sid­er­ing the plight of Cairo’s hungry (and the hungry of Brazil, Niger, Cameroon, Haiti and the other 37 coun­tries that have exper­i­enced food riots this year). The very thing that’s hurt­ing our pock­ets today – the dimin­ish­ing of the planet’s oil sup­plies – is push­ing people to the verge of star­va­tion in less pros­per­ous coun­tries. Yes, trans­port is import­ant to our lives – many of us depend on it for a living. And yes, it’s expens­ive to run a car these days. But we’re lucky enough to live in a coun­try where it’s a national scan­dal when the cost of a loaf of bread goes over £1.

Per­son­ally, I agree with Greenpeace’s Robin Oakley, who told The Guard­ian: “Reward­ing drivers who choose more effi­cient vehicles makes sense.” The flip­side of that is pen­al­ising those who don’t. Mean­while, I’m keep­ing my fin­gers crossed that I’m not soon waking up to the sound of Nicky Camp­bell “grilling” our politi­cians about food riots on the streets of the UK’s cities.

IMAGE: by Flickr user svacher

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Ori­gin­ally posted 2008-​​05-​​28 10:13:00. Repub­lished by Blog Post Promoter

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