Drought's short-term impact on food prices pales in comparison to global, long-term factors

The massive drought that hindered much of the Midwest's food production caused food prices to rise this summer, and they will probably rise more, but Science Daily reports much broader factors will have a longer and heavier impact on rising food costs than any U.S. drought.

Food marketing professor John Stanton told Science Daily that price increases from drought are short-term, while increasing demand from the rest of the world for crops including corn will affect prices for years. "The biggest cost in a box of corn flakes isn't the corn," Stanton says. "It's everything from the price of oil to transport the product to the marketing and the packaging. So something like the cost of oil will have a much more lasting effect on the price of your cereal than the supply of crops." (Read more)

Report: Rural manufacturing, once so hard hit, looks to be rebounding with global growth

According to the Census Bureau, rural communities have lost roughly a third of their factory jobs since 1995. The recent recession has only made this worse, with one out of every eight rural factory jobs disappearing in 2009 alone. But, writes Jason Henderson in The Main Street Economist's report: Rebuilding Rural Manufacturing, rural manufacturing has rebounded  with a vengeance in the past two years. "Stronger global economic growth and a drop in the value of the dollar from its highs a decade ago has boosted U.S. manufactured exports. Rural factories have tapped global markets and a booming agricultural sector to spur rising employment and incomes. While the prospect of additional strength at rural factories remains promising, the rebuilding of rural America's manufacturing base rests on the retooling of rural factories with skilled workers for competition in global markets," Henderson writes.

Henderson, who is vice president and Omaha branch executive at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, reports that "economic growth in developing countries has spawned demand for commodity-based products." Rural manufacturing jobs have jumped 3.8 percent in 2011, double the national rate, with workers putting in more than 40 hours a week through the first quarter of 2012. Such strong labor demand has fueled strong wage growth making weekly earning rise more than 7 percent over the past year. Read the report.

Scientists link bee colony collapses to fatal virus spread by mites

Reddish Varroa destructor mite on honeybee (Photo by Alamy)

The worldwide collapse of honeybee colonies may have finally been linked to a blood-sucking parasite that has successfully spread a fatal virus on a global scale. According to findings published in the journal Science, the researchers warned that the virus passed on by the varroa mite is now one of the "most widely distributed and contagious insect viruses on the planet."  Furthermore, writes Damian Carrington in The Guardian, the new dominance of the killer virus "poses an ongoing threat to colonies even after beekeepers have eradicated the mites from hives. Varroa destructor has spread from Asia across the entire world over the past 50 years."

Bees and other pollinators are vital in the production in up to a third of all the food eaten by humans, and a 2011 United Nations report estimated that bees and other pollinators such as butterflies, beetles or birds do work worth $191 billion a year for the world economy. The role of mites in colony coll,apse disorder had been suspected but unclear; bacteria, fungi and pesticides had also been found in colonies along with the viruses. The disorder had proven difficult to study because the bees generally left the hive en masse to perish, making it difficult for effective post-mortems.  (Read more)