Food prices going up: food quality going down

Last night I went to a green party public meeting at the Southern Cross Restaurant & Bar function room. I was greeted by an old friend from college who works there and was glad to be able to listen in while working.
The main talk was by Sue Kedgley. She outlined how and why food is becoming more expensive around the world, and why. "Free trade" as endorsed by the IMF and world bank has a lot to do with it. Countries are no longer producing enough food on their own and are instead focusing on cash crops for export. This means not only reduced overall supply but increased cost of delivery as food which could be produced domestically is instead produced in distant parts of the world and transported using ever more expensive fossil fuels.
New Zealand, although not starving, is also following this pattern with our mass conversion of wheat, sheep, and vegetable farmland into dairy farms. Unfortunately conventional methods of dairy farming are very wasteful but that's a whole lot of detail I won't go into today.
Fortunately, we don't need to be in positions of power to make a difference in all this. We can buy from farmers' markets rather than supermarkets (I need to find out where the nearest one of those to my house is). There are also community gardens, and most people are able to grow vegetables where they live.
All in all, it was a very interesting evening. Unfortunately no-one stayed very long afterwards so I didn't get much chance to get to know anyone but I did have a nice conversation with Sue Kedgley about joining the green party.