Higher peanut butter prices? A peanut shortage could affect your grocery bill
Bad weather, increased demand, and dwindling supplies are causing peanut prices to skyrocket-and that could lead to a shortage of peanut butter, a household staple that more and more people are relying on in a struggling economy.
"We have quite a peanut shortage this year," Tiffany Arthur, an agricultural economist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Farm Service Agency, told NPR. "Things are snowballing and prices are sharply rising."
"Our first problem was [that] we didn't plant enough peanuts," Peanut broker Richard Barnhill told NPR. The price of cotton was higher than usual, which prompted peanut farmers to change their planting plans.
Also, thousands of acres of peanut fields in Georgia, Texas, and South Carolina went unplanted this year or were destroyed by high temperatures and droughts in the Southeast. Some of the crops that did make it to harvest time developed aflatoxin, a toxin triggered by fungus which requires more-and more expensive-processing in order to make the peanuts edible.
"It's been a terrible year," said Don Koehler, executive director of the Georgia Peanut Commission, told The Cleaveland Plain Dealer. "We've had excessive heat and not enough rainfall over most of the Peanut Belt.
"An inch of rain would help, but it's not enough to change the situation in the market," he continued. "We're just hoping we're going to be able to produce all the peanuts we need."
The outlook isn't promising."Whether we will run out of peanuts by the end of the 2011 growing season is still open to debate and highly dependent on harvest-time weather," writes Roy Robertson at The Southeast Farm Press. "There is considerably less doubt that we will run out of edible peanuts before the 2012 crop is planted."
Parents who are coping with food allergies at home are already aware of several PB&J alternatives, like sunflower-seed butter and soynut butter. But peanut-butter is much less expensive, and has for years been an inexpensive no-refrigeration-needed protein source for those looking to save money. Peanut butter consumption has gone up by 10 percent since 2008, rather than the more-normal 1 percent or 2 percent, Arthur said.
The lower yields and higher production costs have already lead to higher prices at the grocery store. According to The Wall Street Journal, the J.M. Smucker Company expects to raise the price of their number-one selling Jif peanut butter by 30 percent in November. That means that a $3 jar would jump to $4. Candy companies are also going to be raising prices as they head into the holiday season. Trader Joe's, which makes its own line of organic peanut butter, has discontinued the product; if they do restock at some point, the price will be about 70 cents higher, a company spokesperson told NPR.
Does your family rely on peanut butter? How will the price increases affect you?
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