11/17/08 Turkey Dinner & Grain Recovery

Turkey Dinner & Grain Recovery plus Food Forethought. I'm Greg Martin with today's Northwest Report. According to the American Farm Bureau Federation  you might spend more on your Thanksgiving turkey this year. Farm Bureau's 23rd annual informal survey of the prices of basic items found on the Thanksgiving Day dinner table shows a $2.35 price increase over last year's average of $42.26. The biggest contributor to the $44.61 price tag for this year's dinner for 10 is in the turkey. At an increase of nine-cents per pound - a 16-pound turkey will cost nearly one dollar and a half more when compared to 2007. Vic Lespinasse, a private grains analyst, saying he expects a recovery in grain prices when energy, credit and stock markets stabilize. LESPINASSE: Just as prices were overdone to the upside last summer, I think their overdone to the down side so once these financial markets stabilize, I think we will see a recovery in the grains to somewhat higher levels. Now with today's Food Forethought, here's Lacy Gray. How attached are you to those plastic shopping bags that you put your groceries in every week? You may just have to put a price on that attachment sooner rather than later. If you are one of the last people still holding out against purchasing reusable shopping bags your time may soon be up. New York's city officials are calling for a proposition which will charge customers six cents per plastic bag at the check out counter. Voters in the Northwest are already facing the possibility of such a measure next year and several other cities across the nation are seriously entertaining adopting the idea. Europeans have long been users of cloth or mesh shopping bags, and in fact when Ireland adopted a considerably hefty plastic bag tax in 2002 plastic bag use dropped a whopping 94 percent! Whether a plastic bag tax would become a sizeable source of revenue for most cities or whether the nation's shoppers will overwhelmingly embrace reusable shopping bags remains to be seen. The plastic bag tax may just be a win/win situation for both bureaucrats and environmentalists alike. Thanks Lacy. That's today's Northwest Report. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.