Unemployment Rates Jump & Retail Food Prices

Unemployment Rates Jump & Retail Food Prices

Unemployment Rates Jump & Retail Food Prices plus Food Forethought. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Northwest Report.

A trip to the grocery store can be an eye opening experience. With the economic downturn you’d expect to see some changes there. Ephriam Leibtag, USDA economist, explains how the slow economy is affecting the pace of retail food price hikes.

LEIBTAG: The overall economy has an impact on food prices in terms of weakened demand and that’s the biggest place where you tie directly in and certainly weakened demand across the board means that commodity prices are also lower than they were last year but as of late we have seen some of those things turn up again so some of the signs from the commodity markets would imply that we would be moving back towards the higher end of this inflation range.

Unemployment in Portland jumped in the month of April to 12 percent. That’s an estimated 138,600 people unemployed. Last month the rate was 11 percent -- 83,500 more people than a year ago, when the rate was 4.9 percent. Statewide the April unemployment rate was 12 percent. The U.S. rate rose to 8.9. The only general sector that did not post losses was transportation – but that unemployment rate remained flat since March.

Now with today’s Food Forethought, here’s Lacy Gray.

Well, Grandpa would be proud, the garden is planted and doing well. He might however have been found scratching his head come harvest time when my several different varieties of tomatoes and peppers ripen. It was so hard this year to choose just a couple of different varieties of these two garden favorites, so I didn’t.  In fact, I chose several of each. When you can have tomatoes that run the full color spectrum why limit yourself. I’m really curious to see how the “black” tomatoes turn out. Truth be told, there are hundreds of varieties of tomatoes around the world. Gardeners who have an adventurous nature will have found it hard to resist not planting at least one each of pink, purple, orange, yellow, black and of course the traditional red tomatoes. Then there are all those different squash varieties too! Most people wouldn’t think of gardening as an adventure sport, but there are those of us who know better. Just ask us while we are keeping the pests away from and harvesting our dozen different varieties of tomato, pepper and squash plants!  

Thanks Lacy. That’s today’s Northwest Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.

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