Food prices are skyrocketing. Arable land is becoming scarce. And forests continue to disappear across the globe. The world must decide between affordable food and biofuels.
All it takes for Hans Dietrich Driftmann, a businessman from Germany’s northern Holstein region, to explain the way the world works is a package of muesli — or at least to explain the way his world, the world of agricultural markets, works.
Driftmann picks up a packet of “Köllns kernige Multikorn-Flocken” (“Kölln’s Crunchy Multigrain Flakes”) and reads out the list of ingredients: oats, wheat, barley and rye. Then he slips a set of price tables out of a plastic sleeve and does a couple of calculations to illustrate how the prices of the muesli’s ingredients have changed: rye has gone up by 55 percent, barley by 70 percent and wheat 90 percent. The price of oats has also skyrocketed — by 80 percent — since the last harvest a year ago. This final figure is what really hits home for Driftmann.
For the last two decades he has been the CEO of Kölln-Werke, Germany’s top producer of oats and a major player in the muesli market. It’s an old family-owned company, founded in 1795 and headquartered in the town of Elmshorn, a place with a skyline dominated by enormous grain silos painted sky-blue. The silos are beacons for truck drivers approaching Elmshorn to unload their grain — if they come at all these days.
Today Driftmann is grateful for every truck that shows up at his silos. This year’s oats harvest, he says, was “miserable.” His buyers search the whole world for grain, even in places like Finland and Australia. Price is almost secondary. “The problem is availability,” says Driftmann.
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