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I'm not sure how closely one can compare the supply and the market for food and building materials, but on first consideration there seem obvious parallels. I was drawn to this reading an article written by Organic food provider Abel & Cole I received with a delivery earlier this month. It was on the rising cost of food - the reasons and how consumers would need to change their attitudes to buying food.
The article pointed to a worldwide cereal shortage due to farmers turning their land over to bio-fuel crops, increasing demand from China and India and a "crazy summer" weather-wise. The piece quotes a dairy farmer, who says: "We've been used to very cheap food for a long time - 50 years ago we spend a third of or incomes on food, now we spend 8%... Prices may be going up but we'll still have a lot more room in our budgets than our parents did."
I'm not sure whether the same trend has been true for building materials and products as a fraction of overall building costs. It would interesting to see any figures on that. Surely the principle that the need to spend more on good quality is the same in construction as for diet and nutrition is on the food side. It obviously comes down to an issue of whole-life value as being
The argument for a choice of base materials not purely on price is clearly bolstered by the embodied energy issue. Worrying new research from the Tyndall Centre last week looked at the proportion of coming from China due to exports coming from the country and found them to be "large and significant". They amount to 1109m tonnes of CO2 in 2004 which is double that of UK's total emissions in the same year. Buying from China may be cheap in monetary terms, as PricewaterhouseCoopers recently reported, but the cost potentially very damaging. As with food this requires a fundamental shift in culture and attitudes amongst buyers.
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