Australian Floods: As Waters Rise, So Does Inflation

You can imagine that fruit and vegetables were hot commodities aboard Noah’s Ark; torrential flooding that soaks field, engulfs roads and shuts down transport hubs tends to do wonders for the price of produce.

As if Australians had any more to worry about—what with the worst natural disaster in its history and a recent loss to the Pommies (read: English) in the Ashes cricket match—it turns out that the Queensland floods drove up prices for fruit and vegetables by an enormous amount this month.

The TD-Securities Melbourne-Institute (TD-MI) Monthly Inflation Gauge for fruit and vegetables jumped 12.1% in January.  Overall inflation in Australia is at a 10-year low; over all, it rose 0.4% in January, according to TD-MI measurements. But that puts the jump in food prices into starker relief. And many experts expect inflation to rise in the next year as a renewed resources boom takes off in Australia and also as rebuilding and refurbishment in the flooded areas of eastern Australia gets underway.

(More on Time.com: See pictures of Australia’s flooding.)

NewsFeed notices that economists like to borrow from meteorologists’ dictionary to sex-up their dry subject matter. We are told of “economic perfect storms,” “turbulent markets” and, indeed, the “rising tide of inflation.”  But we think the courage of Australians in the face of real floods and real storms should do two things. First, it should remind us that the costs of such disasters should be measured by more than lives lost and property destroyed; a 12% hike in produce costs will hit families hard.

Simultaneously, it should also remind us that there are more important measures than consumer prices indexes, GDP and other economic indicators. Storms and floods are real, and they effect people not numbers.(via Dow Jones Newswire)

(More on Time.com: See the top ten disasters of 2007.)