World grain stocks running low.

[gosub]

Very interesting File on Four (article and podcast last night about prices being artificially raised by speculators.

I had previously read this article on FAO data significance comes out in what the interviewed speculators say . Dovetails with the second half of the program on same thing happening with oil. Unfortunately I would say the lack of investment in refinery plant for decades is a nasty tail-tail. Pity I don't still have a New Scientist subscription had an article about 18 months ago that there isn't the land capacity to feed ourselves and do bio-diesel and feed ourselves. (In which case price rises in both are not artificial)

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

I'm hearing that the 45% of the corn crop in the US is listed as "fair to poor" due to the flooding we've been having.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25196080/?GT1=43001

I'm sure some of you'all will be happy to hear it.

 

[A Dashing Blade]

"The people who tell you that commodity prices today are driven by “economic fundamentals” are the same ones who said that house prices in Britain were rising because of land shortages. "

Excellent article by Anatole Kaletsky from back in May. apols for not posting earlier.

"The present commodity and oil boom shows all the classic symptoms of a financial bubble, such as Japan in the 1980s, technology stocks in the 1990s and, most recently, housing and mortgages in the US."

Too true. Some hilarious loonspudery in the comments

 

[gosub]

Read that article agreed with it, was a bit surprized the week later when he was banging on about needing a high oil price and managing a finite resource. he will go attending Bilderburg meetings

 

[david dissadent]

Famine in Ethiopia due to poor rains.

link

People reduced to eating cactus. Mud pies in Haiti, cactus in Ethiopia. But here is the kicker....

The head of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, Jacques Diouf, has warned that climate change is also affecting global food supply, potentially reducing crop yields in parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America by as much as 40% if global temperatures rise more than three degrees.

Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75% - far more than previously estimated - according to a confidential World Bank report obtained by the Guardian.

The damning unpublished assessment is based on the most detailed analysis of the crisis so far, carried out by an internationally-respected economist at global financial body.

The figure emphatically contradicts the US government's claims that plant-derived fuels contribute less than 3% to food-price rises. It will add to pressure on governments in Washington and across Europe, which have turned to plant-derived fuels to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and reduce their dependence on imported oil.

link In news thats not new, world food program is pointing the finger at the biofuel industry for a large part of recent food price hikes.

 

[david dissadent]

Link

The credit crunch is compounding a profit squeeze for farmers that may curb global harvests and worsen a food crisis for developing countries.

Global production of wheat, the most-consumed food crop, may drop 4.4 percent next year, said Dan Basse, president of AgResource Co. in Chicago, who has advised farmers, food companies and investors for 29 years. Harvests of corn and soybeans also are likely to fall, Basse said.

Smaller crops risk reviving prices of farm commodities that sank from records in 2008 after a six-year rally that spurred inflation and sparked riots from Asia to the Caribbean. Futures contracts on the Chicago Board of Trade show wheat will jump 16 percent by the end of 2009, corn will rise 15 percent and soybeans will gain 3 percent.

In Brazil, the world's third-biggest exporter of corn after the U.S. and Argentina, production may fall more than 20 percent because farmers can't get loans to buy fertilizer, said Enori Barbieri, a National Corn Producers Association vice president. The nation's coffee harvest, the world's largest, may drop 25 percent for the same reason, said Lucio Araujo, commercial director at farmer cooperative Cooxupe, located in Guaxupe.

In Russia, loan rates for farmers have jumped by half in some cases to more than 20 percent in the past few months, Arkady Zlochevsky, president of the Russian Grain Union, said in an interview earlier this month.

The price volatility is also hurting farmers very very hard, many of them bought fertiliser when the prices were at the peak early this year and now are selling the crops that this produced when prices have fallen, others have sold future crops when they were high or sold there crops a couple of years ago at lower prices and missed the big surge. The warehouses (grain elevators) are apparently in very deep financial trouble because of the price volatility.

There is good news though, Saudi Arabia, Russia, India and others are producing huge new fertiliser plants to turn natural gas into fertilizer, it was a bottle neck here that caused some fertlisers to be so damned expensive and hard to get.

The down side of that is we will become even more dependent on artificialy enhanced carrying capacity.
We are creaking at the seams.

 

[darkfibre]

Wheat Soars Most in 20 Years on Federal Reserve's Rate Decrease

Oct. 29 (Bloomberg) -- Wheat rose the most in at least 20 years on speculation the Federal Reserve and European Central Bank would cut interest rates, increasing liquidity and freeing up capital that will allow buyers to purchase U.S. supplies. --

--Wheat futures for December delivery rose 47.25 cents, or 9.2 percent, to $5.6125 a bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade, the biggest percentage gain for the contract closest to expiration since June 30, 1988.

Futures still are down 58 percent from a record $13.495 a bushel on Feb. 27 after growers planted more to take advantage of prices that rose 77 percent last year.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

<snip> There is good news though, Saudi Arabia, Russia, India and others are producing huge new fertiliser plants to turn natural gas into fertilizer, it was a bottle neck here that caused some fertlisers to be so damned expensive and hard to get.

The down side of that is we will become even more dependent on artificialy enhanced carrying capacity.
We are creaking at the seams.

There's also the economic and ecological impact of increased fertiliser use. Economic because buying fertilisers typically incurs debt, putting more small farmers out of business and increasing IMF's ability to fuck up the economies of endebted countries and ecological because of the contribution of fertilisers to loss of arable land (e.g. via salination)

 

[david dissadent]

There's also the economic and ecological impact of increased fertiliser use. Economic because buying fertilisers typically incurs debt, putting more small farmers out of business and increasing IMF's ability to fuck up the economies of endebted countries and ecological because of the contribution of fertilisers to loss of arable land (e.g. via salination)

Not using fertiliser will drop crop yields. Farmers in poor countries are not buying fertiliser because evil companies make them, they do so because it increases crop yields.

The solution is to use less food. But until there is a serious movement to cut down on the food consumed by the worlds wealthy then we will most likely need fertilizers to prevent mass starvation. Hobsons choice, until we acknowledge that grain fed beef and lamb need to be well and truly of the menu.

 

[darkfibre]

Not using fertiliser will drop crop yields.

David - did you read this thread: http://www.urban75.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=267918 ? I linked to the full report in post #31.

Also worth reading is Jared Diamond's 'Collapse' (which I'm just finishing now).

Porrit reviews it here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/jan/15/society

Video here: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4271982381147720351

...also Richard Manning's 'Against The Grain'. (more here)

 

[david dissadent]

Argentias drought

Now seriously impacting on its food production From the worlds second to seventh beef exporter.

China experiances worst drought for 30 years

Wheat-growing areas threatened
Almost half of the wheat-growing areas in the eight provinces — Hebei, Shanxi, Anhui, Jiangsu, Henan, Shandong, Shaanxi and Gansu — were threatened, Xinhua said, while nearly 4 million people lacked proper drinking water.

The official China Daily newspaper, citing meteorological authorities in Henan, said it was the worst drought in Henan since 1951 and that the province, a major supplier of winter wheat, had gone 105 consecutive days without rain.

But some relief may be in sight. Weather forecasts call for rain and snow in some of the stricken areas beginning Saturday.

Severe drought also persists in parts of the US and Australia.

 

[goebfwai]

These reports fit in with the climate change picture of changing, dramatic switches in world precipitation patterns, which means that countries that previously acted as the breadbaskets of the world will no longer be able to do so. This means there is a great urgency for places such as Britain and Europe that are benefiting on the whole - floods aside - from INCREASED precipitation need to step up to the challenge to organically maximise their food growth potential to meet the world shortfall and prevent unparalled levels of world starvation developing over the next 10-15 years.

Argentias drought

Now seriously impacting on its food production From the worlds second to seventh beef exporter.

China experiances worst drought for 30 years



Severe drought also persists in parts of the US and Australia.

 

[kyser_soze]

Hmmm...is everyone certain that these droughts are 'new' droughts, or simply part of multi-decade or even century long weather cycles (the Queensland droughts are part of a recognised 80-100 year long cycle it's reckoned, the main problem being that no one can agree on the time scales of some aboriginal accounts), or even longer? There's little meteorological data in any of these stories - the China one, for example, doesn't say when the last-but one drought was.

Droughts especially are something that need to be looked at on a long timescale...

 

[david dissadent]

Hmmm...is everyone certain that these droughts are 'new' droughts, or simply part of multi-decade or even century long weather cycles (the Queensland droughts are part of a recognised 80-100 year long cycle it's reckoned, the main problem being that no one can agree on the time scales of some aboriginal accounts), or even longer? There's little meteorological data in any of these stories - the China one, for example, doesn't say when the last-but one drought was.

Droughts especially are something that need to be looked at on a long timescale...

The drought in Australia and America are not unpresidenented. Both are regions that suffer from boughts of megadrought. I have no information on the Argentina and Chinese one. These drought will put pressure of supplies of grains and meat but I am a bit out of date on the exact stats. I was assuming from mid last year that the pressures that created the drawdown on grain stocks would partialy ease as the corn ethanol business would hurt badly as the cost of feedstock fed through to meat and produces cut numbers I was guessing that the amount of livestock consumed grain might fall. Its a guess though. Production had been sort of growing for years, but it was more a story of consumption out pacing it. This year has been all about the credit crunch drying up credit for farmers to buy fertilisers and other fallout from the global financial crisis. The droughts merely add pressure to the supply side.

One of the other huge stories has been the moves by nations to grab land. 'Investing' is the buzzword. Japan, China, Saudi, Kuwait, Korea etc has been investing in places like Africa, Indonesia and so on. The cynic in me thinks that these are second tier power making plays as the more stable countries where you can invest in land, the likes of Brazil and other Latin American countries have already been heavily invested in by the likes of Archer Daniel Michael, Cargill and Nestle.

 

[david dissadent]

On droughts I thought Id add that during the holocene thermal optimum the area that is now the South Western and Mid Western US was a dessert. Not just arid scrub land like Texas but in places where we are currently growing the worlds corn and wheat there were mobile sand dunes. The holocene thermal optimum was only about 1 degree warmer than today. Similar conditions were also in parts of South\ern Africa. South Africas wheat belt was part of the Kalahari. There is quiet a panic in places in the US now that a super drought may have arrived.

Lake Mead is at about 50% capacity and falling.
http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/prrl/2008-06.html
California and Las Vegas are in alot of trouble with water supplies
http://www.water.ca.gov/drought/

On the plus side back then the Sahel was a garden of Eden.

 

[Dr Jon]

Food will never be so cheap again

The world's grain stocks have dropped from four to 2.6 months cover since 2000, despite two bumper harvests in North America. China's inventories are at a 30-year low. Asian rice stocks are near danger level.