Posted on 08/25/2009 10:17:14 AM PDT by h20skier66
Years have passed since investors seemed to pay attention to anything other than the latest short-term, but irrelevant, number of the day. Perhaps the ESPN approach being applied to business news is part of the reason for that. What might happen next week or next year seems of little concern. However, next week and next year have a habit of becoming today over time.
Sometimes though, short-term events, being largely ignored, unveil longer term developments. One of those might be the drought currently ravaging India’s farmers. Summer monsoons provide more than half of the rainfall in much of India. Indian Agri-Food production is uniquely dependent on those annual rains. This year those rains have not come as expected. Rainfall is about a third less than normal. Agri-Food production will suffer in India as the summer rains are critical to India’s Agri-Food production. Rice production, a major staple, will fall by more than 10%.
With only a little more than a month of rice consumption in storage, food shortages are likely in India. The Indian government, in typical denial of reality, says that they will simply buy what is needed in global markets. Global Agri-Food markets are seen by many governments as a pantry to be opened any time the need arises. Those inevitable purchases of Agri-Foods by India can only increase the global prices of Agri-Foods.
India’s reliance on imported Agri-Foods due to this year’s poor monsoons is part of a longer term problem. India’s system of providing water to agriculture is inadequate to insure sufficient future Agri-Food production to feed a growing population. India simply will not be able to feed its future population with today’s water management system.
(Excerpt) Read more at commoditynewscenter.com ...
Meat. Eat it, don’t worship it.
Rain Shortage = Globull Warming.
Don’t let the environuts hear about this, they will claim that while it was cool in the world here in the USA and elsewhere the drought in India is clearly caused by the Earth having a fever.
Not sure when this was written, or how changes since have affected the outlook, but daughter who’s now in Delhi said last Friday they had monsoons... took some of her co-workers six hours to get home.
And yet they are part of the so called BRIC whose Stocks are soaring...
Move along, nothing to see here. Go watch the Dodgers play the Rockies.
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