Posted on 04/06/2008 1:15:39 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Storm Warning
The world could be one crop failure away from an actual food crisis. Market panic has already started.
George Wehrfritz and Jason Overdorf
NEWSWEEK
Updated: 11:36 AM ET Apr 5, 2008
When all goes well, thunderheads tower above India's southwestern state of Kerala in early June, drenching the region's vital rice fields and ensuring a bountiful harvest. From there the summer monsoon plods northward to soak the baking plains and irrigate vital breadbasket regions that feed 1.1 billion people before arriving at the foot of the Himalayas in August. Forecasting this complex meteorological process has always been an obsession within India, but this year the world will be watching. Changes in the monsoon cycle can shrink India's total grain harvest by up to 20 percent, creating a shortfall of 30 million metric tons. During India's last crop failure, in 2002, the country had a massive reserve to fall back on. "Now," says Usha Tuteja, an agricultural economist at Delhi University, "we don't have enough buffer stocks to make up for one bad year."
India isn't the only danger zone today. A major storm battering the Philippines or Bangladesh at the wrong moment, a pest or plant-disease outbreak in Vietnam, or floods along China's Yangtze River like those that occurred in the mid-1990s would put serious strains on global grain reserves already depleted to levels not seen since the 1970s. Global markets are behaving as if a food shock is imminent.
In recent months the commodity prices of rice, wheat and corn has jumped 50 percent or more, pushing retail prices to levels unseen in a generation and prompting grain-exporting countries to curtail trade to suppress domestic inflation.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsweek.com ...
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HUNGRY??? I’ll trade a loaf of bread for a tanker of oil!
LLS
We’re all going to die again...? We just did that 29 times last month for assorted, various reasons...
Journalists used to follow H.L. Mencken's adage that “A journalist's job is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” But today, an extra phrase has been added: "and scare the hell out of everybody in between!"
It's the same for a food shortage. One nation could run out of food, or one village, or if one family runs out of food, it's a crisis personally.
The US is not going to run out of food. I hope we continue to plant lots of corn, soybeans etc because then we will actually have a valuable product to export.
The days of the local food shortage are over. Food is sold into the global market, and a crop failure in India would have an affect on worldwide prices. The cost of a loaf of bread in the US could double overnight.
Sure, we’d have plenty of food, but only because we have plenty of money.
Doesn’t warmer weather extend growing seasons, bring more land into production and increase food production? Global warming would be a good thing, then.
The problem seems to be that much of the world is against using GM crops that would actually increase food production. Some countries will not even allow GM seeds into the country even though they would be more insect and drought resistant than the local crops. It is a travesty. They are dying over shortsighted fears.
A bag of corn chips (tortillos) that I buy at Wal-Mart just went from $1.28 a bag to $1.50 a bag...that’s a 17% increase in price in one move.
We’re all going to dine!
Indeed; wasn’t the ‘Green Revolution’ brought about by using better (modified!) seeds?
Its a good time to be a farmer at least.
While the stocks to use ratio is at its lowest level ever for the majority of basic agricultural commodities, we are really only one normal crop away from prices falling and going back to normal again.
Total production has only grown at 1% for the past two years as a result of poor weather (non-global warming kind of weather.)
Farmers can easily ramp up production by a 1% or 2% when the prices are this high. Productivity of existing operations is going to increase substantially this year just because farmers have more money and are buying the latest productivity enhancing equipment.
A big crop failure somewhere or continuing poor weather from La Nina or the less-active Sun could happen however. Then your loaf of bread will be $2.50 instead of $1.50. That is still only 10 minutes of work per day (which should tell you how agricultural productivity has increased over the decades.) It used to take 4 hours worth of work to by a loaf of bread. Now it is only 5 to 10 minutes.
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