Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 04/25/2008 3:13:26 AM PDT by Sub-Driver
Food Crisis Eclipsing Climate Change By JOSH GERSTEIN, Staff Reporter of the Sun | April 25, 2008
The campaign against climate change could be set back by the global food crisis, as foreign populations turn against measures to use foodstuffs as substitutes for fossil fuels.
With prices for rice, wheat, and corn soaring, food-related unrest has broken out in places such as Haiti, Indonesia, and Afghanistan. Several countries have blocked the export of grain. There is even talk that governments could fall if they cannot bring food costs down.
One factor being blamed for the price hikes is the use of government subsidies to promote the use of corn for ethanol production. An estimated 30% of America’s corn crop now goes to fuel, not food.
“I don’t think anybody knows precisely how much ethanol contributes to the run-up in food prices, but the contribution is clearly substantial,” a professor of applied economics and law at the University of Minnesota, C. Ford Runge, said. A study by a Washington think tank, the International Food Policy Research Institute, indicated that between a quarter and a third of the recent hike in commodities prices is attributable to biofuels.
Last year, Mr. Runge and a colleague, Benjamin Senauer, wrote an article in Foreign Affairs, “How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor.”
“We were criticized for being alarmist at the time,” Mr. Runge said. “I think our views, looking back a year, were probably too conservative.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nysun.com ...
lib/dems and their unintended consequences...
Looks like Malthus was right afterall.
Wonder if Fat Al is considering jumping to this bandwagon now that Global Warming is imploding. I can see him as the spokesman for world hunger. /s
Gore’s fault.
Amen!
Seems we are destine to starve to death while being baked by Mutha Earth.
Please Mr. Taxman. Tax us more!
ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒE
Oh for gosh sakes already!
1/3 of the FOREIGN grain markets are closed! Closed due to FOREIGN countries hording food for their own growing populations, not biofuels related.
Couple that with this:
At this writing, some Oklahoma and Texas elevators are offering to forward contract wheat for a minus 75 cents basis the Kansas City Board of Trade July wheat futures contract price. The KCBT July wheat contract price is $11.40, and wheat may be forward contracted for $10.65.
With wheat prices above $10, you would expect producers and elevator managers to be feeling good about the wheat market. What I have observed is that many are scared, worried or some other adjective that means, “They just do not know what to expect, and what happens may not be good.”
Fear comes from the fact that Oklahoma producers have had three below-average crops in a row and two total disasters. Texas producers have experienced two disasters out of the last three crops and are facing a potential disaster this year. Three out of the last four Kansas wheat crops have been below average and two were disasters.
Crop insurance and disaster payments may cover part of producers’ lost income. Elevators, however, have no government help. They depend on wheat bushels (volume) to make money and the bushels have not been there.
http://southwestfarmpress.com/grains/wheat-prices-0410/
And suddenly...corn biofuels is not the BIG issue everyone is trying to make it into. What all this biofuel talk demonstrates is how uneducated most Americans are about farming, ranching etc.
“Based on current market conditions, bulk grains, oilseeds, and cotton exports should rise $13.2 billion and account for 70 percent of the overall increase in export value for 2008. Higher prices account for most of this increase, but export volumes are also generally higher,” Schafer said. “Coarse grains are forecast to rise 10.9 million tons to 70 million tons and wheat should rise 2.3 million tons.”
http://southwestfarmpress.com/markets/farm-exports-0222/
When he was Vice President, Al Gore cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate to pass the bill that mandated the federal government’s program to use corn for fuel. The global food shortage is the result of this Democrat-sponsored law signed by Mrs. Clinton’s HINO.
This is the kind of disaster that results when environmentalists, who make up in emotion what they lack for brains, have the power to influence Democrats in office.
Now they want to ruin the entire economy of the country, using the excuse of the myth of global warming. Perhaps we do deserve to become a third-world country if we can’t stand up to these eco-terrorists.
You’re far too polite in how you wrote this up.
I’m so fed up with this mush-for-brains crap that rattles around here on FR about food stocks.
After hanging around FR for more than a year now, I’m completely convinced that conservatives are just as stupid as liberals when it comes to food and farming. The people of the US are so utterly clueless as to how food is produced, priced, moved, sold, brokered, etc that they’ll believe anything the press says.
If the same press reports on some political issue, conservatives at FR rush to debunk it. The very same press publishes something stupid about food? Conservatives here buy it, hook, line and sinker.
99% of the people on FR can’t tell you what “basis” is on a grain contract. If they can’t tell you (in one phrase) what basis is, they should shut their pieholes.
Let’s not even confuse them with forward contracts, hedging, hedge-to-deliver, etc. Let’s just ask them real simple questions and see what they don’t know.
Bio-ethanol, made from food-stocks is the culprit - NOT dio-Diesel, made from alternate feed stocks.
There is a Clear distinction.
Those cards will get a WHOLE lot less mileage at the store though, but of course the federal gov will simply print more money to increase the card's value every month.
Are you saying that the biofuel scam has nothing to do with prices?
And your having such a bad attitude about it isn't helping matters either. Yes, I among others don't know much about the food industry, other than what I get from news sources. How much do you know about web services?
If you have information to share, share it without an attitude and FR will be a better informed place
What does any of that have to do with the fact that a substantial portion of the US corn crop is no longer destined for food consumption, but for fuel?
And the argument that the corn used for fuel isn’t the ‘sweet corn’ destined for consumption is bunk. Having lived overseas for four out of the last ten years, the corn that is sold for food at corner kiosks is most definitely NOT the ‘sweet corn’, but the stuff many claim as not fit for human consumption.
And adding the ethanol producers to the list of buyers for that adds greatly to the demand, thus driving away those with the least amount of money - like Haiti, Afganistan, etc, etc.
And those next in line start to restrict the sale of their own foodstuffs, as they know that they are next in line. And that exacerbates the problem.
Facts that are exacerbating the food problem far more than our biofuel production.
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