Posted on 05/18/2008 7:47:57 PM PDT by blam
World food price crisis 'here to stay'
By David Blair in New York
Last Updated: 1:43AM BST 19/05/2008
EPA Sir John Holme said the world needed a "green revolution"
High food prices are here to stay and the world needs a "green revolution" to feed its rising population, the senior humanitarian official at the United Nations has told The Telegraph. Sir John Holmes, Britain's former ambassador to Paris who now serves as the UN's under-secretary for humanitarian affairs, said structural changes in the global economy are the cause of the sudden rise in food prices.
"It is possible that in the next two or three years prices will come down a bit from the peaks we've seen in the last few months – but not to where they were before," he said.
Sir John said the emergence of hundreds of millions of middle class consumers in China and India has increased demand for food. High oil prices make transporting food more expensive. The supply of grain has been hit by bad weather and the transfer of land to grow biofuels instead of food crops.
With the global population forecast to reach nine billion by 2050 compared with six billion today, Sir John said, the world needed a "green revolution", especially in Africa.
There is a lot of hatred of the human race around starting with Lucifer who thought God’s creation was an abomination.......
Needed to be repeated.
Anybody got any info on the impact of “Organic” agriculture on food prices and supply? Seems to me that yield per acre is significantly lower, my guess would be by 20-30%.. That has to mean more total acres needed to produce the same amount of total food. My wife has fallen prey to the mystical foolishness of what I see as a big-time scam.
Thanks... I was afraid I was turning into a gullible liberal, but that stuff is just terrifying.
Organic yields are substantially lower than modern yields, sometimes by as much as 50%.
The biggest mistake the organic advocates made in their regulations was the elimination of synthetic fertilizers. On our farm, I ran the numbers:
I could fertilize one pivot (125 acres) of alfalfa for one year with ONE truckload (about 28 tons) of prilled synthetic fertilizer.... or 170 truckloads of cow muck.
That’s how low the NPK levels are in things like manure. Don’t get me wrong - manure is a great soil amendment, but only marginally so for the NPK content. What it has that synthetics don’t is organic matter.
We see lots of people babbling on incessantly about “soil depletion” when they talk of “factory farming” and such. Rubbish. As long as you test your soil and add what you need in the way of fertilizers and amendments, you can maintain very high yields. You cannot, however, do this with fish guts, poultry litter or cow muck, as you simply cannot afford the trucking costs and logistics associated with that much material in one year. So your yields will go down.
If you want to see statistical pictures of what full-on organic farming looks like, simply look at records of what ag yields were like prior to WWII. That’s when all farming was “organic” - and farmers didn’t have much choice in the matter.
There’s tons of food in the world right now.
What the press isn’t telling you is that the shortfalls in wheat and rice are more due to trade restrictions slammed into place by other wheat producing countries (like Russia, Ukraine, Argentina, and a 50% reduction in wheat production in Oz due to drought). It has nothing to do with US production or carry-outs at all.
The reason why we now have the lowest carry-outs we’ve had in decades is due to how cheap our commodities are for people in other countries. The US dollar has gone down by 41% since 2002, and this makes our commodities dirt-cheap on the world markets. Of course these other countries (India, China, et al) are going to buy up our products with both hands - with the dollar being as cheap as it is, they can probably buy it here and ship it there for less than it costs them to buy it.
Ethanol and farmers in the US have little power over the value of the US dollar in forex trading. The biggest causes are the people in DC spending like sailors in a whorehouse, our trade imbalance and our absurdly high levels of government, corporate and personal debt in the US.
“Organic yields are substantially lower than modern yields, sometimes by as much as 50%.
The biggest mistake the organic advocates made in their regulations was the elimination of synthetic fertilizers. On our farm, I ran the numbers:
I could fertilize one pivot (125 acres) of alfalfa for one year with ONE truckload (about 28 tons) of prilled synthetic fertilizer.... or 170 truckloads of cow muck.
That’s how low the NPK levels are in things like manure. Don’t get me wrong - manure is a great soil amendment, but only marginally so for the NPK content. What it has that synthetics don’t is organic matter.
We see lots of people babbling on incessantly about “soil depletion” when they talk of “factory farming” and such. Rubbish. As long as you test your soil and add what you need in the way of fertilizers and amendments, you can maintain very high yields. You cannot, however, do this with fish guts, poultry litter or cow muck, as you simply cannot afford the trucking costs and logistics associated with that much material in one year. So your yields will go down.
If you want to see statistical pictures of what full-on organic farming looks like, simply look at records of what ag yields were like prior to WWII. That’s when all farming was “organic” - and farmers didn’t have much choice in the matter.”
Thanks very much. Confirms my instincts.
I think the drought in Australia is having a larger effect than recognized by most.
The original Green Revolution was fueled by cheap oil - for fertilizers and mechanization. Mechanization in turn required large, uniform crops that could be efficiently harvested. That requirement has led to widespread monoculture; its lack of genetic diversity leaves our crops to susceptible to blights, like the Irish potato famine. In view of those facts, I’m not sure the original Green Revolution will prove sustainable. What miracle will the next Green Revolution be based on?
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