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Archive for the ‘Agriculture’ Category

The U.S. Has No Remaining Grain Reserves

Posted by Charlie Kilo on June 9th, 2008

Larry Matlack, President of the American Agriculture Movement (AAM), has raised concerns over the issue of U.S. grain reserves after it was announced that the sale of 18.37 million bushels of wheat from USDA’s Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) Bill Emerson Humanitarian Trust:

“According to the May 1, 2008 CCC inventory report there are o­nly 24.1 million bushels of wheat in inventory, so after this sale there will be o­nly 2.7 million bushels of wheat left the entire CCC inventory,” warned Matlack.  “Our concern is not that we are using the remainder of our strategic grain reserves for humanitarian relief.  AAM fully supports the action and all humanitarian food relief.  Our concern is that the U.S. has nothing else in our emergency food pantry.  There is no cheese, no butter, no dry milk powder, no grains or anything else left in reserve.  The o­nly thing left in the entire CCC inventory will be 2.7 million bushels of wheat which is about enough wheat to make ½ of a loaf of bread for each of the 300 million people in America.”

The CCC is a federal government-owned and operated entity that was created to stabilize, support, and protect farm income and prices. CCC is also supposed to maintain balanced and adequate supplies of agricultural commodities and aids in their orderly distribution.

“This lack of emergency preparedness is the fault of the 1996 farm bill which eliminated the government’s grain reserves as well as the Farmer Owned Reserve (FOR),” explained Matlack.  “We had hoped to reinstate the FOR and a Strategic Energy Grain Reserve in the new farm bill, but the politics of food defeated our efforts.  As farmers it is our calling and purpose in life to feed our families, our communities, our nation and a good part of the world, but we need better planning and coordination if we are to meet that purpose.  AAM pledges to continue our work for better farm policy which includes an FOR and a Strategic Energy Grain Reserve.”

AAM’s support for the FOR program, which allows the grain to be stored o­n farms, is a key component to a safe grain reserve in that the supplies will be decentralized in the event of some unforeseen calamity which might befall the large grain storage terminals. 

A Strategic Energy Grain Reserve is as crucial for the nation’s domestic energy needs as the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.  AAM also supports full funding for the replenishment and expansion of Bill Emerson Humanitarian Trust.

Survey Shows US Honey Bee Deaths Increased Over Last Year

Posted by Charlie Kilo on May 7th, 2008

Most Americans are unaware of the disastrous implications of the decline in honeybee production:

A survey of bee health released Tuesday revealed a grim picture, with 36.1 percent of the nation’s commercially managed hives lost since last year.

Last year’s survey commissioned by the Apiary Inspectors of America found losses of about 32 percent.

As beekeepers travel with their hives this spring to pollinate crops around the country, it’s clear the insects are buckling under the weight of new diseases, pesticide drift and old enemies like the parasitic varroa mite, said Dennis vanEngelsdorp, president of the group.

This is the second year the association has measured colony deaths across the country. This means there aren’t enough numbers to show a trend, but clearly bees are dying at unsustainable levels and the situation is not improving, said vanEngelsdorp, also a bee expert with the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture.

“For two years in a row, we’ve sustained a substantial loss,” he said. “That’s an astonishing number. Imagine if one out of every three cows, or one out of every three chickens, were dying. That would raise a lot of alarm.”

Asia fears lost decade, unrest from food price shock

Posted by Charlie Kilo on May 4th, 2008

The food crisis is global in its reach and implications: 

Soaring food prices may throw millions of Asians back into poverty, undo a decade of gains and stoke civil unrest, regional leaders said on Sunday as they urged a boost to agricultural production to meet rising demand.

Asia — home to two thirds of the world’s poor — risks rising social tension as a doubling of wheat and rice prices in the last year has slammed people who spend more than half their income on food, Japanese Finance Minister Fukushiro Nukaga said during the Asian Development Bank’s annual meeting.

If food prices rise 20 percent, 100 million poor people across Asia could be forced back into extreme poverty, warned Indian Finance Secretary D. Subba Rao.

“In many countries that will mean the undoing of gains in poverty reduction achieved in the past decade of growth,” Rao told the ADB’s meeting in Madrid.

Total wheat crop failure?

Posted by patriot on April 26th, 2008

There’s fungus amongus:

On top of record-breaking rice prices and corn through the roof on ethanol demand, wheat is now rusting in the fields across Africa.

Officials fear near total crop losses, and the fungus, known as Ug99, is spreading.

Wheat prices have been soaring this week on top of already high prices, and futures contracts spiked, too, on panic buying.

Food shortages lead to revolution

Posted by patriot on April 13th, 2008

A possibility discussed in this Time article:

The idea of the starving masses driven by their desperation to take to the streets and overthrow the ancien regime has seemed impossibly quaint since capitalism triumphed so decisively in the Cold War. Since then, the spectacle of hunger sparking revolutionary violence has been the stuff of Broadway musicals rather than the real world of politics. And yet, the headlines of the past month suggest that skyrocketing food prices are threatening the stability of a growing number of governments around the world. Ironically, it may be the very success of capitalism in transforming regions previously restrained by various forms of socialism that has helped create the new crisis.
…
The sociology of the food riot is pretty straightforward: The usually impoverished majority of citizens may acquiesce to the rule of detested corrupt and repressive regimes when they are preoccupied with the daily struggle to feed their children and themselves, but when circumstances render it impossible to feed their hungry children, normally passive citizens can very quickly become militants with nothing to lose. That’s especially true when the source of their hunger is not the absence of food supplies but their inability to afford to buy the available food supplies. And that’s precisely what we’re seeing in the current wave of global food-price inflation. As Josette Sheeran of the U.N. World Food Program put it last month, “We are seeing food on the shelves but people being unable to afford it.”

Rice continues to surge

Posted by patriot on April 8th, 2008

Don’t you love how wise people who prepare and store are labeled as “hoarders”?

Rice climbed to a record for a fourth day as the Philippines, the biggest importer, announced plans to buy 1 million tons and some of the world’s largest exporters cut sales to ensure they can feed their own people.

Rice, the staple food for half the world, rose as much as 2.9 percent to $21.60 per 100 pounds in Chicago, before paring gains. The price has doubled in the past year. Philippine President Gloria Arroyo announced two rice tenders today and pledged to crack down on hoarding. Anyone found guilty of “stealing rice from the people” will be jailed, she said.

Grains Gone Wild

Posted by patriot on April 8th, 2008

Another slam dunk from Paul Kurgman:

I’m talking about the food crisis. Over the past few years the prices of wheat, corn, rice and other basic foodstuffs have doubled or tripled, with much of the increase taking place just in the last few months. High food prices dismay even relatively well-off Americans — but they’re truly devastating in poor countries, where food often accounts for more than half a family’s spending.

There have already been food riots around the world. Food-supplying countries, from Ukraine to Argentina, have been limiting exports in an attempt to protect domestic consumers, leading to angry protests from farmers — and making things even worse in countries that need to import food.

How did this happen? The answer is a combination of long-term trends, bad luck — and bad policy.

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