Forget Oil, the New Global Crisis is Food

http://www.enn.com/


A new crisis is emerging, a global food catastrophe that will reach further and be more crippling than anything the world has ever seen. The credit crunch and the reverberations of soaring oil prices around the world will pale in comparison to what is about to transpire, Donald Coxe, global portfolio strategist at BMO Financial Group said at the Empire Club's 14th annual investment outlook in Toronto on Thursday.

"It's not a matter of if, but when," he warned investors. "It's going to hit this year hard."

-snip-

"The greatest challenge to the world is not US$100 oil; it's getting enough food so that the new middle class can eat the way our middle class does, and that means we've got to expand food output dramatically," he said.

-snip-

The impact of tighter food supply is already evident in raw food prices, which have risen 22% in the past year.

Mr. Coxe said in an interview that this surge would begin to show in the prices of consumer foods in the next six months. Consumers already paid 6.5% more for food in the past year.

-snip-

"Those who have food are going to have a big edge."

With 54% of the world's corn supply grown in America's mid-west, the U.S. is one of those countries with an edge.
--------------------------


I don't know if we have an edge or not?

we waste a lot of land and water growing beef and other meats, and the food to feed them. Oil too.

The current rise in prices is tied to the rise in corn prices and all the related products made from corn. Since those prices have risen farmers are not growing other grains and growing corn instead. This causes a price rise in those products also. The rise in corn comes from the increased mandated use of ethanol, the biggest energy-waster the world has ever seen. As long as ethanol is used in gas food prices will continue to rise and people will starve.

in other words, our demand for corn products - including HFC and corn-fed meat - also helps drive the price up.

I agree ethanol is a huge boondoggle and will create problems, if it helps. But I also think if we stop relying so much on corn we'd be better off anyway.

Hemp is just as good for bio-fuel as corn is, but can be raised on marginal land without excessive use of water or fertilizers.

For much of our history we've had a very balanced rotational cycle in agricultural, and part of the cycle was grazing animals on cropland in order that they could manure it and provide fertilizer. The trouble is we've gotten away from that style of farming and instead have adapted much more mono-crop farming that requires increasing use of petroleum based fertilizer and the consequent overgrazing of other land.

I don't have a problem with meat eating per se, I have a problem with how we are doing it - horrid farming practices and over-consumption of it. True, I don't think we need meat as much as some seem to think - but whatever. If I had to choose between one person stopping eating it, and 100 people cutting back a bit and buying meat raised more humanely and ecologically soundly, I would take the cutting back because it would have a better overall impact, honestly.

What with climate change producing prolonged droughts, 100,000 year old aquifers going dry, rivers being sucked dry before they reach the sea, wetlands vanishing...

It takes water to generate food. Water in the right places at the right times.
It takes water to sustain burgeoning populations.
It takes water to maintain an economic infrastructure.

And the world is running out of it.

Yet another world crisis brought on by global corporate organization and consolidation: the increase of markets and areas of sales, at cheaper and cheaper prices, for fewer and fewer corporations, reducing the actual number of farmers in the world, (and taking their income away from them), and increasing the damage to the overworked areas where huge factory "farms" of various types now operate. More and more millions of families in the world, no longer self-sustaining and able to eat and drink water even when economic times are grim, more and more people who only consume--from and smaller and smaller commercial source for things. Contaminated or genetically-modified food products now infect and poison more and more people, because the area of slaes is now the whole world, more and more resources are now just used until they are depleted, because the commercial food operations are just run and financed by global investment frims that do not care, and will simply drop this profit-maker for another investment, if it fails. Food, water, usable land--these things can now be actually used to death, only BECAUSE it is all on the global/commercial/consolidated scale now, not local, not real, small scale family farmers.