The Upside of High Food Prices
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Originally Posted by
Beelzebubalicious
Great. Just what we need - to become dependent on Russia for food and energy. I'm sure they're also stockpiling women for the growing gender deficit...
Hey Eric ! There are some intriguing links at the Moscow Times, and it wasn't too long ago that Nashi Summer camps were advertising pro-creation :cool:
Anyhoo, back to the thread. Now here's a unique opinion from Konstantin Sonin, a professor at the New Economic School and a columnist for Vedomosti.
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You should not worry too much about the 1.5 billion Chinese people. If the increase in prices is caused primarily by the increase in meat consumption in China, this means that the quality of life has improved there. If things had gotten worse for them because of their increased meat consumption, they would have ceased to eat meat. In that case, prices would have dropped, and they would have gone back to living as before. :eek:
You also should not worry about the people in the United States or Europe. All the U.S. government has to do to solve the problem is to reduce subsidies to its farmers, including payments for non use of farmland, and prices will drop substantially. To be sure, the agriculture lobby in the United States is very powerful, and even touching the issue is dangerous for Congressmen, but the overwhelming majority of Americans are not producers of grain, but consumers.
At some point, the rise in food prices will pressure the government to stop fulfilling the lobbyists' requests to limit agricultural supply. In this case, an increase in competition and production among producers will lead to sharply lower grain prices.
For countries that significantly depend on food imports -- including Russia -- this logic does not apply. :wry:
Africa Plays the Rice Card
Consider the case of Uganda. The country’s rice output has risen 2½ times since 2004, according to the Ministry of Trade.
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Uganda’s importers, seeing the shift, have invested in new mills in the country, expanding employment and creating competition for farmer output, thereby improving prices. New mills, meanwhile, lowered the cost of bringing domestic rice to market. While people in developing countries across the globe are clamoring about the sharp rise in food prices, Ugandans are still paying about the same for rice as they always have. And Uganda is poised to start exporting rice within East Africa—and beyond.
The secret of Uganda’s homegrown success? Ignoring decades of bad Western advice.
Always Interesting to see if there's an agenda in an article
From Foreign Policy article:
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One of the leaders of Uganda’s rice revolution is Gilbert Bukenya, the country’s vice president and its leading advocate for the commercialization of agriculture. I first met Bukenya at his home on the shores of Lake Victoria, where he laid out the basic philosophy. “By farming smarter, Ugandans not only can grow more, they can earn more money,” he told me. An advocate of food self-sufficiency, Bukenya wants Ugandans to eat more homegrown rice, boosting local farmers and rice millers while at the same time freeing hard cash for other uses. Bukenya has long promoted a new African rice that grows in “uplands” (as opposed to wetland “paddies”) and requires less water.
Embracing a new variety is only part of the working-smarter formula. Once rice output began to expand, Bukenya and other Ugandan politicians played another card: They stumped for a duty of 75 percent to be imposed on foreign rice. The legislature passed the duty, which stimulated domestic rice production further.
There's the real meat of the article. The pols didn't create restrictions on imports until AFTER the output started to expand. Vital point, there, that at least IMHO, the article didn't do sufficient justice to. That's a lesson our pols here in the US need to learn.
You have to expand supply first, then you have got all sorts of options available to you. Good for Uganda for what they are doing - it's working for them, and probably will continue to do so. Now the key for them is to keep expanding/improving their infrastructure (roads, rail, mills, ports, storage facilities), so they can not just feed their own population, but also process exports.
Looks like they have some good, thoughtful leadership in place. Just be wise enough to use the tariffs on imported goods sparingly.
Not that it really matter's but just curious
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Originally Posted by
JJackson
From The New Yorker article.
I could not quickly find a correct figure to rebut this but I will take bets it is far too optimistic. I will give you a cow, pig or chicken and 12 pound of grain and I bet you can not increase their weight by a pound each - if you manage can a couple of ounces between them I will be very impressed. My money says the cow will eat all 12 pounds and all you get in return is an impressive cow pat.
Edit:
I can not paste this in but the link is to
Agroecology: The Ecology of sustainable food systems and on page 256 it gives a conversion factor of 1 to 5% for 'confined livestock' i.e if they do nothing but eat to put on weight.
How did cows, pigs, or chickens ever survive without farmers growing grain to feed them??
They just wondered around
eating what ever they could find, just like all their wild relatives still do. Our domesticated versions just get a helping hand to get fat - and dead - quicker.
Interactive World Food Security Map
Pay Attention to this one....
Article from Monsanto's annual meeting:
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Monsanto's 2030 Goals
By Rachel Melcer, ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Dated: 06/05/2008
Monsanto Co. is offering to help farmers produce more crops while using less water, energy and land for every bushel of corn, cotton and soybeans they harvest using its technology.
The question is: Will the Creve Coeur-based company have many takers?
To succeed, Monsanto must win over biotechnology skeptics, address extremely complex global social, political and economic challenges — and convince naysayers that it should be at the head of the table.
But the company's leaders say they are prepared.
"The question of how do you produce more and conserve more is at the heart of what we're about. … And it's increasingly what the global challenge is about as well," said Hugh Grant, president, chairman and chief executive.
He laid out a three-point plan Wednesday morning during an employee meeting.
•Monsanto will develop corn, cotton and soybean seeds that double crop yields by 2030 over the level of production in 2000.
For example, the weighted average yield in the United States, Brazil and Argentina would reach 79 bushels of soybeans per acre by 2030, up 92 percent from last year's U.S. production; corn, 220 bushels per acre, up 46 percent; and cotton, 1,344 pounds per acre, up 53 percent.
In addition, Monsanto is donating $10 million over five years to fund public-sector research for improving yields in rice and wheat crops.
•The company also will help farmers conserve natural resources by developing corn, cotton and soybean seeds that require less energy, fertilizer and water to produce the same yield. Its goal is to reduce by one-third the amount of resources required per unit of output in 2030, versus what was needed in 2000.
Link to Article
IF they can pull this off (and from what I'm hearing from talking to people in the community, they think it's likely, and it won't even take to 2030 to get it done), we're on the front edge of the Second Green Revolution.
Then there's the UN trying to horn their way into the debate:
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United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon last week said the world needed to invest as much as $20 billion a year on agriculture to tackle soaring food prices.
Link to article
Now, that's typical UN thinking (throw bucketfull's of somebody else's hard earned money at the problem, because they can't possibly change the way they do things).
But in any case, it's going to be a hard year in the marketplace for this year. Look at the numbers for planting this year. It's way behind previous years, primarily because of weather.
Food Shortages Makes For Strange Bedfellows...
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Drought stricken, Iran buys US wheat for first time in 27 years
Dated: Aug 25 2008 10:44 PM US/Eastern
Wracked by drought, Iran has turned to the United States for wheat for the first time in 27 years, marking a setback for Tehran's search for agricultural self-sufficiency.
According to a recent US Department of Agriculture report, Iran has bought about 1.18 million tonnes of US hard wheat since the beginning of the 2008-2009 crop season in June.
The number, which has been growing steadily all summer, already represents nearly 5.0 percent of US annual exports forecast by the USDA.
The last time Iran imported US wheat was in 1981-1982.
Link to Article
This one has really hit the news Link
This was not an anticipated purchase - It's pretty clear that Iranian marketplace options for hard wheat (right now) were pretty limited. The interesting part is that the Iranian shortfall is estimated at around 4.5 mil metric tons, and this sale is for 1.18 mil metric tons. So it could grow even more. Depends on wheat harvests in places like Australia, which is still several months off.
I'd be interested in a geopolitical "read" on how this affects "other ongoing issues" between Iran and the US. Thoughts?