All sorts of little pieces out there, goings on..

The Philippines purchases rice through a national government body (NFA; National Food Authority) for imports. They just went out for a tender for 500k metric tons (approx. 2400 lbs per metric ton), due 05.05.2008, and it looks like they only got around 350k out of the requested 500k from the previous tender.

The Philippines is actually looking to change the methods they use to buy rice because of the escalating costs.

Now this next part is just beyond words:
Japan, the world's biggest net food importer, will ask the World Trade Organization as early as next week to introduce rules to stop countries restricting grain exports, Hiroaki Kojima, deputy director for international economic affairs at Japan's Agriculture Ministry, said on April 22.

Persuading the WTO to intervene may be tough for Japan, which protects its agriculture with subsidies and import tariffs as high as 700 percent on farm products. Developing nations are pressing Japan to cut the duties and open its market in the Doha Round of trade talks.
LInk to Article

The really interesting part in the Commodities market is that the futures market is now showing a rise in the dollar against other currencies. It's seemingly having no real effect on base commodity (food) prices, though.

Also, this whole re-thinking of Ethanol subsidies by the political chattering classes is nice, but it's really only going to have an effect on corn and/or soybeans, and that's if any subsidy cutback actually is passed into law (odds are against). Reason is that it's not all of the sudden going to affect either wheat growing areas, or rice growing areas.

If the farming community doesn't plant corn, they rotate and plant soybeans. Crop rotation cycles has more to do with it than ethanol subsidies.

Today, the real fight is a battle over (a) Cut ethanol subsidies back home here so it's more corn/soybeans for food, or (b) Spend our money we allocate for food purchases in foreign markets, instead of here in the US. If we buy here in the US, we support our markets, but then we have to pay higher transportation rates to get the food to it's intended location.

That's the real behind the scenes fight going on right now, and it's a no-holds-barred fight. Funny thing is, if we spend that money in overseas markets, we'll probably end up lowering our commodity food prices here back home, because right now, the federal government purchases are just working as a little extra 'spike' in commodity food prices. In the past, it's been more of a 'floor' - now it's functioning as a jack to raise the ceiling.

The above is a short term 'fix'. We still need to address the whole corn production for Ethanol or for food issue.

Another aspect to this entire discussion is that the big AG operations (Monsanto, Dow AgroScience, Pioneer, Syngenta, Bayer Crop Science, and any number of others) are having a major benefit dropped in their laps, which is a renewed push for increasing acceptance of biotechnology in crop production.

For the Ethanol vrs. food debate, see the NCGA National Corn Growers Assoc. website for their (obviously biased) viewpoint, but they make a very valid point on their website:

“It’s Not Food, It’s Not Fuel, It’s China” (05-02-08)
A change in Chinese meat consumption habits since 1995 is diverting eight billion bushels of grain per year to livestock feed and could empty global grain stocks by September 2010, according to a new study from Biofuels Digest
Link to the article

I guess my biggest problem is with the MSM as they cover the whole "food crisis", which is that they are big into hype and emotion (and with "gotcha journalism" being a requirement), and totally clueless on how to deal with the real underlying issues, much less explain the costs and benefits of the potential solutions.