Warfare: Food Supply/Access

[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...

[Stan]

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

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.

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.

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.

[Stan]

Consider the case of Uganda. The country’s rice output has risen 2½ times since 2004, according to the Ministry of Trade.

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.

[Watcher In The Middle]

From Foreign Policy article:

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.

[bourbon]

The Last Bite: Is the world’s food system collapsing?, by Bee Wilson. The New Yorker, May 19, 2008.

Like Malthus, Roberts sees humanity increasingly struggling to meet its food needs. He predicts that in the next forty years, as agriculture is threatened by climate change, “demand for food will rise precipitously,” outstripping supply. The reasons for this, however, are not strictly Malthusian. For Malthus, famine was inevitable because the math of human existence did not add up: the means of subsistence grew only arithmetically (1, 2, 3), whereas population grew geometrically (2, 4, 8). By this analysis, food production could never catch up with fertility. Malthus was wrong, on both counts. In his treatise, Malthus couldn’t envisage any innovations for increasing yield beyond “dressing” the soil with cattle manure. In the decades after he wrote, farmers in England took advantage of new machinery, powerful fertilizers, and higher-yield seeds, and supply rose faster than demand. As the availability of food increased, and people became more prosperous, fertility fell.

Malthus could not have imagined that demand might increase catastrophically even where populations were static or falling. The problem is not just the number of mouths to feed; it’s the quantity of food that each mouth consumes when there are no natural constraints. As the world becomes richer, people eat too much, and too much of the wrong things—above all, meat. Since it takes on average four pounds of grain to make a single pound of meat, Roberts writes, “meatier diets also geometrically increase overall food demands” even in those parts of Europe and North America where fertility rates are low. Malthus knew that some people were more “frugal” than others, but he hugely underestimated the capacity of ordinary human beings to keep eating. Even now, there is no over-all food shortage when measured by global subsistence needs. Despite the current food crisis, last year’s worldwide grain harvest was colossal, five per cent above the previous year’s. We are not yet living on Cormac McCarthy’s scorched earth. Yet demand is increasing ever faster. As of 2006, there were eight hundred million people on the planet who were hungry, but they were outnumbered by the billion who were overweight. Our current food predicament resembles a Malthusian scenario—misery and famine—but one largely created by overproduction rather than underproduction. Our ability to produce vastly too many calories for our basic needs has skewed the concept of demand, and generated a wildly dysfunctional market.

[JJackson]

Since it takes on average four pounds of grain to make a single pound of meat

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.

[Ron Humphrey]

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??