stand between you and your neighbors' food stocks; it doesn't take a lot to try and grab that to feed your starving millions...... A lot of soul searching has been going on to try and find a scapegoat to blame this on, from the Iraq war and Bush to Al-Qaeda and/or China and India, but the following paragraph probably sums the whole mess up pretty neatly;
(Adapted from
ttp://www.forumgarden.com/forums/showthread.php?s=936b9b9dfdb74c7ce491ca5915bf7f4f&p=838015#post838015)
The social theories of Karl Marx were long ago discarded as of little value, even to revolutionaries. But he did warn that capitalism had a tendency to generate its own crises. Indeed, the spread of capitalism, and its accelerated industrialization and wealth-creation, may have fomented the food-inflation crisis - by dramatically accelerating competition for scarce resources. The rapid industrialization of China and India over the past two decades - and the resultant growth of a new middle class fast approaching the size of America's - has driven demand for oil toward the limits of global supply capacity. That has pushed oil prices to levels five times what they were in the mid 1990s, which has also raised pressure on food prices by driving up agricultural costs and by prompting the substitution of biofuel crops for edible ones on scarce farmland. Moreover, those new middle class people are eating a lot better than their parents did - particularly more meat. Producing a single calorie of beef can, by some estimates, require eight or more calories of grain feed, and expanded meat consumption therefore has a multiplier effect on demand for grains. Throw in climate disasters such as the Australian drought and recent rice crop failures, and you have food inflation spiraling so fast that even the U.N. agency created to feed people in emergencies is warning that it lacks the funds to fulfill its mandate.
Allow me to set up the dominoes that caused this; Paul Krugman has narrowed down the causes into 2; avoidable and unavoidable:
Unavoidable:
First, there’s the march of the meat-eating Chinese — that is, the growing number of people in emerging economies who are, for the first time, rich enough to start eating like Westerners. Since it takes about 700 calories’ worth of animal feed to produce a 100-calorie piece of beef, this change in diet increases the overall demand for grains.
Second, there’s the price of oil. Modern farming is highly energy-intensive: a lot of B.T.U.’s go into producing fertilizer, running tractors and, not least, transporting farm products to consumers. With oil persistently above $100 per barrel, energy costs have become a major factor driving up agricultural costs.
High oil prices, by the way, also have a lot to do with the growth of China and other emerging economies. Directly and indirectly, these rising economic powers are competing with the rest of us for scarce resources, including oil and farmland, driving up prices for raw materials of all sorts.
Third, there has been a run of bad weather in key growing areas. In particular, Australia, normally the world’s second-largest wheat exporter, has been suffering from an epic drought.
Avoidable:The rise of China and other emerging economies is the main force driving oil prices, but the invasion of Iraq — which proponents promised would lead to cheap oil — has also reduced oil supplies below what they would have been otherwise.
So the dominoes are set up as follows: you have all of the unavoidable factors there; but they have been there for years; why only now are we having such a shortage? The answer lies in the folllowing:
1. Climate change: recent global warming has had a devastating effect on crops worldwide, rice crop failures in Asia; drought in Australia (incidentally the world's second largest producer of wheat. This has had a devastating effect on world food stocks.
2. World food reserves are at their lowest as ironically, national governments are holding less stocks as everyone believed that countries suffering crop failures could always import the food they needed. They didn't count on the fact that everyone could be having crop failures.
So now you have the world food balance in a precarious position, in what mathematicians would term an unstable equilibrium; crop failures in Australia was technically supposed to be counterbalanced by a bumper crop in Central Asia; that did happen; Kazakhstan projected its autumn harvest to possibly reach a record-setting 20 million tons. However, the bumper crop, and this is important, failed to compensate for the crop failure in Australia. That, for lack of a better expression, was the tipping point, that was the first dominoe to fall.
The worsening factor, would undoubtably be the rise of demon ethanol and other biofuels. Krugman, again puts this eloquently:
The subsidized conversion of crops into fuel was supposed to promote energy independence and help limit global warming. But this promise was, as Time magazine bluntly put it, a “scam.”
This is especially true of corn ethanol: even on optimistic estimates, producing a gallon of ethanol from corn uses most of the energy the gallon contains. But it turns out that even seemingly “good” biofuel policies, like Brazil’s use of ethanol from sugar cane, accelerate the pace of climate change by promoting deforestation.
And meanwhile, land used to grow biofuel feedstock is land not available to grow food, so subsidies to biofuels are a major factor in the food crisis. You might put it this way: people are starving in Africa so that American politicians can court votes in farm states.
Oh, and in case you’re wondering: all the remaining presidential contenders are terrible on this issue.
However, its probably a sore point that the US continues to levy heavy tariffs on Brazilian ethanol in an effort to protect corn ethanol, a very stupid move made to appease red-neck farmers, but which resulted in the dilemma; food or fuel? The extra demand for corn from the biofuel industry resulted in there being less corn for food. The whole problem could have been averted if the US simply swallowed its stupid pride and embraced sugar cane ethanol, which incidentally places less stress on the food chain than corn. Though of course you have the problem of deforestation and all.....but thats another story...The point is as Krugman puts it, cheap food, like cheap oil, may be a thing of the past.
Pretty scary eh?
Video feature: BBC feature on the food crisis.
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