Rising Food Prices

Food – Rising Prices: “Why Food Prices Are Set To Rocket” by Uncommon Wisdom is the title of the  article we’re going to discuss today. It’s from The Marker Oracle website (marketoracle.co.uk) and is made available via survivalblog.com’s 8/3/09 post. We postponed/canceled two of today’s scheduled articles to present highlights from this one and here’s why:

• “China leads the world in many things, including the amount of ground lost to desertification or ecological disaster.”
• “At the same time the Chinese are changing their eating habits … eating more food and especially more beef. As a result, despite bumper crops, China is becoming more at risk for being unable to feed itself.” (PH Note: With about 20% of the worlds population, China’s inability to feed itself would be a U.S./world problem!)
• “… if China’s harvest falls by just five percent, the world’s surpluses would vanish.

“The New Threat: A Global Wheat Killer”

• “A destructive black stem rust known as Ug99 is spreading out of Africa. Carried by the wind, Ug99 jumped the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf and Saudi Arabia to land 700 miles away in Western Iran.”
• “Everywhere it goes it damages up to 70 percent of the wheat crop.” and “… Ug99 has become more destructive since it started to spread.”
• “on a global level, five of the countries now in Ug99’s path produce about 160 milliom hectares of  wheat annually, or about 25 percent of the world’s wheat crop. About 80 percent of the varieties there are based on the SR 24 gene, which actually make stem rust more resistant.”
• “The 1-2-3 Problem: Drought, Rising Population, And Shrinking Farmland”
• “Heat and drought have been hammering, on-and-off, the bread basket of Australia, Argentina, China and other major grain growers.”
• “… when something goes wrong in one of the world’s major breadbaskets, a lot more of us are suddenly going hungry.“
• “… the world’s arable land — land that is used for farming — is shrinking. … now… only 10 percent of the world’s surface is arable land. … the world is losing one hectare (about 2.5 acres) of arable land every 7.67 seconds.”

“Weather”

• “Researchers say that yields for the six most widely grown crops in the world –wheat, rice, corn, soybeans, barley, and sorghum — fall by 3 percent to 5 percent for every 1 degree Fahrenheit increase in temperature.”

“The Solution:  More Seeds, More Fertilizer”

• “The ‘Green Revolution’, … between 1950 and 1990, world grain yield per hectare climbed 2.1 percent a year, ensuring rapid growth in world grain harvest. …revolutions have their limits.
• “… from 1990 to 2008, grain yields rose only 1.3 percent annually. … partly because the yield response to the additional application of fertilizer is diminishing and partly because irrigation water is limited.”
• “meanwhile global population keeps growing. Today, grain yields are rising at something like 0.7 percent, scarcely half that of the preceding decade and far behind world population growth.”

PH Note: The “Green Revolution” was dependent on more prolific plants, producing under the influence of increased irrigation (water),  increased use of fossil fuel based fertilizers, insecticides and herbicides, in relatively good weather.

These changes in agricultural inputs hit a wall after about two generations and the  current input situation promises questionable availability of all of the above essentials.

If you’re looking for future food security, now’s a great time to become a skilled home gardener.

Until the mid-week: keep your eyes on the horizon as the weathers changing fast.