<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 12:04 PM, bingham <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:bingham@zekes.com" target="_blank">bingham@zekes.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<div bgcolor="#ffffff">
<div>subsidized grains....under cut the production of corn ???? I would like to
see the evidence of a subsidized grain effecting the production of corn in a third world setting. Most third world farmers, only
cost, is the seed. Rain is free and the grass is free, to feed there beasts of burden is free. They do not use energy.</div></div></blockquote><div><br>Your logic is a bit tricky to follow, but here's something to ponder in relation to your notion that agriculture in the third world is (nearly) free and does not use energy.<br>
<br>-----Forwarded Message-----
<br>From: Earth Policy Release
<br>Sent: Jan 14, 2011 2:00 AM
<br>To: <a href="mailto:mcat@teleport.com" target="_blank">mcat@teleport.com</a>
<br>Subject: Earth Policy Release -- The Great Food Crisis of 2011
<br><br>
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<td colspan="4"><div align="center"><a href="http://www.earth-policy.org/" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.earth-policy.org/images/interface/EPI_logo_top.gif" alt="Earth Policy Institute" longdesc="http://www.earth-policy.org" border="0" height="110" width="274"></a></div>
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<td colspan="3"><div align="left"><b><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="3">THE GREAT FOOD CRISIS OF 2011* <br>
</font></b><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">By Lester R. Brown </font><br>
<font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="-2"><a href="http://www.earth-policy.org/plan_b_updates/2011/update90" target="_blank"><font size="2">www.earth-policy.org/plan_b_updates/2011/update90</font></a></font><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2"><br>
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<p><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Earth Policy Release <br>
Plan B Update <br>
January 14, 2011 <br>
</font><b><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="3"><br>
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</tr><tr><td colspan="4"><div align="justified"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">As
the new year begins, the price of wheat is setting an all-time high in
the United Kingdom. Food riots are spreading across Algeria. Russia is
importing grain to sustain its cattle herds until spring grazing begins.
India is wrestling with an 18-percent annual food inflation rate,
sparking protests. China is looking abroad for potentially massive
quantities of wheat and corn. The Mexican government is buying corn
futures to avoid unmanageable tortilla price rises. And on January 5,
the U.N. Food and Agricultural organization announced that its food
price index for December hit an all-time high.<br>
<br>But whereas in years past, it's been weather that has caused a
spike in commodities prices, now it's trends on both sides of the food
supply/demand equation that are driving up prices. On the demand side,
the culprits are population growth, rising affluence, and the use of
grain to fuel cars. On the supply side: soil erosion, aquifer depletion,
the loss of cropland to nonfarm uses, the diversion of irrigation water
to cities, the plateauing of crop yields in agriculturally advanced
countries, and—due to climate change —crop-withering heat waves and
melting mountain glaciers and ice sheets. These climate-related trends
seem destined to take a far greater toll in the future.<br>
<br>There's at least a glimmer of good news on the demand side: World
population growth, which peaked at 2 percent per year around 1970,
dropped below 1.2 percent per year in 2010. But because the world
population has nearly doubled since 1970, we are still adding 80 million
people each year. Tonight, there will be 219,000 additional mouths to
feed at the dinner table, and many of them will be greeted with empty
plates. Another 219,000 will join us tomorrow night. At some point, this
relentless growth begins to tax both the skills of farmers and the
limits of the earth's land and water resources.<br>
<br>Beyond population growth, there are now some 3 billion people moving
up the food chain, eating greater quantities of grain-intensive
livestock and poultry products. The rise in meat, milk, and egg
consumption in fast-growing developing countries has no precedent. Total
meat consumption in China today is already nearly double that in the
United States.<br>
<br>The third major source of demand growth is the use of crops to
produce fuel for cars. In the United States, which harvested 416 million
tons of grain in 2009, 119 million tons went to ethanol distilleries to
produce fuel for cars. That's enough to feed 350 million people for a
year. The massive U.S. investment in ethanol distilleries sets the stage
for direct competition between cars and people for the world grain
harvest. In Europe, where much of the auto fleet runs on diesel fuel,
there is growing demand for plant-based diesel oil, principally from
rapeseed and palm oil. This demand for oil-bearing crops is not only
reducing the land available to produce food crops in Europe, it is also
driving the clearing of rainforests in Indonesia and Malaysia for palm
oil plantations.<br>
<br>The combined effect of these three growing demands is stunning: a
doubling in the annual growth in world grain consumption from an average
of 21 million tons per year in 1990-2005 to 41 million tons per year in
2005-2010. Most of this huge jump is attributable to the <a href="http://www.earth-policy.org/plan_b_updates/2007/update63" target="_blank">orgy of investment</a> in ethanol distilleries in the United States in 2006-2008.<br>
<br>While the annual demand growth for grain was doubling, new
constraints were emerging on the supply side, even as longstanding ones
such as soil erosion intensified. An estimated one third of the world's
cropland is losing topsoil faster than new soil is forming through
natural processes—and thus is losing its inherent productivity. Two huge
dust bowls are forming, one across northwest China, western Mongolia,
and central Asia; the other in central Africa. Each of these dwarfs the
U.S. dust bowl of the 1930s.<br>
<br>Satellite images show a steady flow of dust storms leaving these
regions, each one typically carrying millions of tons of precious
topsoil. In North China, some 24,000 rural villages have been abandoned
or partly depopulated as grasslands have been destroyed by overgrazing
and as croplands have been inundated by migrating sand dunes.<br>
<br>In countries with severe soil erosion, such as Mongolia and Lesotho,
grain harvests are shrinking as erosion lowers yields and eventually
leads to cropland abandonment. The result is spreading hunger and
growing dependence on imports. Haiti and North Korea, two countries with
severely eroded soils, are chronically dependent on food aid from
abroad.<br>
<br>Meanwhile aquifer depletion is fast shrinking the amount of
irrigated area in many parts of the world; this relatively recent
phenomenon is driven by the large-scale use of mechanical pumps to
exploit underground water. Today, half the world's people live in
countries where water tables are falling as overpumping depletes
aquifers. Once an aquifer is depleted, pumping is necessarily reduced to
the rate of recharge unless it is a fossil (nonreplenishable) aquifer,
in which case pumping ends altogether. But sooner or later, falling
water tables translate into rising food prices.<br>
<br>Irrigated area is shrinking in the Middle East, notably in Saudi
Arabia, Syria, Iraq, and possibly Yemen. In Saudi Arabia, which was
totally dependent on a now-depleted fossil aquifer for its wheat
self-sufficiency, production is in a freefall. From 2007 to 2010, Saudi
wheat production fell by more than two thirds. By 2012, wheat production
will likely end entirely, leaving the country totally dependent on
imported grain.<br>
<br>The Arab Middle East is the first geographic region where spreading
water shortages are shrinking the grain harvest. But the really big
water deficits are in India, where the World Bank numbers indicate that
175 million people are being fed with grain that is produced by
overpumping. In China, overpumping provides food for some 130 million
people. In the United States, the world's other leading grain producer,
irrigated area is shrinking in key agricultural states such as
California and Texas.<br>
<br>The last decade has witnessed the emergence of yet another
constraint on growth in global agricultural productivity: the shrinking
backlog of untapped technologies. In some agriculturally advanced
countries, farmers are using all available technologies to raise yields.
In Japan, the first country to see a sustained rise in grain yield per
acre, rice yields have been flat now for 14 years. Rice yields in South
Korea and China are now approaching those in Japan. Assuming that
farmers in these two countries will face the same constraints as those
in Japan, more than a third of the world rice harvest will soon be
produced in countries with little potential for further raising rice
yields.<br>
<br>A similar situation is emerging with wheat yields in Europe. In
France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, wheat yields are no longer
rising at all. These three countries together account for roughly
one-eighth of the world wheat harvest. Another trend slowing the growth
in the world grain harvest is the conversion of cropland to nonfarm
uses. Suburban sprawl, industrial construction, and the paving of land
for roads, highways, and parking lots are claiming cropland in the
Central Valley of California, the Nile River basin in Egypt, and in
densely populated countries that are rapidly industrializing, such as
China and India. In 2011, new car sales in China are projected to reach
20 million—a record for any country. The U.S. rule of thumb is that for
every 5 million cars added to a country's fleet, roughly 1 million acres
must be paved to accommodate them. And cropland is often the loser.<br>
<br>Fast-growing cities are also competing with farmers for irrigation
water. In areas where all water is being spoken for, such as most
countries in the Middle East, northern China, the southwestern United
States, and most of India, diverting water to cities means less
irrigation water available for food production. California has lost
perhaps a million acres of irrigated land in recent years as farmers
have sold huge amounts of water to the thirsty millions in Los Angeles
and San Diego.<br>
<br>The rising temperature is also making it more difficult to expand
the world grain harvest fast enough to keep up with the record pace of
demand. Crop ecologists have their own rule of thumb: For each 1 degree
Celsius rise in temperature above the optimum during the growing season,
we can expect a 10 percent decline in grain yields. This temperature
effect on yields was all too visible in western Russia during the summer
of 2010 as the harvest was decimated when temperatures soared far above
the norm.<br>
<br>Another emerging trend that threatens food security is the melting
of mountain glaciers. This is of particular concern in the Himalayas and
on the Tibetan plateau, where the ice melt from glaciers helps sustain
not only the major rivers of Asia during the dry season, such as the
Indus, Ganges, Mekong, Yangtze, and Yellow rivers, but also the
irrigation systems dependent on these rivers. Without this ice melt, the
grain harvest would drop precipitously and prices would rise
accordingly.<br>
<br>And finally, over the longer term, melting ice sheets in Greenland
and West Antarctica, combined with thermal expansion of the oceans,
threaten to raise the sea level by up to six feet during this century.
Even a three-foot rise would inundate half of the riceland in
Bangladesh. It would also put under water much of the Mekong Delta that
produces half the rice in Vietnam, the world's number two rice exporter.
Altogether there are some 19 other rice-growing river deltas in Asia
where harvests would be substantially reduced by a rising sea level.<br>
<br>The current surge in world grain and soybean prices, and in food
prices more broadly, is not a temporary phenomenon. We can no longer
expect that things will soon return to normal, because in a world with a
rapidly changing climate system there is no norm to return to.<br>
<br>
The unrest of these past few weeks is just the beginning. It is no
longer conflict between heavily armed superpowers, but rather spreading
food shortages and rising food prices—and the political turmoil this
would lead to—that threatens our global future. Unless governments
quickly redefine security and shift expenditures from military uses to
investing in climate change mitigation, water efficiency, soil
conservation, and population stabilization, the world will in all
likelihood be facing a future with both more climate instability and
food price volatility. If business as usual continues, food prices will
only trend upward. </font> <br>
<br>
<font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2"><i>*NOTE: This piece originally appeared in <a href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/01/10/the_great_food_crisis_of_2011?page=0,3" target="_blank">Foreign Policy</a> on Tuesday, January 10, 2011.</i></font><br>
<p align="center"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2"> # # #
<br>
<br>
Lester Brown is President of the Earth Policy Institute and author of <br>
<b>World on the Edge: How to Prevent an Environmental and Economic Collapse</b> (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011) available online at <a href="http://www.earth-policy.org/books/wote" target="_blank">www.earth-policy.org/books/wote</a>. <br>
<br>
<br>
Data, endnotes, and additional resources <br>
can be found on <a href="http://www.earth-policy.org/" target="_blank">www.earth-policy.org</a>.</font></p>
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