drought and the economy...,

forbes | The effects of the vast drought afflicting America’s farm belt are rippling across the economy. Major companies apparently feeling the heat from rising crop prices include McDonald’s, Smithfield Foods and Arthur Daniels Midland, which processes agricultural commodities.

More than half of the nation’s pasture and rangeland is now plagued by drought – the largest natural disaster area in U.S. history. And with corn prices soaring as crops wither, other sectors are nervously watching the weather forecasts and assessing potential impacts on their business. For example:

• As corn prices rise, first dairy and then meat prices are expected to follow (cattle are fed on corn), which will hit major beef buyers such as McDonald’s.


• Corn is also a ubiquitous ingredient in foods ranging from corn flakes to ketchup, bread, and soda. With as many as three-quarters of all supermarket products containing corn, there are significant implications for the food and soft drink industry – and consumers – should the drought fail to let up.


• The price of ethanol – again made from corn – is also rising amid fears of possible future shortages. This in turn may hike the price of gasoline, a significant cost for many businesses as well as consumers.

The Climate Connection
But perhaps the most sobering implication of this agricultural crisis is what it heralds for the long-term health of our economy.

Unlike the reaction to the recent searing heat wave, the mainstream media has largely ignored a possible climate connection to America’s worst drought since 1956. While this particular drought could turn out to be due to several factors, (such as a second winter of La Niña), we know the afflicted region will look increasingly as it does today in a warmer world.

The U.S. Global Change Research Program, for example, has projected more frequent and severe droughts across much of the United States. Their forecast for the Great Plains region, 70 percent of which is farmland, is dire: increasing temperatures and evaporation rates and more sustained drought, furthering stressing already overstrained water resources.

corn seen rallying to record $8.50 as drought kills crops

Businessweek | Corn may rally to a record $8.50 a bushel as the worst U.S. drought in decades cuts production in the world’s biggest exporter, driving global stockpiles lower, according to broker Newedge USA LLC.

The U.S. harvest may drop to 11.8 billion bushels (299.7 million metric tons), said Dan Cekander, director of grain research, who correctly predicted in March that soybeans would trade at the most expensive level relative to corn since 2010. Cekander’s output forecast is 29.75 million tons less than the latest estimate from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and would be the smallest crop since 2006-2007. Futures traded as high as $7.89 yesterday, near the $7.9925 record set in 2008.

The drought is baking farms from Arkansas to Ohio, reducing yields, after frosts followed by drought cut wheat harvests in the former Soviet Union, prompting the United Nations and the USDA to pare estimates for world grain harvests. Dimming corn- crop prospects in the U.S. may push global food costs higher, the Food & Agriculture Organization said earlier this month.

“If it doesn’t start raining the rest of July, you’re going to have a significant shortfall here in production,” said Cekander, a fourth-generation farmer who grows corn and soybeans in Illinois, the second-largest U.S. grower of both crops. “That would put the 2012-2013 world corn carry-out below last year,” he said, referring to year-end stockpiles.
Soybeans Climb

Corn for December delivery gained 0.2 percent to $7.73 on the Chicago Board of Trade at 12:51 p.m. in Singapore, erasing a drop of 1 percent. Since reaching the year’s low in June, the grain has rallied 53 percent. November-delivery soybeans, trading at $15.905 a bushel, reached $16.07 yesterday, the highest price since 2008.

Corn yields will probably drop to 134.9 bushels an acre as crop conditions deteriorate, Cekander said in an interview yesterday, forecasting prices of $8.25 to $8.50 for December futures. That compares with the USDA estimate of 146 bushels, and a forecast of 138 bushels from AccuWeather.com. Last year’s harvest was 12.36 billion bushels, with a yield of 147.2 bushels.

“The fear is that the U.S. corn yield will decline to 125 to 130 bushels per acre if hot and dry weather persists through mid-August,” Cekander said. The 11.8 billion-bushel harvest estimate is based an area of 87.5 million acres (35.4 million hectares), lower than the USDA’s 88.9 million acres, he said.

About 55 percent of the contiguous U.S. states were in moderate-to-extreme drought at the end of June, the highest since December 1956, according to the National Climatic Data Center. USDA ratings for corn and soybeans as of July 15 were the worst for that time of year since a drought in 1988.

what does $80 billion of food stamps buy?

washingtontimes | Americans spend $80 billion each year financing food stamps for the poor, but the country has no idea where or how the money is spent.

Food stamps can be spent on goods ranging from candy to steak and are accepted at retailers from gas stations that primarily sell potato chips to fried-chicken restaurants. And as the amount spent on food stamps has more than doubled in recent years, the amount of food stamps laundered into cash has increased dramatically, government statistics show.

But the government won’t say which stores are doing the most business in food stamps, and even it doesn’t know what kinds of food those taxpayer dollars buy.

Coinciding with lobbying by convenience stores, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the program in conjunction with states, contends that disclosing how much each store authorized to accept benefits, known as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), receives in taxpayer funds would amount to revealing trade secrets.

As a result, fraud is hard to track and the efficacy of the massive program is impossible to evaluate.

As the House debates the once-every-five-years farm bill, the majority of which goes to food stamps, there is a renewed and fervent call from a broad spectrum of camps that the information — some of the most high-dollar, frequently requested and closely held secrets of the government — be set free.

“We can’t release it based on federal rules. If it were up to us, I wouldn’t have a problem releasing the information. It’s taxpayer money,” said Tom Steinhauser with the division of benefit programs for the Virginia Department of Social Services.

The District said it would be illegal to tell the newspaper how many food stamp dollars were flowing to each local vendor, but first offered to sell The Washington Times the information for $125,000.

“Why don’t you just pay the charges? Your paper has a lot of money,” said David Umansky, spokesman for the District’s chief financial officer.

Told that the newspaper would not pay, the CFO’s office then said that only JP Morgan, to which it contracted out operations, had access to the store totals and that the office had never looked at them. After six months of the local government attempting to extract the information from JP Morgan, the District finally said that releasing the information would be illegal.

States instructed not to tell

Maryland denied The Times’ request for data under the Freedom of Information Act, saying the information belonged to the federal government, which instructed states not to release it.

Occupy our food

TheNation | On this past December 4, food activists from across the country joined the Occupy Wall Street Farmers March for "a celebration of community power to regain control over the most basic element to human well-being: food."

The rally began at La Plaza Cultural Community Gardens where urban and rural farmers talked about the growing problems with the industrial food system and the solutions based in organic, sustainable and community based agricultural production. This was followed by a three-mile march from the East Village of Manhattan to Zuccotti Park, the birthplace of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

This video by Anthony Lappe offers an inspiring glimpse into this new movement. Check it out and then go to Food Democracy Now, a grassroots community dedicated to building a sustainable food system, to find out how you can help.

WW-III will have its own little gratifications...,

LATimes | Reporting from Beijing — At a glance, it is clear this is no run-of-the-mill farm: A 6-foot spiked fence hems the meticulously planted vegetables and security guards control a cantilevered gate that glides open only to select cars.

"It is for officials only. They produce organic vegetables, peppers, onions, beans, cauliflowers, but they don't sell to the public," said Li Xiuqin, 68, a lifelong Shunyi village resident who lives directly across the street from the farm but has never been inside. "Ordinary people can't go in there."

Until May, a sign inside the gate identified the property as the Beijing Customs Administration Vegetable Base and Country Club. The placard was removed after a Chinese reporter sneaked inside and published a story about the farm producing organic food so clean the cucumbers could be eaten directly from the vine.

Elsewhere in the world, this might be something to boast about. Not in China. Organic gardening here is a hush-hush affair in which the cleanest, safest products are largely channeled to the rich and politically connected.

Many of the nation's best food companies don't promote or advertise. They don't want the public to know that their limited supply is sent to Communist Party officials, dining halls reserved for top athletes, foreign diplomats, and others in the elite classes. The general public, meanwhile, dines on foods that are increasingly tainted or less than healthful — meats laced with steroids, fish from ponds spiked with hormones to increase growth, milk containing dangerous additives such as melamine, which allows watered-down milk to pass protein-content tests.

"The officials don't really care what the common people eat because they and their family are getting a special supply of food," said Gao Zhiyong, who worked for a state-run food company and wrote a book on the subject.

In China, the tegong, or special supply, is a holdover from the early years of Communist rule, when danwei, work units of state-owned enterprises, raised their own food and allocated it based on rank. "The leaders wanted to make sure they had enough to eat and that nobody poisoned their food," said Gao.

In the 1950s, Soviet advisors helped the Chinese set up a food procurement department under the security apparatus to supply and inspect food for the leadership, according to a biography of Mao Tse-tung written by his personal physician. Lower levels of officialdom were divided into 25 gradations of rank that determined the quantity and quality of rations.

In modern-day China, it is the degradation of the environment and a limited supply of healthful food that is fueling the parallel food system for the elite.

"We flash forward 50 years and we see the only elements of China society getting food that is reliable, safe and free of contaminants are those cadres who have access to the special food supply," said Phelim Kine of the Hong Kong office of Human Rights Watch.

FRANK depicts the collective food mood...,

Google Trends result for the search terms "apply food stamps"

And here is a Trends result for the search terms "buy seeds"

wall st. drives world hunger

food prices and humans rioting...,

TechnologyReview | What causes riots? That's not a question you would expect to have a simple answer.

But today, Marco Lagi and buddies at the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, say they've found a single factor that seems to trigger riots around the world.

This single factor is the price of food. Lagi and co say that when it rises above a certain threshold, social unrest sweeps the planet.

The evidence comes from two sources. The first is data gathered by the United Nations that plots the price of food against time, the so-called food price index of the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN. The second is the date of riots around the world, whatever their cause. Both these sources are plotted on the same graph above.

This clearly seems to show that when the food price index rises above a certain threshold, the result is trouble around the world.

This isn't rocket science. It stands to reason that people become desperate when food is unobtainable. It's often said that any society is three square meals from anarchy.

But what's interesting about this analysis is that Lagi and co say that high food prices don't necessarily trigger riots themselves, they simply create the conditions in which social unrest can flourish. "These observations are consistent with a hypothesis that high global food prices are a precipitating condition for social unrest," say Lagi and co.

In other words, high food prices lead to a kind of tipping point when almost anything can trigger a riot, like a lighted match in a dry forest.

On 13 December last year, the group wrote to the US government pointing out that global food prices were about to cross the threshold they had identified. Four days later, Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in Tunisia in protest at government policies, an event that triggered a wave of social unrest that continues to spread throughout the middle east today.

That leads to an obvious thought. If high food prices condition the world for social unrest, then reducing the prices should stabilise the planet.

But what can be done to reverse the increases. Lagi and co say that two main factors have driven the increase in the food price index. The first is traders speculating on the price of food, a problem that has been exacerbated in recent years by the deregulation of the commodities markets and the removal of trading limits for buyers and sellers.

The second is the conversion of corn into ethanol, a practice directly encouraged by subsidies.

Those are both factors that the western world and the US in particular could change.

Today, the food price index remains above the threshold but the long term trend is still below. But it is rising. Lagi and co say that if the trend continues, the index is likely to cross the threshold in August 2013.

If their model has the predictive power they suggest, when that happens, the world will become a tinderbox waiting for a match.

u.n.: small-scale farming could double the world's food production

Slashfood | The United Nations released a whopper of a report today. In the midst of soaring global food and oil prices, the agency let loose a public stunner: World hunger and climate change cannot be solved with industrial farming. So much for seed-giant Pioneer Hi-Bred's "We Feed The World" slogan. Yowch.

The U.N. study makes it clear -- small-scale farmers can double food production in 10-years by using simple farming methods. According the The Guardian, insect-trapping plants in Kenya or weed-eating ducks in Bangladesh's rice paddies may be the way to feed the world's burgeoning population.

"To feed 9 billion people in 2050, we urgently need to adopt the most efficient farming techniques available. Today's scientific evidence demonstrates that agroecological methods outperform the use of chemical fertilizers in boosting food production in regions where the hungry live," says Olivier De Schutter, U.N. Special Rapporteur on the right to food and author of the report.

De Schutter told the Wall Street Journal that promoting natural farming techniques is the only sustainable way to guard against future food crisis.

"We set up our farming techniques in the 1920s when we thought there would be a never-ending supply of cheap oil," he said. "Developing farming in a way which makes it less addicted to fossil energy is much more promising."

For more global stories that affect us all, check out the AOL News United Nations site.


The agroecological methods mentioned throughout the report sure sound like organic farming to us, but ag writer Jill Richards says there are subtle differences separating the two terms. Agroecology increases soil quality, biodiversity and can make farms more resilient to climate change, but it also values indigenous farming methods, she says.

"A net global increase in food production alone will not guarantee the end of hunger (as the poor cannot access food even when it is available), and increase in productivity for poor farmers will make a dent in global hunger. Potentially, gains in productivity by smallholder farmers will provide an income to farmers as well, if they grow a surplus of food that they can sell," she writes.

So are we on the verge of an agricultural sea change? asks WSJ reporter Caroline Henshaw.

"As leaders debate how to combat record food prices and producers struggle to meet rapidly growing demand, the world is looking for a new agricultural revolution," Henshaw writes.

We think today's U.N. report might give that revolution the mighty shove it needs.

no seriously, how ARE you humans going to feed youselves?

Alternet | Come October, Atlas won't be shrugging, he'll be groaning as global population passes the 7 billion mark. Until very recently, demographers predicted that these numbers would peak in 2050 at just over 9 billion and then start to decline. The latest research, however, suggests that despite declining fertility across much of the world, population will continue to rise through this century to over 10 billion people.

With famine spreading in Somalia, another food crisis gripping North Korea, global food prices near a record high, and climate change threatening to reduce future harvests, the question continues to nag: are we outstripping our capacity to feed ourselves?

The good news is that the harvests this year promise to be bountiful. The bad news is that this increased grain production may still not be enough. The worse news is that millions more mouths to feed, over the long term, will increase pressure on the world's farmers to squeeze more and more food from less and less arable land.

In 2010, the world dipped into food reserves to make up for a 60-million-ton shortfall in grain production. This year, predicts the Earth Policy Institute's Lester Brown, farmers will have to produce 100 million additional tons to meet last year's needs plus the increased demand. Based on a number of factors – better harvests in Russia versus droughts in China and the U.S. Midwest – Brown expects only an increase of about 80 million tons for 2011. The bottom line: food prices will continue to rise.

But that's just the short term. Most estimates of grain needs in 2050 suggest that production will have to increase by 70 percent. That means somehow conjuring a billion-plus tons of grain from the already strained resource base of Mother Earth.

There are basically four schools of thought on how to feed the world. The biotech crowd believes that genetic modification will eventually spur another Green Revolution that will dramatically boost yield per acre. The organics faction believes that industrial farming techniques have drained the aquifers and robbed the topsoil of nutrients, among other ecological ills, and only natural farming techniques can restore soil fertility and produce sustainable yields. Somewhere in the middle is the status-quo-plus gang, which believes that improvement of current practices can meet the needs of a growing world. And the fourth school is…well, I'll get to that in a moment.

the truth about global demand for food

Guardian | As it happens, FAO food balance sheets show that both direct and indirect demand for grain in China and India barely increased between 2000 and 2007, and cereal imports were actually lower. Why this has been happening, and why the economic growth has not translated into more aggregate demand for grain, is obviously a fascinating question on its own and one that deserves more study. It is likely that the worsening income distribution in both countries may have had something to do with it, so that increased demand from high-income groups is counterbalanced by reduced demand from poorer sections. But this needs to be explored further.

The relevant point is that it is not increased demand from China and India that is driving up grain prices. This does not mean that there are no other demand forces at work, however. Financial speculation in commodity markets is clearly significant, but it is also true that even such speculation must be based on some assessments of changing global balances. What could that be based on?

The report from the FAO has a convincing response to that as well: it notes that the biofuel boom has had a major impact on the evolution of world food demand for cereals and vegetable oils. According to page 32 of the report "there is a real acceleration of non-feed uses boosted by biofuel development. Excluding use for biofuel, the growth rate for non-feed use is stable compared with the 1990s and markedly inferior to its historical performance. Without biofuel, the growth rate of world cereal consumption is equal to 1.3% compared with 1.8% for biofuel".

This massively increased demand from biofuel is largely determined by the very large subsidies provided in many western countries, which have, ironically, been increasing their subsidisation of biofuel at the same time that they have reduced subsidies on food cultivation. Aside from a few producers, such as Brazil and Cuba, biofuel production in most locations would be completely unviable without these large subsidies.

The impact of these on diverting production and affecting price has been even more significant in the case of edible oils. The report shows that "the use of vegetable oils for food slowed down between the 1990s and the 2000s (from 4.4% a year to 3.3%), but industrial use of vegetable oil soared, pushed by the booming European biofuel industry. As a result, the share of industrial use in world consumption of vegetable oils jumped from 11% to 24% between 2000 and 2010".

The surprising conclusion from all this is that, leaving out the impact of the biofuel boom of the 2000s, global consumption of both cereals and edible oils is actually slowing down. All the more tragic, then, that speculative forces are still allowed to run amok in global commodity markets and global food prices are kept so high as to increase the deprivation of the millions of hungry people in the world.

critical phosphate: misused and running low...,

Yale | If you wanted to really mess with the world’s food production, a good place to start would be Bou Craa, located in the desert miles from anywhere in the Western Sahara. They don’t grow much here, but Bou Craa is a mine containing one of the world’s largest reserves of phosphate rock. Most of us, most days, will eat some food grown on fields fertilized by phosphate rock from this mine. And there is no substitute.

The Western Sahara is an occupied territory. In 1976, when Spanish colonialists left, its neighbor Morocco invaded, and has held it ever since. Most observers believe the vast phosphate deposits were the major reason that Morocco took an interest. Whatever the truth, the Polisario Front, a rebel movement the UN recognizes as the rightful representatives of the territory, would like it back.

Not many people would call phosphate a critical issue or one with serious environmental consequences. But even leaving aside the resource politics of the Sahara, it is an absolutely vital resource for feeding the world. It is also a resource that could start running low within a couple of decades — and one we grossly misuse, pouring it across the planet and recycling virtually none of it.

The world’s food supplies are alarmingly dependent on the phosphate fertilizer that is hewn from the desert of the Western Sahara. The vast open-cast mine at Bou Craa delivers several million tons of phosphate rock every year down a 150-kilometer-long conveyor belt, the world’s longest, to the Atlantic port of El Ayoun. From there, it is distributed around the world and made into fertilizer.

Morocco’s phosphate reserves are owned by the Office Cherifien des Phosphates, a Moroccan state agency. Given the almost unlimited executive powers of the Moroccan monarch, it might reasonably be said that most of the world's known reserves of phosphate are, in effect, owned by King Mohammed VI and his Alaouite dynasty, which has reigned in Morocco since the 17th century.

If the people of Western Sahara ever resume their war to get their country back — or if the Arab Spring spreads and Morocco goes the way of Libya — then we may be adding phosphate fertilizer to the list of finite resources, such as water and land, that are constraining world food supplies sooner than we think.

Phosphorus is one of the building blocks of all life. Every living cell requires it. Plants need phosphorus to grow as much as they need water. Many soils do not have enough to meet the voracious demands for phosphorus of the high-yielding crop varieties of the Green Revolution. But we can provide more by mining phosphate rock and turning it into fertilizer to spread on the land.

It takes one ton of phosphate to produce every 130 tons of grain, which is why the world mines about 170 million tons of phosphate rock every year to ship around the world and keep soils fertile.

Currently, only about 15 percent of that comes from mines in the Western Sahara and Morocco. But the only other large producers, the U. S. and China, mostly keep supplies for their own use. So Morocco is by far the biggest contributor to international trade, with more than half the total business. The people of India, the world’s largest importer, would be starving without Morocco’s phosphates. Brazil’s agricultural boom would never have happened otherwise.

Even more critically in the longer term, the U.S. Geological Survey says that of the 65 billion tons of the world’s known phosphate rock reserves — and the estimated 16 billion tons that might be economic to mine — almost 80 percent is in Western Sahara and Morocco. Add in China’s reserves, and the figure rises to almost 90 percent. The U.S., with 1.4 billion tons, is close to running out. You can see why agronomists are starting to get worried.

The world is not about to run out of phosphate. But demand is rising, most of the best reserves are gone, and those that remain are in just a handful of countries. Dana Cordell of Linkoping University in Sweden, who runs an academic group called the Global Phosphorus Research Initiative, says we could hit “peak phosphorus” production by around 2030.

As domestic production wanes, the U.S. is starting to join those countries — most of the world, in fact — that import phosphate from Morocco and the Western Sahara. American imports cross the Atlantic courtesy of Potash Corp, the Canada-based fertilizer company whose hostile takeover bid by the Australian mining giant BHP Billiton was blocked by the Canadian government last year. And phosphate mining in Florida, which is home to the world’s largest phosphate mine, is being challenged by environmentalists concerned about its impact on waterways and drinking water supplies.

Already, like other key commodities with once-dominant sources running low, the price of phosphate is starting to yo-yo alarmingly. Prices spiked at an 800-percent increase in 2008.

have the swiss been talking to will allen?

Video - Growing Power movement redux.

swissinfo | As people are recognising the need for more sustainably grown produce, new ideas about agriculture are taking shape.

Swiss entrepreneurs Urban Farmers are pushing the concept of local production and have come up with a pioneering solution to many of the problems of conventional farming methods.

Urban Farmers attended the International Federation of Landscape Architects' World Congress at the end of June. The event drew around 850 participants from around the world to Zurich's Kongresshaus to discuss issues including the integration of agriculture into an urban environment.

Using an almost closed-loop aquaponics system – that combines raising aquatic animals with cultivating plants in water – to produce fish, vegetables and herbs, the firm has developed one of the most ecologically friendly ways to eat. They believe the technology can soon be commercialised.

Top retailers Migros and Coop have expressed an interest in the company’s plans and the firm has been awarded a prize by environmental organisation, WWF Switzerland.

The Swiss Farmers Association said it approved of the idea as a complement to traditional farming, but that it was hard to know how workable it was.

"The concept of urban farming sounds like a good idea to us. Actually, it is a form of Suisse agriculture and our goals in miniature: Produce locally, ecologically food for the local population and pay attention that the circulation of nutrients is closed," spokeswoman Sandra Helfenstein told swissinfo.ch.

"Unfortunately, we cannot judge the potential and the viability of a production like this in the city. Are there enough suitable places and are the consumers interested to buy this product for a higher price?"

Rooftop boxes

With acquaponics there is no waste created, no need for soil or pesticides, and it is all contained in a box designed to be set up on the rooftops of urban buildings.

No transportation is required, thereby cutting out oil consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

WWF Switzerland sees one advantage as being that no land needs to be cultivated.

“If you can use a surface that is not otherwise being used, it’s worth a try,” spokesman Philip Gehri told Swiss public radio DRS. “It doesn’t mean though that we think cities can provide for all their food needs this way.”

The Urban Farmers box contains vegetables grown in a glasshouse on top of a tank of fish, which provide nutrients for the plants through their waste as it is taken up with the water through the roots of the plants.

"The beauty of this natural system is that it's a symbiosis of fish and plants which lives on its own," Urban Farmers CEO Roman Gaus told swissinfo.ch.

"The main reason for doing this is ecological," added Gaus.

"We think urban agriculture has a future because the current conventional agriculture is at its peak, with issues such as E-coli, CO2 and so on.”

usda's food desert locator map

Good | Yesterday, the United States Department of Agriculture unveiled its latest online tool: an eye-opening map of the nation's "food deserts."

These food deserts (marked in pink above) are places where there is "low income" and "low access"—or places where at least a fifth of the population lives at or below the poverty line and where there isn't a supermarket within a one-mile radius (or within a 10-mile radius in rural areas). All things told, about 13.5 million people nationwide have little or no access to stores selling healthful food.

The complete dataset is downloadable, so it should spawn mash-ups. The USDA has also created the Food Environment Atlas, which maps factors ranging from food taxes to farmers' markets (below). What correlations can we make about the absence of food deserts and farmers' markets?

The data's impressive and certainly opens up opportunities to map other connections: What's the impact of healthy corner stores, walkable school districts, or even McDonald's locations on food deserts? Could we put the "Wal-Mart as food desert solution" theory to the test? Fist tap ProfGeo.

u.s. squanders energy on food chain

Video - First McDonald's commercial featuring Ronald.

CNBC | Between 1997 and 2002, in fact, over 80 percent of the increase in annual U.S. energy consumption was food related.

And estimates for 2007 suggest the U.S. food system accounted for nearly 16 percent of the nation’s total energy budget, up from 14.4 percent in 2002, according to the report, which measured both the direct energy used to power machines and appliances (like trucks and microwave ovens) as well as the “embodied” energy used to manufacture, store and distribute food products.

“This is what they call a fossil fuel party,” says Kamyar Enshayan, director of the Center for Energy & Environmental Education at the University of Northern Iowa. “We’ve created a food system that relies heavily on fossil energy, and it’s become so globalized that there are literally grapes from South Africa in the grocery store in Cedar Falls, Iowa. It’s a long-distance shipping economy, which makes all of us vulnerable to disruptions in the supply chain and other unforeseen emergencies.”

That’s particularly troublesome, he notes, when so much of the U.S. — particularly the Midwest — has such potential for primary production.

“We have the best soils and a great climate and yet, most of what we eat is imported,” says Enshayan. “You have to step back and say, ‘Wait, why is a region like Iowa not feeding itself?”

The environmental consequence of relying so heavily on a national and international network of suppliers is even greater, he notes.

“It dulls our imagination and prevents us from paying attention to what sustains us,” says Enshayan. “The loss of water and soil quality is right in front of us, but since our food doesn’t come from it, why worry?”

And then, of course, there’s the impact on our climate.

“The production and distribution of food has long been known to be a major source of green house gas and other environmental emissions, and, for many reasons, it is seen by many environmental advocates as one of the major ways concerned consumers can reduce their carbon footprints,” writes Christopher Weber, an environmental engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University, in a 2008 paper called “Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the Unites States” that he co-authored with H. Scott Mathews.

According to the report, the average household’s climate impact related to food is estimated to be 8.1 t CO2/yr, or tonnes of CO2 equivalent a year, a common measure for determining how much global warming a type of greenhouse gas may cause.

To put that figure into perspective, driving a car that gets 25 miles per gallon roughly 12,000 miles produces 4.4 t CO2/yr.

Why So High
One of the reasons energy use in the food system is growing so rapidly is that there are more of us to feed.

The U.S. population grew by more than 9.7 percent to 308.7 million in 2010, according to the Census Bureau.

A second culprit is higher food expenditure for the amount of food marketed to U.S. consumers, which boosted food system energy use in America by 25 percent, the USDA report notes.

By far, though, the use of energy-intensive technologies as a substitute for manual labor is the biggest contributor.

energy use in the u.s. food system

USDA | Energy is an important input in growing, processing, packaging, distributing, storing, preparing, serving, and disposing of food. Analysis using the two most recent U.S. benchmark input-output accounts and a national energy data system shows that in the United States, use of energy along the food chain for food purchases by or for U.S. households increased between 1997 and 2002 at more than six times the rate of increase in total domestic energy use. This increase in food-related energy flows is over 80 percent of energy flow increases nationwide over the period. The use of more energy-intensive technologies throughout the U.S. food system accounted for half of this increase, with the remainder attributed to population growth and higher real (inflation-adjusted) per capita food expenditures. A projection of food-related energy use based on 2007 total U.S. energy consumption and food expenditure data and the benchmark 2002 input-output accounts suggests that food-related energy use as a share of the national energy budget grew from 14.4 percent in 2002 to an estimated 15.7 percent in 2007.

Summary and discussion of the paper. Keywords: Energy use, energy technologies, food expenditures, input-output analysis, population change, structural decomposition analysis, supply chain analysis, ERS, USDA

what's your gameplan as corn prices skyrocket?

TheContraryFarmer | Forgive me for returning to this topic again, but history is being made in the corn market and the mainstream press isn’t paying attention. Corn prices hit an all time high last week. As you pull on your boots and head for the garden or fields for spring planting, what are your plans? Are you ready for some seismic changes in food prices? Do you feel too helpless to do anything much but keep on hoeing? Am I overreacting?

Corn recently made it well into the $7.00 plus per bushel range, to an historic high, and a rise of about a dollar a bushel from the week before, indicating how eradicate the market has become. As I write this, the market is bobbing up and down around $7.50 like a basketball during March Madness. The USDA just came out with a report in which it said, much to the surprise of nearly everyone, that corn stocks remain unchanged. But then the experts came on with a litany of “it depends” about how one should interpret the meaning of “unchanged.”

We’ve heard for months now that corn was in short supply. There are a number of reasons, supposedly. The demand for ethanol was going up, supposedly. The ethanol plants were buying more corn, supposedly. Other countries were importing more corn, supposedly. Weather outlooks are iffy, supposedly. I can write more sentences ending with the word ‘supposedly’, but what’s the use. Even the grain traders are saying they don’t know what’s happening.

You can read all this stuff in the farm news yourself. I don’t really care to hear any more ‘supposedlies’. I just want to know the what of it, not the how or why. At the livestock auctions in eastern Ohio last week, buyers and sellers were talking glibly of ten dollar corn by this summer, lamb prices over four dollars, and heaven help the cattle market. If you happen to be raising your own calves for meat right now, you could not have a better investment IF you aren’t feeding them seven dollar corn.

Others at the auctions were convinced there is going to be crash. Even farmers who still have last year’s corn to sell (not many), looked at me and said: “this is not good.”

The National Corn Growers Association and food wholesalers and retailers are at each other’s throats over the way ethanol appears to be driving up the price of food. The chairman of Nestle’s has been particularly strident in his criticism, really ripping the corn growers and the ethanol suppliers and especially the government’s generous subsidies to the ethanol plants, insisting that the world needs all its tillable land for human food, not car fuel. I think he’s right, but the corn growers are lashing right back, declaring that the food industry’s attacks are inaccurate, unwarranted, etc. etc.

This much I know from history. During the Irish famine, the landlord farmers of Ireland continued to sell their oats to England where they could get a better price for it than from the starving Irish, until the government stopped them. I am way too pessimistic to think that could not happen again. There are plenty of people who would choose to use corn to feed their cars, boats and airplanes rather than starving people. Fist tap Dale.

the new normal: revolt, migrate, or die...,

FinancialSense | This week wheat and soybeans are up 8 per cent and corn hit a record high of US$7.73 a bushel.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) farmers in the US expect to plant one of the largest corn and soybean crops in history. Wheat production is up in China, Russia and the Ukraine - India is enjoying strong rice harvests. Growers in Brazil and Argentina have reaped bumper harvests. But production is barely keeping up with demand.

The USDA says inventories of corn and soybeans are plummeting. The supply of corn is at a 15-year low and soybean inventories are at record lows. Canola inventories are also down.

“World agricultural markets have become so finely balanced between supply and demand that local disruptions can have a major impact on the global prices of the affected commodities and then reverberate throughout the entire food chain.” A recent report from HSBC

Living on the edge - US grain production filled critical shortages in world supply three times in the last five years:

* 2007-08 drought hit Australian wheat
* 2009 drought hit Argentine soybeans
* 2010 drought hit Russian wheat

“This has been a demand-driven bull market. I do not think we can see a big enough increase in U.S. acreage to rebuild inventories back to a comfortable cushion in one year. It is going to take two years of good weather and good yields. There is absolutely no room for any weather problems anywhere in the world this year.” Jim Farrell, chief executive officer of Omaha-based Farmers National Co.

Good weather, and good yields for two years in a row just to get back to comfortable levels?

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) said, in a recent report:

“Over time, supply growth can be expected to respond to higher prices, as it has in previous decades, easing pressure on food markets, but this will take time counted in years, rather than months.”

It is estimated that the population of the world reached:

* One billion in 1804
* Two billion in 1927
* Three billion in 1960
* Four billion in 1974
* Five billion in 1987
* Six billion in 1999
* Projected to reach seven billion by early 2012
* Eight billion by 2030
* By 2050, the world's population is expected to reach around nine billion - minimum and maximum projections range from 7.4 billion to 10.6 billion
* By the mid 2060s it’s possible that 11.4 billion people will inhabit this planet

Over the next fifty years, as we add another 4.5 billion people to the world’s population, global demand for food will increase almost 70% if population growth predictions are correct.
Already approximately 1 billion people go to bed hungry each night. Somewhere in the world someone starves to death every 3.6 seconds - most are children under the age of five.

“Rising food prices are a threat to global growth and social stability and the world is just one poor harvest away from chaos.” Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank

We have to realize that higher food prices and the resulting civil unrest are not a temporary condition but a New Normal and adjust ourselves accordingly.

Is a New Normal, the coming Harsh Times, on your radar screen?

strange agricultural landscapes seen from space

Fist tap Dale.

galloping growth and hunger in india

NYTimes | The 50-year-old farmer knew from experience that his onion crop was doomed when torrential rains pounded his fields throughout September, a month when the Indian monsoon normally peters out.

For lack of modern agricultural systems in this part of rural India, his land does not have adequate drainage trenches, and he has no safe, dry place to store onions. The farmer, Arun Namder Talele, said he lost 70 percent of his onion crop on his five-acre farm here, about 70 miles north of the western city of Aurangabad.

“There are no limits to my losses,” Mr. Talele said.

Mr. Talele’s misfortune, and that of many other farmers here, is a grim reminder of a persistent fact: India, despite its ambitions as an emerging economic giant, still struggles to feed its 1.1 billion people.

Four decades after the Green Revolution seemed to be solving India’s food problems, nearly half of Indian children age 5 or younger are malnourished. And soaring food prices, a problem around the world, are especially acute in India.

Globally, floods in Australia and drought in China have helped send food prices everywhere soaring — on fears the world will see a repeat of shortages in 2007 and 2008 that caused food riots in some poor countries, including Egypt.

While India’s agricultural problems are part of this bigger global puzzle, in many ways India’s food challenges are more entrenched and systemic than those faced elsewhere.