August 31st, 2007 by John
Wheat and other grain prices keep rising and are now well over double the price of a year ago, reflecting the very tight supply situation. We at Peak Food have been saying for some time that we are facing a food crisis, but still hope that this is just a blip and not the start of the real thing.
Of course, farmers needed a rise on the £60-£70 per tonne they have been getting for the last few years but the recent jump will mean real hardship for some. In the West with our processed, packaged food, the grain element is usually a small proportion of the retail price and the price increases should cause no real problems, but spare a thought for the hundreds of millions of people in the world who live on a few dollars per day and buy basic food. They will find that the cost has nearly doubled and that may mean the difference between struggling by or not. If the world is short of grain, demand will have to fall to the level of supply and this will happen by the poorest eating less.
On our site, we have listed the many threats to food supplies. Of those, the ones causing the present problems are:
- Climate change
- competition from biofuel production, and
- millions of people in Asia moving up the food chain.
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August 28th, 2007 by John
Part of the ‘Global Ocean Conveyor Belt’, a series of giant ocean currents that flow around the earth, the Gulf stream carries vast quantities of warm Atlantic water northward giving Europe and parts of North America a temperate climate. The amount of heat involved is phenomenal, estimated by Stephen Rahmstorf, an oceanographer at Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, as equivalent to one million powerplants.
Without the Gulf stream, Northern Europe would be hardly habitable, certainly not by the present dense population.
The Gulf stream is powered by the weight of the dense, salty water of the northern part of the current which sinks, pulling the current behind it. Scientists are extremely worried that fresh water pouring into the northern ocean from melting glaciers will mix with the salt water of the current making it lighter and unable to sink. It is disturbing that from measurements taken in the last few years there is already a decline in the vigour of the circulation and studies indicate that unlike other climate changes, ocean currents can shift or stop in just a few years.
The effects of such a shut-down would push Northern Europe into semi-Arctic weather conditions, a change so profound that most people don’t even want to think about it.
Posted in Climate Change, Terminology | No Comments »
Below is an excerpt from our book,”Famine in the West”. Though it was only written a few months ago, events have allready slightly overtaken it.
“In January 2007 the IPCC issued a report which was the culmination of six years of research by 2500 scientists from more than 130 countries. This highly regarded study predicts catastrophic rises in sea levels, frequent droughts, tropical storms, flooding, heatwaves and the disappearance of Arctic ice in the sea in the second half of this century.
“It forecasts a 3ºc rise in average temperature by the end of the century but a 6.4ºc rise is possible. So, without very quick action, runaway change looks certain.
“Some commentators have said that climate change will merely mean a geographic relocation of the areas suitable for agriculture, that as large areas like Africa, Southern Europe and the U.S. corn belt become too dry, other parts of the world such as Upper Canada and Northern Russia would become more viable for farming. This argument might make sense if the change were taking place over many hundreds of years but as we lose production from the South we cannot easily move farming to the more northern areas. It would take years to clear the land and build an infrastructure and even then would only be marginally suitable. Certainly there would be no chance of replacing production lost elsewhere. The best we could hope for would be a slow movement northwards of the boundaries of productive land.
“As far as other productive farming areas are concerned, scientists predict major losses in agricultural productivity if global surface temperatures rise by more than 2ºC. However, non-farmers do not always realise how dependent farmers are on a regular weather pattern for the type of farming they do and how relatively small changes can cause big losses. In fact, in the last few years I am sure that every farmer has seen extremes of weather, way outside of the normal fluctuations, that have at times lowered crop yield. So far though, consumers have been lucky in that poor yields in one area have been balanced by good yields in others and there have been carry-over stocks available from previous harvests…”
Since that was written, the 2007 harvest has been poor in several parts of the world causing grain prices to shoot up to record levels. By next harvest, stocks will be at dangerous levels and we are now extremely vulnerable should that harvest also be poor.
