February 29th, 2008 by admin
We wrote a lot about China in our book “Famine in the West”, simply because China and the other fast growing nations of the East will have a massive impact on food availability in the future.
The extraordinary growth of China is hard for us in the West to grasp because every change is multiplied by such large numbers of people. There are now 49 Chinese cities with populations of over one million, and now the more wealthy are moving into vast suburbs with larger houses and more land. Many then need a car and although now their are only 12 million private cars, sales are growing at 26% per year. These relatively rich people consume far more of everything than they did when they were in villages, including food. They want a more western diet with more meat and alchohol, needing much more land per person just when the amount of farmland per person is going down due to desertification in the north west of the country and the massive loss of good, flat, fertile land for the expansion of cities.
It should be remembered that until recently, only about one billion of us were big consumers of food, energy and other resources. The other five billion were relatively low consumers. The world is adding about 90 million people to it’s population each year, but more significant is the similar amount of people in the world each year who move up to become consumers on a similar scale to us. This is the problem we face, more people wanting more of everything when in the case of food at least, there will be less.
When a real food crisis hits the world, it will be countries like China with huge foriegn exchange reserves that will be able to buy what food is available.
Posted in The East Moving up the Food Chain | No Comments »
February 28th, 2008 by admin
World grain reserves are at their lowest level since records began in 1960, and U.S, reserves are the lowest since 1948.
These tight stock levels are causing grain prices to be highly volatile. In normal years, prices tend to change by small amounts, rerely more than £1/tonne in one day. This year, prices on the futures market can go up by £10 one day and then drop £8 the next day.
National governments are responding to this with panic measures. Kazakhstan has frozen grain exports, Vietnam and Argentina are reducing exports through export taxes, Russia and China are introducing price controls and Pakistan and Egypt are rationing food.
Remember, all this is happening when the world still has reserve stocks and there will be enough grain to last till next harvest, so what will happen when a real shortage happens and there is not enough to go round
The answer is that it will be every man and every country for themselves. Big exporting countries will ban exports, farmers and grain traders will hang on to stocks, ordinary people will hoard food and supermarket shelves will empty in the panic. Countries that traditionally import a large proportion of their food will really strugle unless they have something like oil to barter with.
Posted in Threats to Food Supply | No Comments »
Our book “Famine in the West” was written during the early months of 2007 and events have moved quickly in the short time since then.
Wheat prices have doubled over the past year and other grains, legumes and oilseeds have risen by at least 50%. This causes people to ask,
“Are the severe food shortages forecast in the book starting to happen already?”
The answer is that we don’t know, but probably not. Without strong worldwide action by governments, we are heading for a disaster, but the timing can only be guesswork. Starting on page 105 of this book we show two fictional scenarios of the years leading up to 2025, simply because that is the year when the world population should reach 8 billion.
We think that in the next few years , oil and grain prices will fluctuate wildly but the world will most likely get by without a major catastrophe. Farmers will respond to higher prices and will use the small remaining reserves of land such as European set -aside, to sow more acreage, therefore temporarily making up for the 25 million acres of cropland lost each year to desertification, new cities, roads, etc. They will also need to make up for the extra millions of acres being used for biofuel. Although higher prices have put some biofuel projects at risk, government schemes such as the renewable fuel obligation will ensure that many will go ahead.
Higher prices will also mean that the poorest people in the world will have to tighten their belts even further. They are already spending most of their income on food, so when prices rise they have no option but to buy less. Lower consumption by the very poor will help to off-set increased consumption by the millions of newly prosperous urban dwellers in the developing world.
Providing the inputs of fertiliser and pesticides are available to grow both food and fuel, we should get by but it is unlikely that world reserve grain stocks will be rebuilt to safe levels. The real crunch will come when the inevitable big event occurs. Droughts and floods have always happened, and are happening now, but when we get a severe drought in a major region such as the U.S. mid west that lasts for more than one year, we simply will not have the food reserves to cope or extra land to use. The other big risk is that with oil supplies on a similar knife edge as food, our oil dependent farming would suffer if events in the volatile middle east caused real oil shortages. A reserve tank of diesel on the farm could be a good investment.
When a real food crisis happens, panic buying, hoarding and speculation will make things much worse.
