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7 Reasons Food Shortages Will Become a Global Crisis

Activist Post

Food inflation is here and it's here to stay. We can see it getting worse every time we buy groceries. Basic food commodities like wheat, corn, soybeans, and rice have been skyrocketing since July, 2010 to record highs. These sustained price increases are only expected to continue as food production shortfalls really begin to take their toll this year and beyond.

This summer Russia banned exports of wheat to ensure their nation's supply, which sparked complaints of protectionism. The U.S. agriculture community is already talking about rationing corn over ethanol mandates versus supply concerns. We've seen nothing yet in terms of food protectionism.

Global food shortages have forced emergency meetings at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization where they claim "urgent action" is needed. They point to extreme weather as the main contributing factor to the growing food shortages. However, commodity speculation has also been targeted as one of the culprits.

It seems that the crisis would also present the perfect opportunity and the justification for the large GMO food companies to force their products into skeptical markets like in Europe and Japan, as recently leaked cables suggest. One thing is for sure; food shortages will likely continue to get worse and eventually become a full-scale global food crisis.

Here are seven reasons why food shortages are here to stay on a worldwide scale:

1. Extreme Weather: Extreme weather has been a major problem for global food; from summer droughts and heat waves that devastated Russia’s wheat crop to the ongoing catastrophes from 'biblical flooding' in Australia and Pakistan. And it doesn’t end there. An extreme winter cold snap and snow has struck the whole of Europe and the United States. Staple crops are failing in all of these regions making an already fragile harvest in 2010 even more critical into 2011. Based on the recent past, extreme weather conditions are only likely to continue and perhaps worsen in the coming years.


2. Bee Colony Collapse: The Guardian reported this week on the USDA's study on bee colony decline in the United States: "The abundance of four common species of bumblebee in the US has dropped by 96% in just the past few decades." It is generally understood that bees pollinate around 90% of the world's commercial crops. Obviously, if these numbers are remotely close to accurate, then our natural food supply is in serious trouble. Luckily for us, the GMO giants have seeds that don't require open pollination to bear fruit.

3. Collapsing Dollar: Commodity speculation has resulted in massive food inflation that is already creating crisis levels in poor regions in the world. Food commodity prices have soared to record highs mainly because they trade in the ever-weakening dollar. Traders will point to the circumstances described in this article to justify their gambles, but also that food represents a tangible investment in an era of worthless paper. Because the debt problems in the United States are only getting worse, and nations such as China and Russia are dropping the dollar as their trade vehicle, the dollar will continue to weaken, further driving all commodity prices higher.

4. Regulatory Crackdown: Even before the FDA was given broad new powers to regulate food in the recent Food Safety Modernization Act, small farms were being raided and regulated out of business. Now, the new food bill essentially puts food safety under the direction of the Department of Homeland Security where the food cartel uses the government to further consolidate their control over the industry. Militant police action is taken against farmers suspected of falling short on quality regulations. It is the power to intimidate innocent small farmers out of the business.

5. Rising oil prices: In 2008, record oil prices that topped $147 per barrel drove food prices to new highs. Rice tripled in 6 months during the surge of oil prices, along with other food commodities. The price of oil affects food on multiple levels; from plowing fields, fertilizers and pesticides, to harvesting and hauling. Flash forward to 2011: many experts are predicting that oil may reach upwards of $150-$200 per barrel in the months ahead. As oil closed out 2010 at its 2-year highs of $95/bbl, it is likely on pace to continue climbing. Again, a weakening dollar will also play its part in driving oil prices, and consequently, food prices to crisis levels.

6. Increased Soil Pollution: Geo-engineeringhas been taking place on a grand scale in the United States for decades now. Previously known in conspiracy circles as 'chemtrailing,' the government has now admitted to these experiments claiming they are plan "B" to combat global warming. The patents involved in this spraying are heavy in aluminum. This mass aluminum contamination is killing plants and trees and making the soil sterile to most crops. In an astonishing coincidence, GMO companies have patented aluminum-resistant seeds to save the day.


7. GMO Giants: Because of growing awareness of the health affects of GM foods, several countries have rejected planting them. Therefore, they would seem to need a food crisis to be seen as the savior in countries currently opposed to their products. A leaked WikiLeaks cable confirms that this is indeed the strategy for GMO giants, where trade secretaries reportedly “noted that commodity price hikes might spur greater liberalization on biotech imports.” Since GMO giants already control much of the food supply, it seems they can also easily manipulate prices to achieve complete global control of food.

The equation is actually quite simple: food is a relatively inelastic commodity in terms of demand. In other words, people need to eat no matter how bad the economy gets. Thus, demand can be basically measured by the size of the population. Therefore, as demand remains steady while the 7 supply pressures outlined above continue to worsen, food prices will have only one place to go -- up, up, and up.

As international agencies scramble to find "solutions," their energy may be just as well spent on questioning if this famine scenario is being purposely manipulated for profits. Regardless, the average person would be very wise to stock up on food staples as an investment, and frankly to survive the worsening food crisis.

Activist Post: 7 Reasons Food Shortages Will Become a Global Crisis



http://newscorpwatch.org/mmtv/201105230039

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Obama Orders Military To Prepare For Spring Food Riots



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A grim report prepared by France’s General Directorate for External Security (DGSE) obtained by Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) states that president’s Obama and Sarkozy have “agreed in principal” to create a joint US-European military force to deal exclusively with a Global uprising expected this spring as our World runs out of food.


According to this report, Sarkozy, as head of the G-20 group of developed Nations, called for and received an emergency meeting with Obama this past Monday at the White House wherein he warned his American counterpart that the shock rise in food prices occurring due to an unprecedented series of disasters was threatening the stability of the entire World and could lead to the outbreak of Total Global War.


Just last week French Prime Minister Francois Fillon underlined that one of France’s top G-20 priorities was to find a collective response to “excessive volatility” in food prices now occurring, a statement joined by Philippe Chalmin, a top economic adviser to the French government, who warned the World may face social unrest including food riots in April as grain prices increase to unprecedented highs.
From $100 to $1,500 in One Week!





The fears of the French government over growing Global instability was realized this past week after food riots erupted in Algeria and Tunisia and left over 50 dead. So dire has the situation become in Tunisia that their government this morning rushed in massive amounts of troops and tanks to their capital city Tunis and instituted a Nationwide curfew in an order to quell the growing violence.


The United Nations, also, warned this past Friday that millions of people are now at risk after food prices hit their highest level ever as Global wheat stocks fell to 175.2 million tons from 196.7 million tons a year ago; Global corn stocks are said may be 127.3 million tons at the end of this season, compared with last month’s USDA outlook for 130 million tons; and Global soybean inventories will drop to 58.78 million tons at the end of this season, from 60.4 million tons a year earlier.


Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, further warned this past week that rising food prices are “a threat to global growth and social stability” as our World, for the first time in living memory, has been warned is just “one poor harvest away from chaos”.
Important to note about how dire the Global food situation has become is to understand the disasters that have befallen our World’s top wheat growing Nations this past year, and who in descending order are: China, India, United States, Russia, France, Canada, Germany, Ukraine, Australia and Pakistan.

From China’s disaster: 2010 China drought and dust storms were a series of severe droughts during the spring of 2010 that affected Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangxi, Sichuan, Shanxi, Henan, Shaanxi, Chongqing, Hebei and Gansu in the People’s Republic of China as well as parts of Southeast Asia including Vietnam and Thailand, and dust storms in March and April that affected much of East Asia. The drought has been referred to as the worst in a century in southwestern China.

From India’s disaster: A record heat wave and growing water crisis in India are forcing politicians to consider implementing user fees and other measures to conserve water. Sri Lanka’s President Mahinda Rajapaksa yesterday instructed ministers and officials to prepare a strategic plan to face an impending food crisis as there were signs that the World is to confront a food shortage by next April.

From Russia’s disaster: (10% of total World’s output, 20% for export) they were hit by the highest recorded temperatures Russia has seen in 130 years of recordkeeping; the most widespread drought in more than three decades; and massive wildfires that have stretched across seven regions, including Moscow.

From France’s disaster: The French government lowered their wheat crop forecast by 2.7% over last year due to drought and cold weather.

From Canada’s disaster: Record setting drought has affected their main grain producing provinces in the Western part of their Nation.

From Ukraine’s disaster: (the World’s top producer of barley and sixth biggest of wheat) hit as hard as Russia by fire and drought to the point they have halted all their exports of grains in 2011.

From Australia’s disaster: Fears of a Global wheat shortage have risen after the Queensland area of Australia was hit by calamitous flooding. Andrew Fraser, Queensland’s State Treasurer, described the floods as a “disaster of biblical proportions”. Water is covering land the size of France and Germany. It is expected to reach over 30 feet deep in some areas in coming days.

From Pakistan’s disaster: Floods have submerged 17 million acres of Pakistan’s most fertile crop land, have killed 200,000 herd of livestock and have washed away massive amounts of grain and left farmers unable to meet the fall deadline for planting new seeds, which implies a massive loss of food production in 2011, and potential long term food shortages.
Not only have the vast majority of our World’s top wheat producers been affected, but also one of the main grain producing regions on the Planet, South America, has been hit by disasters too where an historic drought has crippled Argentina and Bolivia, and Brazil, that regions largest Nation, has been hit with catastrophic floods that have killed nearly 400 people in the past few days alone.
Even the United States has been hit as a catastrophic winter has seen 49 of their 50 States covered by snow causing unprecedented damage to their crops in Florida due to freezing weather, and record setting rains destroying massive numbers of crops in their most important growing region of California.
And if you think that things couldn’t get any worse you couldn’t be more mistaken as South Korea (one of the most important meat exporters in Asia) has just this past week had to destroy millions of farm animals after an outbreak of the dreaded foot-and-mouth disease was discovered.


To how horrific the Global food situation will become this year was made even more grim this past month when the United States reported that nearly all of their honey bee and bumblebee populations have died out, and when coupled with the “mysterious” die-off of the entire bat population in America means that the two main pollinators of fruit and vegetable plants will no longer be able to do their jobs leading to crop losses this report warns will be “biblical and

catastrophic”.


Chillingly to note is that after meeting with Sarkozy, Obama began implementing his Nation’s strategy for keeping the truth of this dire events from reaching the American people by ordering all US citizens to have an Internet ID so that they can be tracked and jailed should they begin telling the truth.


And so today, as agricultural traders and analysts warn that the latest revision to US and Global stocks means there is no further room for weather problems, a new cyclone is preparing to hit Australia, brutal winter weather in India has killed nearly 130, and more snow is warned to hit America, and we’re not even two full weeks into 2011… may God have mercy on us all.


Source

Obama Orders Military To Prepare For Spring Food Riots | EUTimes.net

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World Risks Food Riots as Grains Climb, Economist Chalmin Says

January 07, 2011, 3:44 AM EST

By Rudy Ruitenberg


Jan. 6 (Bloomberg) -- The world may face social unrest including food riots in April as grain prices increase, said Philippe Chalmin, an economic adviser to the French government.


Crop damage caused by flooding in Australia and drought in Argentina is likely to boost grain prices in coming months, Chalmin, an economics professor at the University of Paris- Dauphine, said in an interview in the French capital today.


“I’m very concerned,” Chalmin said. “Around Easter we could start to see food riots.”


World food prices advanced to a record in December, partly driven by higher sugar prices, the United Nation’s Food and Agricultural Organization reported yesterday. The FAO’s cereal index rose to the highest level since August 2008, remaining about 37 points below the record level in April that year.


Corn prices rose 52 percent in Chicago last year, while wheat climbed 47 percent. Grain prices may rise further because of uncertainty about production in South America, FAO senior economist Abdolreza Abbassian said yesterday.


“For the cereals, I expect very strong tension around March, April,” Chalmin said. “There are no more stocks available with the large exporters. It’s not because of sugar that you’re going to have food riots.”


Skyrocketing food prices in 2008 sparked protests and riots in almost three dozen poor nations including Haiti, Somalia, Burkina Faso and Cameroon.


--Editors: John Deane, Claudia Carpenter
To contact the reporter on this story: Rudy Ruitenberg in Paris at rruitenberg@bloomberg.net.


To contact the editor responsible for this story: Claudia Carpenter at ccarpenter2@bloomberg.net.


World Risks Food Riots as Grains Climb, Economist Chalmin Says - Businessweek

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YouTube - ‪Empty Store Shelves Coming to America‬‏

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Why Are Food Prices Rising So Fast?


If you do much grocery shopping, you have probably noticed that the cost of food has been rising at a very brisk pace over the past year. So why are food prices rising so fast? According to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, inflation is still very low and the economy is improving. So what is going on here? When I go to the grocery store these days, there are very few things that I will buy unless they are on sale. In fact, I have noticed that many of the new "sale prices" are the old regular prices. Other items have had their packages reduced in size in order to hide the price increases. But with millions of American families just barely scraping by as it is, what is going to happen if food prices keep rising this rapidly?


The food prices are especially painful if you are trying to eat healthy. Most of the low price stuff in the grocery stores is garbage. Eating the "typical American diet" is a highway to cancer, heart disease and diabetes.
But if you try to stick to food that is "healthy" or "organic" you can blow through hundreds of dollars in a heartbeat. In fact, the reality is that tens of millions of American families have now essentially been priced out of a healthy diet.


Soon there will be millions more American families that will not even be able to afford an unhealthy diet.


Some recent statistics compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics are absolutely staggering. According to a recent CNBC article, over the past year many of the most popular foods in America have absolutely soared in price....

Coffee, for instance, is up 40 percent. Celery is 28 percent higher while butter prices rose 26.4 percent. Rounding out the top five are bacon, at 23.5 percent, and cabbage, at 23.3 percent.

Unfortunately, it looks like the trend of rising food prices is accelerating. Just look at what the CNBC article says happened in the month of April alone....

Just in April—the most recent month for which data is available—grapes went up nearly 30 percent, cabbage jumped about 17 percent and orange juice surged more than 5 percent.

Meat is becoming more expensive as well. Since March 2009, livestock prices have risen by 138%.
So when Ben Bernanke tells us that inflation is very low, that really is a lie. On the stuff that people spend money on every day (like food and gas), prices have gone up dramatically.


Sadly, this is not just a phenomenon that is happening in the United States. The truth is that the entire planet is rapidly approaching a horrific global food crisis.
Over the past year, the global price of food has risen by 37 percent and this has pushed approximately 44 million more people around the world into poverty.


When food prices rise in the U.S. it may be painful for millions of American families, but around the world a rise in food prices can mean the difference between surviving and not surviving.


That is why it has been so alarming that the global price

of wheat has approximately doubled over the past year.
But it is not just wheat that has been soaring. Check out what a recent Bloomberg article had to say about what has been happening to many key agricultural commodities over the past year....

Corn futures advanced 77 percent in the past 12 months in Chicago trading, a global benchmark, rice gained 39 percent and sugar jumped 64 percent. There will be shortages in corn, wheat, soybeans, coffee and cocoa this year or next, according to Utrecht, Netherlands-based Rabobank Groep. Prices also rose after droughts and floods from Australia to Canada ruined crops last year. European farmers are now contending with their driest growing season in more than three decades.

Even before this recent spike in food prices the world was struggling to get enough food to everybody. It has been estimated that somewhere in the world someone starves to death every 3.6 seconds, and 75 percent of those are children under the age of five.


So what is going to happen if food prices keep on rising at the current pace?


That is a very good question.
We really are starting to move into unprecedented territory. Nobody is quite sure what is going to happen next.


So why is all of this happening?


Well, a lot of people are blaming the Federal Reserve. All of the "quantitative easing" that the Fed has done has flooded the financial markets with money. All of that money had to go somewhere. Much of it has pumped up the prices of hard assets such as oil, gold and agricultural commodities.


But it is not just the Fed that is to blame. The truth is that central banks all over the world have been recklessly printing money.


When the amount of money in an economy goes up, the purchasing value of all existing money goes down. In the United States, that means that your dollars will not go as far as they did before.


But it is not just monetary policy that is affecting food prices. In 2010 and 2011 we have seen an unprecedented wave of natural disasters and crazy weather. This has caused problems with crops all over the globe.


In addition, U.S. economic policies are also playing a role. At this point, almost a third of all corn grown in the United States is used for fuel. This is putting a lot of stress on the price of corn.


Also, there are some long-term trends that are not in our favor. For example, the systematic depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer could eventually turn "America's Breadbasket" back into the "Dust Bowl". If you have not heard of this problem I would encourage you to do some research on it.


Things are going to get a lot worse, but already America is having a really hard time feeding itself. According to Feeding America's 2010 hunger study, more than 37 million Americans are now being served by food pantries and soup kitchens.


So is that number unusual?


Yes, it sure is.


The number of Americans that are going to food pantries and soup kitchens has increased by 46% since 2006.
That is not a good trend.


Another stat that I talk a lot about in this column is the number of Americans on food stamps.


Right now, there are 44 million Americans on food stamps. Nearly half of them are children.
How did we ever get to the point as a nation where more

than 20 million children end up on food stamps?


It is estimated that one out of every four American children is currently on food stamps, and it is being projected that approximately 50 percent of all U.S. children will be on food stamps at some point in their lives before they reach the age of 18.


So what is going to happen if the economy gets even worse?


What is going to happen if there really is a major food crisis in this country someday?
Food prices have been going up for decades and they are going to continue to go up. But the frightening thing is how fast they are increasing now.


As the U.S. middle class continues to be destroyed, the number of Americans that can't afford to buy enough food is going to continue to rise. Food prices are rising much faster than wages are, and that is not likely to change any time soon.


Food is rapidly becoming one of the most important global economic issues of this decade. The farther one looks down the road, the bleaker things look for the global food situation.


I hope you are prepared for that.


Why Are Food Prices Rising So Fast?

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Gas Prices May Be Falling, But Food Keeps Going Up

Thursday, 23 Jun 2011 | 1:24 PM ET

By: Jeff Cox

CNBC.com Staff Writer


Falling gas prices are easing the pain at the pump, but surging food costs are still causing consumers to get gored at the grocery store.

While gasoline is off more than 5 percent over the last month, prices for coffee, fruit, bacon, pasta and a slew of other food items have registered gains over the past year as high as 40 percent.

Just in April—the most recent month for which data is available—grapes went up nearly 30 percent, cabbage jumped about 17 percent and orange juice surged more than 5 percent.

So while the energy prices that helped fuel inflation have eased a bit recently, the items that Americans use to feed their families and host summertime picnics are continuing to rise and rise fast.

"This is a serious problem in the middle- to lower-income parts of the country," says Richard Hastings, consumer strategist at Global Hunter Securities in Newport Beach, Calif. "A little bit of inflation in the United States is actually a big problem because of how many lower-income people we have. It's a serious long-term fiscal problem."


The government's main gauge of inflation, the Consumer Price Index, is increasing at a 3.6 percent annualized rate, a higher reading but not enough to provoke any policy action to control prices.

But a look at prices compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics tells a different story.
The BLS numbers show a climate of continually rising prices across a wide swath of food categories—a tally of 76 items ranging from ground beef to soda to dairy products.
\
Measuring the past month's performance, the BLS found prices gained on 45 of the items it monitors. But over the past year the trend is much stronger, with 66 of the 76 items higher in price, some by staggering numbers.

Coffee, for instance, is up 40 percent. Celery is 28 percent higher while butter prices rose 26.4 percent. Rounding out the top five are bacon, at 23.5 percent, and cabbage, at 23.3 percent.

April 2011, meanwhile, was a bad month for fruit prices as well. Joining grapes as big gainers in the fruit aisle was grapefruit, which rose 15 percent. While cabbage led the vegetables, broccoli rose 2.5 percent in the month and about 12 percent for the past year. Smoked ham was 7 percent higher and potatoes jumped 6.1 percent.

Consumers already under intense pressure from rising unemployment and falling home values, then, are getting no relief when it comes to putting food on the table.

"The labor market may already have reached its capabilities," Hastings said. "Sensitivity to low levels of inflation is quite high."

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has used the term "transitory" to address the surge in food and energy costs, reasoning that temporary factors such as weather and $4 a gallon gas were pressuring prices.
But that theory has run into roadblocks lately, in part because of the resistance of food prices to drops even in the wake of falling gasoline as well as a persistently nasty weather pattern that already has exacted a toll that will last throughout the year.

"Food prices are transitory only if you have weather that is transitory, if you don't have natural disaster problems," says Peter Cardillo, chief economist at Avalon Partners in New York. "It appears the past several years that things have gotten worse in terms of natural disasters. How many tornadoes have we had? All you need is something like that to happen during growing season in Idaho or Nebraska and that's the end of you."
Of course, not everything is higher.

Tomatoes dropped 21 percent in the past month and are down 6.5 percent in the past year. Boneless chicken breasts fell 5.5 percent last month and 4 percent over the past year. And wine conisseurs can drown their sorrows in a 24 percent price drop over the past month.

But there are few indications that, overall, the pattern of price hikes will abate anytime soon. That in turn will be bad news for an economy suffering under the twin yoke of high unemployment and rising inflation.

"We're going to have to get used to a good growth rate being 3 percent, simply because of globalizations and the problems that are attached to it," Cardillo says. "The glorious days of our economy growing at 5 or 6 percent are not likely to happen for many more years, if they ever happen."

© 2011 CNBC.com






News Headlines

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France’s Sarkozy Urges Action Against the ‘Plague’ of Food Price Surges

By Rudy Ruitenberg and Tony Dreibus - Jun 23, 2011 1:40 AM ET



World food prices that rose 37 percent in a year, driving 44 million more people into poverty, are a “plague” that need action from world leaders now, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said.


Group of 20 farm ministers are in Paris for the second day of a summit. France, which holds the G-20 presidency, wants a central database on crops, limits on export bans, international market regulation, emergency stockpiles and a plan to raise global output. The proposals to limit export curbs and start a database will be “especially sensitive,” French Agriculture Minister Bruno Le Maire said last week.


Wheat as much as doubled in the past year as Russia and Ukraine curbed exports after drought decimated crops, adding to record global food prices the World Bank says put 44 million more people into poverty since June. Nations will spend $1.29 trillion on food imports this year, the most ever and 21 percent more than in 2010, the United Nations estimates.


“Volatility is a plague on farmers and consumers,” Sarkozy said in a speech to the ministers yesterday. “It can plunge entire populations into famine and poverty.”


A lack of transparency in agricultural markets is exacerbating price swings, threatening economic recovery and food production, Sarkozy said.


“We have to act, and act together,” the president said.



“The world is watching you.”
‘Century of Hunger’

World leaders risk making this “the century of hunger” unless they can agree to new rules on food supply, Le Maire said before the meeting. France’s position on the main proposals being put to the G-20 ministers is that either all are agreed on or there is no accord, Le Maire said in an interview with Bloomberg Television on June 20.


“Transparency is an issue,” Abah Ofon, a Singapore-based analyst at Standard Chartered Plc, said in an interview with Susan Li on Bloomberg Television’s First Up. “The market isn’t giving enough signals to farmers and stakeholders” to boost production to make up for potential losses to crops in importing countries, he said.


The ministers will most likely balk at the proposal on trade restrictions, said Robert Carlson, international relations director at the Washington-based National Farmers Union.
‘Tough One’

“That’s going to be a tough one,” Carlson said in an interview in Brussels. “Probably the last thing you get agreement on is the agreement to let somebody else control the borders of your country.”
The last time prices surged, from 2007 to 2009, more than 60 food riots occurred worldwide, according to the U.S. State Department. The G-20 countries account for 65 percent of all farmland and 77 percent of global grain output, according to a statement on the website of the G-20 presidency.



Corn futures advanced 77 percent in the past 12 months in Chicago trading, a global benchmark, rice gained 39 percent and sugar jumped 64 percent. There will be shortages in corn, wheat, soybeans, coffee and cocoa this year or next, according to Utrecht, Netherlands-based Rabobank Groep. Prices also rose after droughts and floods from Australia to Canada ruined crops last year. European farmers are now contending with their driest growing season in more than three decades.
‘Corn And Yields’

“In terms of supply, there’s been some concerns in Europe, in southern U.S. Plains, in northern plains in China,” Standard Chartered’s Ofon said. “We’re concerned about corn and yields and acreage.”


Growth in agricultural output will slow to 1.7 percent a year through 2020, compared with 2.6 percent in the previous decade, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization and Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said in a report this month.


While Standard Chartered forecasts global wheat production will expand, prices may still be sustained at current levels as “demand surges back into the market,” Ofon said.


France will sign only an agreement that includes regulation of financial markets for agricultural commodities, Le Maire said. The details will be discussed by G-20 finance ministers later this year, he said.
“A market that is not regulated is not a market, it’s a lottery in which fortune smiles on the most cynical, instead of rewarding hard work, investment and the creation of value,” Sarkozy said.


To contact the reporters on this story: Rudy Ruitenberg in Paris at rruitenberg@bloomberg.net; Tony Dreibus in London at tdreibus@bloomberg.net


To contact the editor responsible for this story: Claudia Carpenter at ccarpenter2@bloomberg.net

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The Food Crisis War Endgame

Stock-Markets / Food Crisis Aug 04, 2011 - 11:55 AM

By: Andrew_McKillop


Nothing gives better proof of a sure and certain, rapidly growing global food shortage than the simplest look at how commodity markets have been responding to the US debt crisis, the coming devaluation of the US dollar, and the merited exposure of Barack Obama as a loser. Stripping away the short covering, the dollar crisis, inflation fear and all the rest, we find that food prices are resisting a lot better than oil prices, to the rising likelihood of recession in the western world, and maybe also global economic recession.


If food products were "pure commodities", like oil basically is, like copper basically is, they should also tank on this recession outlook.


But that isn't happening. Prices, to be sure, are highly volatile but the fundamentals tell us why food prices are so resistant to recession fear. UN FAO food supply, demand and price data proves that global demand is high, but supply isnt. The result: food prices are rising even as most OECD countries, led by the US, the EU27 countries and Japan are either in recession, close to recession, or experiencing constantly falling economic growth and rising unemployment.
LONG AND SHORT TERM TRENDS: THE SAME RESULT
We know all to well that "food is a weapon". This is what we can call FoodWar-1, dating from the 1970s and before.


Food supply was then only a blunt instrument in the foreign policy of food exporter countries - which were traditionally led by the USA, the biggest exporter, but that is changing fast. In commercial terms, the balance on its food trade by value, the USA will likely become a net food importer by or before 2017. Other major food exporters are as small in number as the number of world net creditor nations - that is countries whose debts are lower than their credits, and which usually run net trade surpluses with the rest of the world.


More than 150 nations run a deficit on their food trade - they import more food than export it. The food deficit is worse than the oil deficit, measured by global food import dependence. The so-called "food weapon" in fact exhibits, yet again, the wall-to-wall schizophrenia that is not second nature, but the primary nature of our crisis prone and dangeroulsy incompetent ruling political and corporate elites. They want food shortage, to exercise political and commercial power, and they also want population growth, for cheap labor and growing markets - but refuse to understand this is a zero sum game. Literally, the growing population will eat up the food surpluses - and neither a worker nor a consumer of T-shirts and cellphones is much use when they do not have enought to eat.


Food shortage is driven by population growth: anybody who wants to deny that by calling it fascistminded can take a look at how agribusiness operates, from Monsanto, Dow, Bayer and McDonalds to the Bill Gates Foundation. Their game is trashing the environment for decades or centuries ahead and making profits right now - - while just about being able to feed 6.1 billion persons on Earth. The other 900 million suffer permanent food shortage. That is one-in-seven of world population. The number of underfed is growing by around 4% to 6% per year - far ahead of the population growth rate, and the average rate of global economic growth. And one thing is sure: in global economic recession the underfed will grow even faster, unless food prices behave like "other commodities" and tank in recession - which is no longer certain.


This is the danger: recession will come. Oil prices will drop, even gold edges down a little - maybe - but food prices stay high and dangerous. They can, could or might even continue rising in global economic recession, drastically multiplying the social stress and damage from recession.


The cards and dice are stacked and rolling that way. We can be 100% certain that any abandonment of pesticides-and-ferilizer, monocrop, irrigation-based "farming", that is agribusiness, will firstly result in a large net fall in world total food supply. Any attempt at a rapid phase-out of agribusiness would move us up to say 1300 million persons who suffer permanent day in and day out food shortage - and anybody saying we need to control population is still a fascist, right ?


The shift to sustainable low-input agriculture, ask Bill Gates, is a nice slogan but doing it will soon be a lot more necessary than only talking about it. This is an epochal shift and a change of civilization, which Gates doesn't mention too often - it will be bad for profits - and the change that is coming will be basically open-ended. Population control will be high up the list.


GETTING WORRIED


Just occasionally, our ruling elites get worried about their gameplan of food undersupply-population oversupply. Being fascist minded when pushed, they have all kinds of fallback ideas and plans for wiping out a billion persons here, a billion persons there: this isnt Norway designer massacre stuff ! But until they have to pull the plug on the human race - and being schizophrenic - they have to keep the party going with profits flowing from growing populations and for corporate cronies who make everything from fertilizers and pesticides to nerve gas and bioweapons.


In fact, these 3 last-cited business activities are all close-linked and related: check the story of the organophosphate pesticides like TEPP, which started their commercial lives as ultra-powerful, ultralethal nerve gases and chem-bio weapons. Spraying them around in the country is called "farming". Monocrop high yield agribusiness, with its oil-pesticides-fertilizer mantra, to which you need to add irrigation (78 percent of world water is used in farming), is the only thing that separates us all from a decades-long food crisis. Our elites musing in private on how to get rid of 1 billion here and 1 billion there would have their musings fulfilled - and more. But their one-only choice of agribusiness, and their refusal to act against overpopulation means the unwinding of the coming global food crisis is completely out of their hands. Just like the sovereign debt crisis.
Back as 1974 Henry Kissinger, who is often accused of war crimes but not FoodWar crime, mused in secret that "Hungry people will do anything for food". Those who control food supply can use it as leverage. This revelation for Kissinger coincided with the USA learning about oil shortage, but his argument was that food shortage can be used to induce political change - including forced birth control. This musing from 1974 is now revealed, in a previously classified US National Security Study Memorandum, No. 200: "Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests".


Kissinger advocated various tactics but had no real strategy. Food supplies on one hand could be used to force family planning, and they could also be used as a blunt instrument of foreign policy but only against countries in dire straits. The use of "the food weapon" was not taken up at the time by US deciders, for the simple reason that the US food trade surplus was so important for helping trim the USA's already growing overseas debts and rising trade deficits.


What happened since the 1970s is easy to summarize. The facts speak for themselves: through 1970- 2010 the world's population doubled from 3.5 billion to 7 billion. It grew by over 11 times the population of the USA today. If it could or might have been possible to feed the 3.5 billion in 1970, which wasn't the case, it will be even less possible to feed the 7 billion od today, growing at 65 million a year. This is a simple fact. Forgot about your "knowledge based agro-revolution" and Third World farmers with cellphones finding the best price for their products in the nearest market.


Our ruling elites know all this, but being schizoid, they panic about ageing Baby Boomer populations and insufficient birth numbers of future consumers and future taxpayers to help pay the wild, fantastic sovereign debts they also cooked up through their one-only wait-then-panic operating mode for running the economy. So they want population growth but they fear population growth - which they should.


OUT OF TIME


The Kissinger food war strategy was far away from being a subtle thing: it only really works on nations and territories enduring economic collapse and with few or no food stocks and resources for food production. The "peace dividend" for FoodWar is like the peace dividend in Afghanistan: zero. The country or countries wracked by famine and food shortage will certainly not bounce back into virile economic growth, because solving food shortage - with growing populations - is not an easy thing. This is basically why Kissinger's 1974 strategy (in fact tactics) were put on the back burner. As a result, and because the world's population "just happened to double", the world's environment has been ransacked and continent-sized ecosystems have been dangerously weakened, often right to the brink.


We have a whole new FoodWar, operating right now, worldwide, uncontrollable.We can call it FoodWar-2, and it's an endgame. Everybody loses, we have no choice.
We can call FoodWar-2 more subtle because it is multiform, dangerous and permanent, unlike the outlyer food panics of the 1960s and 1970s - which were supposedly "solved forever" by the Green Revolution, which in fact was nothing but the good old mantra of oil-fertilizers-pesticides-irrigation, and nothing else. FoodWar-2 is also different because it is engaged against every country on Earth - including the food game controllers. On present population growth trends, with present urban-rural population patterns, with the same economic system as we have now, the countdown to dependence on food imports for nearly all present major food exporters in the OECD group - like the USA, France and Spain - is fast and sure. It may happen by 2020, perhaps a little later, perhaps sooner.


No Einstein is needed to tell you, it is not possible to have a world made up of countries all of which are net food importers. This is the endgame and it is coming.
There are so few exceptions to the list of large food exporters in the OECD Old Rich-New Poor group of countries which will not soon become importers, that we can name them: Australia and New Zealand. We can be sure and certain these 2 countries can't feed the world, and have already maxxed out in agroproduction.


By 2017 on current trends, the USA will be running a net trade deficit on food and agricultural products. The European Union is proud of its agribusiness forcing strategy, the Common Agriculture Policy, taking over 60 percent of all European Commission spending but if those subsidies are stripped away, Europe's 27 countries become instant food deficit. Without subsidies and good old agribusiness, Europe is a food importing group of countries, and has been that way for decades. Japan has the most oil-intensive food production system in the world, using an incredible 10 barrels of oil per hectare, each year in its rice farming, but even with this, it remains a huge food importer country. Both China and India are large and growing net food importers, having to spend more and more on food subsidies..
Like we know, there are only two ways out of the food shortage and overpopulation threat: increase food supply or reduce population. This has been known for decades - but nothing happened. Making this even worse, FoodWar-2 operates a multifaceted attack on anything and everything to do with food.


This ranges from what is outright biological warfare against natural species and natural ecosystems - called agribusiness and producing the food you eat - to people's physical, as well as commercial and economic access to food. In other words, what Kissinger advocated 37 years ago has spiralled out, grown in scale and complexity, getting so expansive and wide ranging that it is almost surely and certainly out of control. The game controllers themselves got trapped by their own refusal to treat the real problems - and when they are in trouble, watch out !


AGRIBUSINESS KILLS


Global agribusiness is very comparable to, and dependent on global banking. Through massive corporate consolidation in agriculture, food and farming, coordinated and convergent global food regulations, and chaff dollars euro and yen thrown on the gaming play tables of unrestrained food commodity speculation, agribusiness creates food shortage, and has a vested interest in food price explosions. To be sure, we wont expect the agribusiness players to say that ! Commodity-oriented agribusiness is a corporate profit tool, but farmers net few or no gains from this. Farmers are low-tech debt-serfs in the low income countries, and are high-tech debt-serfs in the high income countries.


Agribusiness is lethal to the planet and to our future. It wreaks chemical damage, genetic modification and systematic damage right across the food web, both locally and across continents. It punches deep holes in the very base of biosystem and ecosystem operation - for example by almost wiping out bee populations in dozens of countries, cutting their numbers by as much as 75% since 2005 in some cases.
We have constant, sad and shameful proof of the damage dome by agribusiness, in the shape of collateral dead natural systems, right across the planet. The seven seas, for example, have been so ruthlessly predated by deep sea and inshore fishing, that large and ever-growing numbers of food fish species will take decades or even centuries to recoup numbers - or die out entirely. We have lost the resource. Aquaculture and mariculture run on the business mantra of oil-antibiotics-insecticidesfungicides, in case you didnt know, meaning we replace the good with the harmful and unsustainable.
This is progress ! We are feeding about 6-in-7 of the world's population: Rejoice !


On top of real shortage, FoodWar 2 brings manipulated and unpredictable food shortages, and underlines what this new war really means: this war targets the general population - everywhere. We are all targeted. The bottom line is simple and you can see it in your local shop: It means high food prices and also the increasingly sombre and real threat of straight physical shortage. The Olde Worlde term for this is: famine.


We therefore need to understand the strategy and tactics in order to fight back against them: this war is produced by the exact same elites who have destroyed our economic and monetary systems, but the damage done to natural ecosystems and living species is not going to be changed overnight through a stroke of the pen.
Debts could or might be treated that way, even though debt conflicts often lead to war. But the damage from FoodWar-2 will need decades and decades of massive change to stop the Death Machine. Food shortage is not going to run away and disappear because the economy got a little less bad. Also and unfortunately, like so many other crises we heard too much about but which never happened, nobody will believe in this one until it hits them - in the stomach.


YOU THOUGHT FOOD PRICES ARE RISING ?


Crippling food price inflation, by 2008, had caused deadly riots in at least 40 countries. Today in 2011, food commodity prices are as high, in some cases higher than they were in 2008 - and world population has risen by another 200 million since 2008, or two-thirds of the USA's total population today.


Through June 2010-June 2011, the UN FAO's world food price index rose by 39 percent.


Food price inflation now affects every corner of the globe, to be sure with the poorest countries most exposed and feeling the worst hunger pangs. All and every country experiencing the Arab Spring revolt, and its trend to linked civil war, is we can note totally dependent on food imports for all basic foods. The world's three-largest wheat importes by rank are Egypt, Algeria and Saudi Arabia. Street protest might be nice, and is surely needed to overthrow dictators and tyrants - backed or tolerated by the western democracies for decades - but food shortage is almost guaranteed to turn democracy protests into civil war, even faster and more surely.
Exactly like oil prices, food commodity prices rise not only through physical shortage, but also because of the naked decline of the US dollar used to pay for them, causing a flight to "real resources". Factors like extreme weather damage, tsunami damage in Japan, and plant or livestock diseases and pathogen outbreaks - often linked to chemical and genetic manipulation of crop plant and livestock species - can at any time radically cut supplies and increase food prices in a few days hectic trading.


The arm of food shortage and high prices, to be sure, can still be wielded in blunt weapon FoodWar-1 style, on already down-and-out countries. The endless negotiations with North Korea are basically a nuclear threat and food game, where Pyongyang holds a nuclear gun to the West's head in exchange for food. Pirate Somalia, when it was last a country and not a fuzzy and starving no-mans-land of feudal chiefdoms, was food self-sufficient until the 1970s. It is a "failed state" because of food shortage or food shortage helps keep it locked down as a failed state.


Like we can guess, the Peace Dividend in either of these cases will be almost zero, but deliberately intensifying the food crises in North Korea and Somalia yet again underlines the schizoid but vicious nature of our ruling elites. More important, FoodWar-2 needs no political trigger-pull, the process is in global operation now, 24/7, and will only keep going.


The measuring rod of this is rising food prices.
Food War 2 is worldwide and multiform, but has one single end result: food prices will rise. Trapped in a web of regulations restricting food freedom in all ways, starting with what farmers are allowed to produce, to protect the agribusiness cartel which controls the basic building blocks of food, from the molecular level up and through the entire system, the potential for change is low. Raising global food output through changing the methods and techniques utilised, including a shift back to traditional farming, is practically impossible, even in the midterm.


There is no short-term way out, nor midterm way out. Food prices could "go on rising forever", but just like other fetish symbols and needs of the consumer society - oil in particular - when we have a constantly rising price, the economic and social systems get flakier, faster. This will go on a certain time, depending on wealth and spending capabilities in different countries, depending how much inflation middle class voters can absorb with their McDonalds - but the process will not go on forever.
BLOWBACK TIME


The elites took a look at runaway population growth in the 1970s and stepped back: they linked it with controlled and manipulated food production, and made a weapon out of it. The weapon was remodeled and refined over the decades, while population kept on growing. Today, the words of Roosevelt are acid-tinged: "People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made."


They also make revolutions, Mr Roosevelt. The same elites who cooked up FoodWar 2 have destroyed the economy of dozens of countries - especially their own countries - since 2008. In Europe's debtwracked PIIGS, adult unemployment is often 20 percent, and youth unemployment 40 percent. Rising food prices can easily help the generally placid, inert and egoist, consumption crazy populations of Old


Rich-New Poor countries to get a lot less inert and a lot more more political.


Food War2 comes at a particularly bad time for our ruling elites - so if they chose to aggravate and intensify FoodWar-2 this is yet another proof of their stupidity.
Out in the killing fields, that is agribusiness fields, the damage keeps on growing. The biosystem damage reducing future bioproductivity - the ability of living systems to provide us food - continues 24/7.



Agribusiness employs a host of methods and tactics which make this certain, like destroying biodiversity to the point where only GM seeds for crops totally dependent on pesticides and fertilisers can grow in near-sterile, compacted, degraded and eroded soils, called "fields". But agribusiness has no strategy - or if it does have one it has no sense at all - because it is zero sum and total loss.


This blowback is known and proven by what we have now. More is coming and exactly the same applies to overpopulation. Refusal to apply population controls 40 years ago has in that time allowed another 3.5 billion persons to need food, now and every day, but agribusiness denies food to more than 900 million persons, today and every day. The growth in numbers of those who dont eat - around 4 to 6 percent a year - vastly outstrips either economic growth or the growth rate of global population - around 0.9 percent a year. Agribusiness and overpopulation are two proven loser strategies.


When the ruling elites get a handle on this they will panic, as ever. In semi-secret cabals and clubs like the Club of Madrid and the WorldShift Network, for at least 4 years, agenda items include present world food shortage and the coming shortage of medecines, fertilizers, genetic materials for agribusiness crops, livestock pathogen outbreaks - and a string of other tell-tale items. Also figuring, to be sure, is the "potential" for nuclear catastrophes, in the plural.


We can perhaps get a little satisfaction from knowing that FoodWar 2 was almost certainly never planned as a global strategy. It emerged from a nexus of never treating simple problems with clear and courageous action, but to always use two-faced muddling through - with panic afterwards.


Cynics can of course say the elites acted like that with the economy - they muddle through with bigger and bigger debts - so its no surprise they do the same with food and population. But as we have said many times in this article, the lasting damage to the environment from agribusiness, even if we stopped it dead in its bulldozer tracks, would take decades to heal. And between times how do we produce the food needed for 7 or 8 billion persons, assuming that population control goes serious, and world population peaks out at 8 billion ?


FoodWar-2 happened because it was unplanned. It was only a reaction to short-term corporate needs for making profit out of hunger, but the agribusiness weapon that was used is now killing the planet. FoodWar-2 goes far beyond so-called "economic and military security" - and concerns our basic ability to eat. This ultra basic need is now systemically compromised, worldwide: FoodWar 2 has gone critical.


As they say in French: Bon appetit !


By Andrew McKillop


Contact: xtran9@gmail.com


Former chief policy analyst, Division A Policy, DG XVII

Energy, European Commission. Andrew McKillop Biographic Highlights


Andrew McKillop has more than 30 years experience in the energy, economic and finance domains. Trained at London UK’s University College, he has had specially long experience of energy policy, project administration and the development and financing of alternate energy. This included his role of in-house Expert on Policy and Programming at the DG XVII-Energy of the European Commission, Director of Information of the OAPEC technology transfer subsidiary, AREC and researcher for UN agencies including the ILO.