Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

For months I've been warning of spot shortages and much higher prices to
come. Some are finally catching on out there. U.S. agriculture does not
"feed the world"; the U.S. is now a net IMporter of food. And with global
free trade we're competing for the products of agribusiness with a hungry
world. Maybe growing our own won't be just a hobby after all ... but
survival.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net
--------------------

Wheat is the new oil
from San Antonio Current 07/26/2006
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=16966991&BRD=2318&PAG=461&de
pt_id=484045&rfi=6

Get ready for Peak Grain: The global cupboard is one major disaster away
from bare

Brace yourself for crises at the cash register. Major price hikes for food
are coming, as Peak Grain joins the lineup of life-changing events such as
Peak Oil and Peak Water. Unless this year’s harvest is unexpectedly
different from six out of the last seven, the world’s ever-decreasing
number of farmers will not produce enough staple grains to feed its
ever-increasing number of people.

Amber waves of grain: another endangered species?

Quite a shift from obsessing about obesity, isn’t it?

Last month, enviro analyst Lester Brown of the Washington, D.C.-based Earth
Policy Institute examined U.S. Department of Agriculture figures and issued
a shocking warning. The international cupboard, or “reserve” of grains
(wheat, rice, and corn, for example), he showed, is now at its lowest point
since the early 1970s.

He wasn’t the first to go down this path. He follows by a few months
Darrin Qualman, researcher with Canada’s National Farmers Union, one of
the few farm orgs that think agriculture policy should be about feeding
people, not finding ways to raise prices by getting rid of farm surpluses.

While there’s been a crisis of quiet desperation over at least a decade
for the 15,000 people who die each day from hunger-related causes,
shortages and high prices are about to become everyone’s problem.

Turns out that if massive disaster strikes, there’s enough in the global
cupboard to keep people alive on basic grains for 57 days. Two months of
survival food is all that separates us from mass starvation due to drought,
plagues of locusts, and other pests, or the wars and violence that disrupt
farming, all of which are more plentiful than food.

And since the World Trade Organization prohibits government intervention
that keeps any items off the free-trade ledger, there’s no law that says
Canadians, or any other people, get first dibs on their own food
production.

To put the 57 days in historical perspective, the world price for wheat
went up six-fold in 1973, the last time reserves were this low. Wheat
prices ricocheted through the food supply chain in many ways, from higher
prices for cereal and breads eaten directly by humans to the cost of milk
and meat from livestock fed a grain-based diet.

If such a chain reaction happens this year, wheat could fetch $21 a bushel,
about six times its current price. It might cost even more, given that
there are now two other pressing demands for grains that were less forceful
during the 70s.

Those happy days predated modern fads such as using grains for ethanol, now
touted as an alternative to petroleum fuels for cars, and predated the
factory barns that bring grains to an animal’s stall, thereby eliminating
grazing on pasture grasses.

University ethics classes and church elders can ponder the moral dilemmas
imposed on the wealthy when they choose fuel and meat while others starve.

Historians will also recall that 1970s food prices went up because of price
hikes for oil, contributing to the runaway inflation that defined the
decade’s economic challenge. That experience shows that seemingly small
blips in food reserves and availability can lead to major shocks in the
economy and society.

The drop in world food reserves back then was also accompanied by trends
from which the world has yet to fully recover. Legacies include traumatic
famines across Africa, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh, the emergence of
hard-right politics in conventional parties as governments prepared for a
crackdown on unions that were blamed for the inflationary spiral, and tight
money policies that doubled unemployment levels.

Even modest price changes can deliver a big wallop this time, too,
especially in a world that’s already suffering from crisis overload. For
a third of the world’s people who subsist on less than $2 a day, even a
few pennies increase in food prices can make a life-and-death difference.

There will be an echo of that desperation in wealthy North America, where
about 10 percent of the population — mostly single-parent families and
immigrants — faces some form of food insecurity. If looming food
shortages make it onto the radar of government officials charged with
safeguarding public health, a raft of new policy issues will need to be
addressed.

A big question mark has to be put next to ethanol fuels, except those made
from crop wastes. Food sovereignty — the right of a people to set their
own food policies — emerges as a precondition of food security, and
should put the world free-trade agenda on hold.

Planning measures that prohibit urban sprawl onto good farmland —
Ontario, Canada’s greenbelt is an excellent example — become axiomatic.
So do government incentives such as guaranteed minimum prices for farmers
producing basic foods, the same kinds of guarantees now given to
self-regulating professions such as doctors and lawyers, as well as
apprenticed tradesmen, all of whom would have problems working if they
didn’t eat.

And so do measures that promote food production in cities — not as a
healthy hobby, but as a public-health essential. A garden on top of every
garage, a veggie stew in every pot: We will see this and more in the years
ahead.

©San Antonio Current 2006