Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/consumer_goo
ds/article1642746.ece

 Dash for green fuel pushes up price of meat in US
April 12, 2007


The price of meat is set to rise in America as the nation’s
helter-skelter dash to convert corn into road fuel begins to take its toll
on the supply of food.

The US Department of Agriculture has said that meat supply will fall this
year because of the high cost of feed. Output of beef, pork and chicken is
expected to decline by one billion pounds as farmers react to the soaring
cost of feeding their livestock.

Typically, meat production in the United States rises by about 2 per cent a
year, but the pressure from American ethanol producers manufacturing road
fuel from corn has sent the price of maize soaring to $4 a bushel.

The USDA is predicting that the 2006 corn crop will sell for an average of
$3.10 a bushel at the farm gate, the highest for a decade. Faced with
extortionate feed costs, cattle and poultry farmers are rearing fewer
animals and slaughtering them early. That means a sudden reversal in the
annual meat production gain, representing a fall of 1.7lb per person.

“There is a new demand component,” Shayle Shagam, a livestock analyst
at USDA, said. “Livestock producers have to bid against the ethanol
industry to get supplies of corn.”

The biofuel revolution’s unpleasant negative consequence was first felt
south of Rio Grande, when the escalating price of corn affected a food
staple. Mexico’s tortilla inflation crisis is spreading north to the
heartland of rib-eye steak and chicken wings. The USDA predicts that food
prices will rise by up to 3.5 per cent this year as farmers rein in output
in response to feedstock costs.

In Washington, the International Monetary Fund added its warning about the
consequences of a mass conversion of food crops into fuel. Mounting
political panic over carbon emissions has encouraged politicians in
European and America to raise targets for the biofuel content in a litre of
petrol.

Food prices rose by 10 per cent worldwide in 2006, said the IMF in its
World Economic Report, owing to a surge in corn, wheat and soybean prices.
The pressure on prices will increase, says the IMF. The EU’s target of a
minimum biofuel content of 10 per cent will require 18 per cent of
agricultural land to be set aside for road fuel production.

Corn is a vital component of the human food chain, used as cornmeal for
baking bread and tortillas, as cooking oil and corn syrup in processed
foods and as animal feedstock. Vast US government subsidies for the
production of ethanol, used as a petrol additive in America, has encouraged
the expansion of ethanol distilleries.