Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

livingontheland - [Livingontheland] As corn and soy fields drown in rainwater, the food crisis deepens

livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] As corn and soy fields drown in rainwater, the food crisis deepens
  • Date: Sun, 15 Jun 2008 23:47:27 -0600


Our Ruined Harvest
As corn and soy fields drown in rainwater, the food crisis deepens
By Tom Philpott
13 Jun 2008
http://www.grist.org/comments/food/2008/06/13/index.html

Here in the United States, we grow 44 percent of the world's corn crop, and
38 percent of its soy. For the great bulk of that massive harvest, we rely on
a single region: the Midwestern farm belt. And over the past couple of weeks,
torrential rains have hammered that area, at a particularly sensitive time
for its grand swath of corn and soybean plants.

An unusually wet spring had already pushed farmers to plant their crops late
and forced them to keep some land fallow. With the recent deluge, a bad
situation has turned worse. The rains have not only damaged crops, they've
also washed away untold tons of fertilizer, which leach into groundwater and
eventually flow through the Mississippi clear down to the Gulf of Mexico.
There, the fertilizer won't feed crops; instead, in a double blow to food
production, it will nourish a vast algae bloom blotting out sea life that
would otherwise have contributed to a once-bountiful fishery.

As a result of this soggy situation, corn yields will plummet, the USDA
reports [PDF]. And that's bad news for the billions of people who rely on the
global food system for sustenance.

Back in February, a fertilizer executive was already waxing darkly about
trends in food production: "If you had any major upset where you didn't have
a crop in a major growing agricultural region this year, I believe you'd see
famine," William Doyle, CEO of Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan, told Bloomberg
News.

Mulling over depleted global grain stores, ramped-up U.S. and European
mandates for turning food crops into biofuel, and rising demand for grain in
Asia, Doyle declared that the global food system had no margin for error. "We
keep going to the cupboard without replacing, and so there is enormous
pressure on agriculture to have a record crop every year," he said. "We need
to have a record crop in 2008 just to stay even with this very low inventory
situation."

Since that time, we've seen images of people in places like Haiti desperately
scrounging in garbage dumps for food, because they could no longer afford to
buy it. And now comes news that prospects for the coming harvests of corn,
soy, and wheat -- the holy trifecta of our globalized food system -- are
looking grim indeed.

When It Rains, It Pours

Think food prices are high? Fasten your seatbelt -- and prepare to tighten
it. The bad weather combined with dubious federal policies means we're ...
well, shucked.

In the past, societies stored grain precisely because agriculture has always
been such a fickle food provider. A few decades ago, the U.S. began testing a
new theory: sell off grain reserves and let "market forces" ensure there's
enough food for everyone. Our policymakers have become so enamored of the
idea that they've managed to convince many countries in the global south to
do the same -- often with the help of the International Monetary Fund and its
famed "structural adjustment" packages.

More recently, our leaders have combined the no-grain-storage decree with
another, deeply contradictory experiment: using heavy-handed subsidies and
mandates (what happened to "market forces"?) to ensure that a large and
growing chunk of our farm bounty be turned into car fuel.

Combined, those policies have brought us to the present pass: As our friend
the fertilizer executive reminds us, feeding the world now requires that the
weather cooperate, every year. That's a tough row to hoe, given that climate
change seems set to make weather patterns increasingly erratic. And as we're
seeing this summer, it doesn't take much to make things come unhinged.

In response to the rains, investors have driven up corn prices to levels
never seen before. By Wednesday afternoon, corn was trading above $7 per
bushel -- an astonishing 75 percent rise since last June. Just three years
ago, a bushel of corn fetched less than $2. The same factors have ramped up
soy prices as well.

And the worst may be yet to come. Weather reports suggest that the Midwest's
wet spell may last through the month. If that happens, surviving plants will
have a tough time developing deep roots, making them vulnerable to a dry
spell later in the summer. If a soggy June turns into a bone-dry July and
August, corn and soy prices will likely spike anew.

Meanwhile, wheat prices have held relatively steady -- most of the U.S. wheat
crop lies outside the area currently under water. But the same factor that
pushed global wheat prices to all-time highs last year -- a persistent
drought in Australia's wheat belt -- may be rearing up again. The New York
Times reported recently that a new burst of dry weather in Australia could
lead to another shortfall in its wheat output -- and push prices back into
the stratosphere.

And that's not all. While conditions are too dry in Australia, Chinese
farmers, like their U.S. counterparts, are bracing for hard rain. According
to the Times, China's agriculture ministry "issued an urgent notice to wheat
and rice farmers in southern China on Sunday, telling them to harvest as much
of their crop as possible immediately in the face of unseasonable torrential
rains expected to rake the region for the next 10 days."

At this point, given how much there already is to worry about, it's probably
best not to think about the new fungal strain that, according to The Wall
Street Journal, threatens to eviscerate wheat crops in Africa, the Middle
East, and South Asia.

No Piece of Cake

When fertilizer magnate Doyle predicted famine if global agriculture didn't
hit on all cylinders this year, he probably wasn't talking about the
industrial nations of North America and Western Europe. Despite our
increasingly enfeebled economy, most Americans still command enough wealth to
procure sufficient calories even if prices rise dramatically. Likely, Doyle
meant the world's 850 million people who live in conditions of persistent
hunger, mostly in the southern hemisphere. For them -- many of whom have been
essentially evicted from productive farmland and pushed into cities over the
past few decades -- spikes in food prices spell devastation.

But here in the United States, too, hard times seem imminent. No one can envy
the 10.9 percent of U.S. families who already lacked sufficient access to
food as of 2006. That number will surely grow as the economy weakens.

And you don't have to be poor to feel the pinch of higher grocery bills. "You
know those complaints you've been hearing about high food prices? They've
just begun," a commodity trader told The New York Times Thursday.

As the food crisis plays out, we're likely to hear more and more pitches from
agribusiness giants who promise that if we simply play by their rules,
everything will be just fine. Just last week, the biotech giant Monsanto --
which dominates the global seed markets for corn, soy, and cotton --
announced its intention to double yields for its "core crops" by 2030, all
the while reducing "by one-third the amount of key resources" required to
grow them.

To do so, Monsanto and its allies are stockpiling patents for so-called
"climate ready" genes that will ostensibly equip plants to withstand severe
weather. "In the face of climate chaos and a deepening world food crisis, the
Gene Giants are gearing up for a PR offensive to re-brand themselves as
climate saviors," writes the watchdog outfit ETC Group in a recent report.
"The focus on so-called climate-ready genes is a golden opportunity to push
genetically engineered crops as a silver bullet solution to climate change."

If the current crisis has taught us one thing, it's that food production
needs to become more diversified and dispersed, not concentrated ever more
tightly into fewer and fewer hands. Here's my alternative to Monsanto's
vision: Let's end the biofuel mandates and subsidies -- currently eating up
around $13 billion per year in taxpayer cash -- and invest the savings in
grain storage and the infrastructure required to really revive local and
regional food production.

Of course, Monsanto can lavish a cool $1.3 million on Washington lobbyists
each quarter, and all I've got is this stinkin' column.





  • [Livingontheland] As corn and soy fields drown in rainwater, the food crisis deepens, Tradingpost, 06/16/2008

Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page