Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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AGRICULTURAL APOCALYPSE, 2010
Wednesday, 07 April 2010
http://agriculture.imva.info/?p=12
Dwayne Andreas

The food business is far and away the most important business in the world. 
Everything else is a luxury. Food is what you need to sustain life every day.

When a large segment of the population is facing a drastic cut in income in 
the face of escalating food prices we have a catastrophic problem in the 
making. Today we have the simultaneous events of income deflation and food 
inflation; two high-speed express trains coming down that tracks at each 
other, a financial crisis colliding with staggering crop losses, which are 
cutting deeply into available planetary food reserves. Prices of food are 
again beginning to soar again just as millions are losing the ability to 
afford a reasonable diet, though little of this is being observed or 
reported. But soon even the blind will see.

>From corn to crude, prices for a wide range of commodities are
on the rise across the globe. In recent months, global food prices
have been growing at a rate that rivals some of the wildest months
of 2008, when food riots erupted across the developing world.
[January 9th Wall Street Journal]

The cold is again freezing oranges in Florida. Temperatures in Miami dropped 
to 36F; beating the record 37F set in 1938.  Officials are saying that 
hundreds of millions of dollars of food perished. Vegetables were among the 
hardest hit. At least one major tomato grower, Ag-Mart Produce, has already 
declared that most of its Florida crop is “useless due to the freeze.” Other 
vegetable farms were expected to lose their entire crop, and wholesale prices 
have already increased. “Tomatoes were down around $14 for a 25-pound box; 
now they are up over $20,” said Gene McAvoy, an agriculture expert with the 
University Florida, who predicted $100 million in vegetable losses. “Peppers 
— just after New Year’s they were $8 a box; now they’re up around $18.”

White sugar climbed to the highest price in at least two decades
in London on speculation that India, Pakistan and other importers
will purchase more of the sweetener as a supply deficit looms.
Excess rains in Brazil and a weak monsoon in India hurt
sugar-cane output from the world’s two biggest growers.
[January 20, 2010]

The world faces “mass starvation” following North America’s next major crop 
failure. And it could even happen before year’s end. So says Chicago-based 
Don Coxe, who is one of the world’s leading experts on agricultural 
commodities, so much so that Canada’s renowned BMO Financial Group named the 
fund after him. A crop failure in North America will have particularly dire 
consequences for major overseas markets that are highly reliant on U.S. crop 
imports.

Scientists in England are warning that a “perfect storm” of food shortages 
and water scarcity now threatens to unleash public unrest and conflict, the 
government’s chief scientist, Professor John Beddington, has warned.[i] 
“People do not quite realise the scale of the issue,” said Professor Mike 
Bevan. “This is one of the most serious problems that science has ever 
faced.” In Britain the lives of hundreds of thousands of people will be 
threatened by food shortages. The repercussions of food shortages for any 
society are devastating. The world faces “mass starvation” following more 
major crop failures in the United States and other places around the globe. 
According to Chicago-based Don Coxe, who is one of the world’s leading 
experts on agricultural commodities, so much so that Canada’s renowned BMO 
Financial Group named the fund after him, this mind boggling event could 
happen before year’s end.

We are facing a problem that literally has never been faced in human history. 
Surging population and food demand, food inflation, diminishing world food 
stocks, drought, flooding, cold, diminished credit, infestations, soil 
erosion, industrial farming, factory farm pollution, aquifers/wells going 
dry, relocation of produce for energy production are all slamming into a 
global financial and economic crisis. And in some places like the United 
States they don’t have enough farmers. Then on top of everything else we have 
desertification, which is one of the world’s most pressing environmental 
issues. New deserts are growing at a rate of 20,000 square miles (51,800 
square kilometers) a year. Desertification leads to famine, mass starvation 
and human migration.

According to Eric de Carbonnel, “There is overwhelming, undeniable evidence 
that the world will run out of food next year. The 2010 Food Crisis is going 
to be different. It is the crisis that will make all doomsday scenarios come 
true. Early in 2009, the supply and demand in agricultural markets went badly 
out of balance. The world experienced a catastrophic fall in food production 
as a result of the financial crisis (low commodity prices and lack of credit) 
and adverse weather on a global scale. Normally food prices should have 
already shot higher months ago, leading to lower food consumption and 
bringing the global food supply/demand situation back into balance. This 
never happened because the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), 
instead of adjusting production estimates down to reflect decreased 
production, adjusted estimates upwards to match increasing demand from china. 
In this way, the USDA has brought supply and demand back into balance (on 
paper) and temporarily delayed a rise in food prices by ensuring a 
catastrophe in 2010.”[ii]

According to the United States Department of Agriculture U.S. farmers 
produced the largest corn and soybean crops on record in 2009. And there are 
people who believe that anyone who believes government figures on anything 
concerning the economy or anything else is a total moron.

Very few people in the US have given any serious consideration to the 
question of food security. This essay should convince people that its time to 
start. For the most part, we’re not aware of the problem but if we look hard 
at the ‘hidden’ news we see that the handwriting is on the wall for an 
unimaginable crisis that will come on us as early as this year.

More than 2.1 million hectares of grain have been destroyed
by drought in 2009 in Russia, Agriculture Minister Yelena
Skrynnik said. A total of 616,000 hectares have been
destroyed in the region, or 70% of the total amount planted.[iii]

“The world is blissfully unaware that the greatest economic, financial and 
political crisis ever is a few months away. It takes only the tiniest bit of 
research to realize something is going critically wrong in the agricultural 
market. All someone needs to do to know the world is headed for food crisis 
is to stop reading USDA’s crop reports predicting a record soybean and corn 
harvests and listen to what else the USDA is saying.
Specifically, the USDA has declared half the counties in the Midwest to be 
primary disaster areas, including 274 counties in the last 30 days alone. 
These designations are based on the criteria of a minimum of 30 percent loss 
in the value of at least one crop in the county,” continues de Carbonnel.

[i] http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/dec/13/britain-faces-food-shortage
[ii] http://www.marketskeptics.com/2009/12/2010-food-crisis-for-dummies.html
[iii] http://www.kyivpost.com/news/world/detail/44653/

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