Grain drain: Get ready for Peak Grain

[Barrett808]

Grain drain: Get ready for Peak Grain
Two months of global food reserves is all that's separating us from mass starvation.
By WAYNE ROBERTS

Brace yourself for crises at the cash register. Major price hikes for food are coming, as Peak Grains join 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.

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

Last month, enviro analyst Lester Brown of the Washington, DC-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.

(more)

http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=20060723083547992

[Warpy]

1. Much of the world is heading for famine

as drought conditions expand in many food producing areas, even the US and the Amazon basin.

We are not exempt. Don't forget, corporations are interested in the bottom line. They don't care if some of us go hungry if they can get Euros instead of dollars.

[havocmom]

2. And it takes fuel to grow/harvest/transport grain

Custome combining companies are cutting back the distances they will go to help harvest the grain. That will result in less planting.

Been harping on this for a few years now. Water & food will be more vaulable than gas for your tank pretty soon. If you don't like multi-national cartels having control of your gas tank, you are not gonna be happy when they control your belly.

[nam78_two]

3. egad!

I have heard some about this...very scary stuff....

[acmavm]

4. But lets crank out some more checks to farmers and pay them

not to grow anything shall we?

[acmejack]

5. Quick, make Ethanol out of 20% of our Corn!

[yurbud]

10. You can make biodiesel out of the oil and still have the solids

left for food.

[LiberalEsto]

6. Time to get rid of our lawns

and start planting food crops.

[jilln]

7. and yet meat eaters want to feed what grain we have to cattle and chickens

which is highly inefficient. Because it's their "right" to eat meat and no one can tell them what to do. Which is the same "argument" Hummer drivers use.

[mcscajun]

8. If the worst happens, us "fat folk" will survive longer, and wind up

the skinny survivors. :)

Seriously though, the whole business IS scary.

WilliamPitt quoted something in another post in the last day or so about how the US is just three missed meals away from total chaos. It wouldn't take much to cause a breakdown in civil order in this country. Not much at all. :scared:

[yurbud]

9. Isn't the problem that our massive surpluses make it

unprofitable for other countries' farmers to grow grain?

[yurbud]

11. this title is the first thing to make me doubt peak oil and...

think it's an artificial crisis the way any "Peak Grain" one would indisputably be.

Like oil, they want to corner the market and then create scarcity, so they can get maximum profit from minimum effort and production.