Civilization? Get ready for a spanking.

[luckytroll]

Or, thank goodness for rice, and potatoes.

For many parts of the world, our civilization has been based in large part on eating grass seeds. Grain. Either we eat it, or our animals do.

To mess with grain is to shake the foundations of human civilization.

We do have stand-ins for our starch. Tubers, beans. But grass seeds are huge. A Global rice disaster would mean starvation for billions.  A wheat failure could be almost as bad for the poor.

Guess whats about to happen?

Bread is about to get rather expensive in the next decade.

Comments

[moria73.livejournal.com]

ARGGG!

This scare-mongering is really starting to drive me nuts! "Oh no, our food is going to be too expensive! Wheat prices are going to skyrocket and bread will be unaffordable!"

Do you know how much the wheat costs in your $2+ dollar loaf of bread? How much the farmer gets?
Less than $0.11
LESS. THAN. ELEVEN. BLOODY. CENTS!

If the commodity price of wheat doubles, it would only add eleven cents more to the price of a loaf of bread!
The rest of the damn cost is just processing, packaging, marketing, and corporate profits.

So if bread prices do go through the roof it will not be because the commodity price itself went up. It'll be because processors and retails are exploiting the media-fueled scare like this to raise prices and increase their profits, counting on consumer ignorance. Odds are the farmers will still end up getting screwed and not get a fair price for their product.

And if food prices do go up a bit in Canada, well guess what, it's about time. We've had a cheap food policy in this country for a decade now. Do you know what food price inflation rate in Canada was last year? 0.6 per cent.
It was 5.4 per cent in the US.

Sorry if I'm ranting, but this new food price scare thing the media's getting on to is really annoying. It's going to get consumers all screaming and complaining about food prices, which is going to put downward pressure on prices, and you know who's going to get screwed in the end... not the retail and processing corporations... it'll be the farmers.

[luckytroll.livejournal.com]

Im not particularly worried about Canadians, or even other more developed nations. We can always trade for whatever is on the market, and with friends like the Yanks, we can bomb for the rest if need be, the way they do for oil. What worries me is the people who are living at subsistence levels, and the effects this might have given the increased sensitivity of worlds markets to smaller and smaller global factors.

Its amazing what a mob of starving people can do to geopolitics. Even if they are poor starving people.

[iambic-cub.livejournal.com]

That looks like an opportunity! If North America can figure out a way to protect our own crops while everybody else's crops fail, well, we just might have a solution to all those economic problems that keep popping up. We can exploit world hunger to support our lifestyle!

In the mean time, I wonder how jam tastes on corn chips. We may be using tortillas for everything.

[moria73.livejournal.com]

Corn prices are rising faster, and corn supplies are getting lower, than wheat because of demand from the new biofuels industry.

[chief1ic.livejournal.com]

In my opinion, it isn't a disease affecting one particular crop that people need to worry about. It's oil. Modern agriculture in the west is mainly a process of converting oil (via fertilizers, pesticides & machinery) into food. But global demand for oil is increasing even as production looks to be plateauing.