Infinite Unknown

Life is hard for wheat and livestock farmers in the south, as they face a possible third year of nearly no rain.

July 12, 2008 POOCHERA, AUSTRALIA — Glen Phillips kneels down, scoops up a handful of dirt and squashes it in his fist to test whether the soil in this dry patch of the Australian Outback is ready to take a crop of wheat.

“It should clump together when you squeeze,” says Phillips, whose family has lived off the land on the edge of the Great Australian Bight since 1949. “That’s how you know it’s good to plant, it’s moist enough to hold the roots.”

He opens his hand and the earth sifts dustily between his fingers. Phillips looks up, lifts his hat slightly and squints into an empty blue sky with no sign of rain.

“We’ll plant anyway,” he says. “We don’t have a choice.”

Australia is suffering one of its worst droughts on record, hurting wheat farming just as the world faces a food crisis. Australia is usually the world’s third or fourth-largest exporter of wheat. But exports dropped 46% from 2005 to 2006, then fell 24% last year.

Most of its exports go to the Middle East and Southeast Asia to make bread and cereals, but the fall in supply has led to soaring prices. A ton of Australian wheat costs $367, compared with $258 in early 2007, an increase poorer countries can ill afford.

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- Floods wipe out US crops
- The Best Farmland in the U.S. Is Flooded; Most Americans Are Too Stupid to Panic
- The Price Of Food: 2007 - 2008
- The U.S. Has No Remaining Grain Reserves
- Nine meals from anarchy - how Britain is facing a very real food crisis
- Time to Stockpile Food?
- Food Riots are Coming to the U.S.
- UN alert: One-fourth of world’s wheat at risk from new fungus
- THE FOUR HORSEMEN APPROACH - FAMINE IS IN THE AIR
- Philippines: Food Shortage Looms - Arroyo Adviser

“When they pay high prices, they pass on an increase to their poorest people, who can no longer afford it,” says Kunhamboo Kannan, director of agriculture, environment and natural resources at the Asian Development Bank. “Just look at Egypt.” Riots over rising bread prices and shortages have led to at least 10 deaths there this year.

Continue reading »

Tags: Australia, climate change, corn, Drought, earth changes, Environment, Food, Food Prices, Food shortages, Global Warming, Grain, rice, wheat

An agricultural region that produces over 40 percent of Australia’s fruit, vegetables, and grain is seriously threatened by the country’s ongoing drought, which has been developing into a crisis over the last decade. Scientists say that the two mighty rivers that irrigate the Murray-Darling Basin (an area the size of France and Germany combined) received the lowest amount of replenishing autumn rain since record-keeping began over a century ago.

Neil Plummer, acting head of the National Climate Centre, described rainfall during the southern hemisphere autumn as “an absolute shocker”, and said: “I’m gasping for good news”. Wendy Craik, chief executive of the Murray-Darling Basin Commission, said the river system’s condition was “critical… tending towards flatlining”. She added: “We have got it on life support” [The Independent].

Related articles:
- Drought devastates Iraq’s wheat crops
- Floods may boost world food prices for years
- Floods wipe out US crops
- The Best Farmland in the U.S. Is Flooded; Most Americans Are Too Stupid to Panic
- The Price Of Food: 2007 - 2008
- The U.S. Has No Remaining Grain Reserves
- Nine meals from anarchy - how Britain is facing a very real food crisis
- Time to Stockpile Food?
- Food Riots are Coming to the U.S.
- UN alert: One-fourth of world’s wheat at risk from new fungus
- THE FOUR HORSEMEN APPROACH - FAMINE IS IN THE AIR
- Philippines: Food Shortage Looms - Arroyo Adviser

The degrading ecosystem may cause strife between farmers and environmentalists, as the government has said it might be forced to compulsorily acquire water from irrigators, a move that would anger and devastate farm families [The Daily Telegraph]. Conservationists say the mandatory water buy-backs are necessary to protect the wetland habitat of native birds, turtles and fish.

Continue reading »

Tags: Australia, climate change, Drought, earth changes, Environment, Food, Food Prices, Food shortages, Global Warming, Grain, wheat

Related articles:
- Floods may boost world food prices for years
- Floods wipe out US crops
- The Best Farmland in the U.S. Is Flooded; Most Americans Are Too Stupid to Panic
- The Price Of Food: 2007 - 2008
- The U.S. Has No Remaining Grain Reserves
- Nine meals from anarchy - how Britain is facing a very real food crisis
- Time to Stockpile Food?
- Food Riots are Coming to the U.S.
- UN alert: One-fourth of world’s wheat at risk from new fungus
- THE FOUR HORSEMEN APPROACH - FAMINE IS IN THE AIR

A catastrophe for Iowa farmers will not be just a catastrophe for Midwestern Americans. In the Iowa floods, we’ll see more evidence of how the problems of weird weather (climate change) combine and ramify the problems associated with Peak Oil. In this particular case they lead to an inflection point sometime around the 2008 harvest season, which will also be our time of political harvest.

These are not your daddy’s or granddaddy’s floods. These are 500-year floods, events not seen before non-Indian people started living out on that stretch of the North American prairie. The vast majority of homeowners in Eastern Iowa did not have flood insurance because the likelihood of being affected above the 500-year-line was so miniscule - their insurance agents actually advised them against getting it.

The personal ruin out there will be comprehensive and profound, a wet version of the 1930s Dust Bowl, with families facing total loss and perhaps migrating elsewhere in the nation because they have no home to go back to.

Iowa in 2008 will be an even slower-motion disaster than Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Beyond the troubles of 25,000 people who have lost all their material possessions is a world whose grain reserves stand at record lows. The crop losses in Iowa will aggravate what is already a pretty dire situation. So far, the US public has experienced the world grain situation mainly in higher supermarket prices.

Cheap corn is behind the magic of the American processed food industry - all those pizza pockets and juicy-juice boxes that frantic Americans resort to because they have no time between two jobs and family-chauffeur duties to actually cook (note: reheating is not cooking).

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Tags: biofuel, climate change, corn, Disaster, erath changes, flood, Food, Food Prices, Food Riots, Food shortages, Grain, Iowa, Oil, Oil Prices, U.S.

Related articles:
- The U.S. Has No Remaining Grain Reserves
- Floods wipe out US crops
- Nine meals from anarchy - how Britain is facing a very real food crisis
- Time to Stockpile Food?
- Food Riots are Coming to the U.S.
- UN alert: One-fourth of world’s wheat at risk from new fungus
- THE FOUR HORSEMEN APPROACH - FAMINE IS IN THE AIR

The meat prices will very soon go through the roof too, because the livestock is fed with corn, soybeans and hay. And the prices will continue to rise because of accelerating inflation, the missing bees, flooding and more natural disasters coming. - The Infinite Unknown
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Source: Cattle Network

Tags: climate change, earth changes, Food, Food Prices, Grain, Inflation, rice, soybeans, wheat

The crest of the swollen Mississippi River moved downstream yesterday as volunteers manned sandbagged levees and coped with the costs of the Midwest’s worst flooding in 15 years. “At times like these you don’t know whether to cry or laugh. But here in the Midwest we tend to favour the latter,” said Charlotte Hoerr, who, with her husband Brent, farms land not far from the river in this small Missouri town.

The river overcame more than two dozen levees last week, submerging small towns and vast stretches of prime farmland as the nation’s most vital waterway absorbed the run-off of torrential rains that put many Iowa towns under water. The Midwest flooding and storms are expected to push US and world food prices higher. Up to five million acres of newly planted crops have been lost at the heart of the world’s top grain and food exporter. Prices for corn, cattle and pigs all set records this week owing to the floods, as a world economy already hit by inflation from rising energy prices absorbed the blow.

Related articles:
- The U.S. Has No Remaining Grain Reserves
- Nine meals from anarchy - how Britain is facing a very real food crisis
- Time to Stockpile Food?
- Food Riots are Coming to the U.S.
- UN alert: One-fourth of world’s wheat at risk from new fungus
- THE FOUR HORSEMEN APPROACH - FAMINE IS IN THE AIR

(Wake up: “World Situation” & Prepare yourself: “Solution” - The Infinite Unknown)

Continue reading »

Tags: corn, Disaster, flood, Food, Food Crisis, Food Prices, Food shortages, George Bush, Grain, Iowa, Mississippi, wheat

WASHINGTON - Larry Matlack, President of the American Agriculture Movement (AAM), has raised concerns over the issue of U.S. grain reserves after it was announced that the sale of 18.37 million bushels of wheat from USDA’s Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) Bill Emerson Humanitarian Trust.

“According to the May 1, 2008 CCC inventory report there are only 24.1 million bushels of wheat in inventory, so after this sale there will be only 2.7 million bushels of wheat left the entire CCC inventory,” warned Matlack. “Our concern is not that we are using the remainder of our strategic grain reserves for humanitarian relief. AAM fully supports the action and all humanitarian food relief.

Our concern is that the U.S. has nothing else in our emergency food pantry. There is no cheese, no butter, no dry milk powder, no grains or anything else left in reserve.

The only thing left in the entire CCC inventory will be 2.7 million bushels of wheat which is about enough wheat to make 1⁄2 of a loaf of bread for each of the 300 million people in America.”

Related articles:
- Nine meals from anarchy - how Britain is facing a very real food crisis

- Time to Stockpile Food?

- Food Riots are Coming to the U.S.

- UN alert: One-fourth of world’s wheat at risk from new fungus

- THE FOUR HORSEMEN APPROACH - FAMINE IS IN THE AIR

More here: World Situation “Stock up FOOD and WATER NOW!” - The Infinite Unknown

The CCC is a federal government-owned and operated entity that was created to stabilize, support, and protect farm income and prices. CCC is also supposed to maintain balanced and adequate supplies of agricultural commodities and aids in their orderly distribution. Continue reading »

Tags: Food, Food Crisis, Food Prices, Food shortages, Grain, U.S., USDA, wheat

The 2008 winter was the coldest in 40 years for the upper Midwest, Plains states and most of Canada. Minnesota newspapers report that this year’s opening of the locks to Mississippi barge traffic, delayed by three weeks, was the latest since the modern waterway opened in 1940.

Eau Claire, where “old-fashioned winters” have been a thing of the past, recorded 43 days of below-zero temperatures, while folks down in Madison shoveled away at a 117-year record snowfall throughout the season, as did many in New England and Canada.

Rare snowfalls struck Buenos Aires, Capetown, and Sidney during their mid-year winter, while China continually battled blizzards. Even Baghdad experienced measurable snowfall.

Antarctic pack-ice far exceeded what Captain Cook saw on his 18th century voyage into the Southern Ocean. On the continent itself the miles-thick ice continues to accumulate despite peripheral melting along the Antarctic Peninsula and occasional calving of an ice block. At the opposite pole, flow-ice once again spans the entire Arctic Ocean, and by April it had extended into the Bering Strait, making up for the much heralded melt-back last summer.

From January 2007 through the end of January 2008, the average global temperature fell by nearly a degree Fahrenheit, based on data obtained by the MET Office in Great Britain and other international temperature monitoring networks.

What are we to make of this? The recent climate conference held in New York City, sponsored by the Heartland Institute, provides some answers. Several hundreds climatologists in attendance dispelled notions that the global warming debate is over. Most attendees, who readily acknowledge the existence of post-Little Ice Age warming, believe man-made emissions are unlikely to cause major climate change and signed a declaration to that effect. Continue reading »

Tags: climate, climate change, El Nino, Food, Food shortages, Global Warming, Grain, Ice Age, La Nina, sunspot activity, Sunspot cycles

Fidencio Alvarez abandoned his bean and corn farm in southern Honduras because of the rising cost of seeds, fuel and food. After months of one meal a day, he hiked with his wife and six children to find work in the city.
“We would wake up with empty stomachs and go to bed with empty stomachs,” said Alvarez, 37, who sought help from the Mission Lazarus aid group in Choluteca in January. “We couldn’t afford the seeds to plant food or the bus fare to buy the food.”

Honduran farmers like Alvarez can’t compete in a global marketplace where the costs of fuel and fertilizer soared and rice prices doubled in the past year. The former breadbasket of Central America now imports 83 percent of the rice it consumes — a dependency triggered almost two decades ago when it adopted free-market policies pushed by the World Bank and other lenders.

The country was $3.6 billion in debt in 1990. In return for loans from the World Bank, Honduras became one of dozens of developing nations that abandoned policies designed to protect farmers and citizens from volatile food prices. The U.S. House Financial Services Committee in Washington today explored the causes of the global food crisis and possible solutions.

The committee examined whether policies